In the cultural world we don’t always consider the living artisans and artists whose livelihood is undermined by fakes. https://hyperallergic.com/483700/worlds-largest-native-american-art-forgery-ring-distributed-12m-of-fakes/ US government attorney supports 18-month sentences and fines for the accused, but in many ways the damage is done, casting both real and fake Native American artworks into doubt. Apparently enforcement against fakes, mostly from […]
Tag Archives: Fakes and forgeries
The Voynich Manuscript and Fakery
[Update 10/14/2013 See comment below.] The latest New Yorker has an article about the Voynich manuscript by Reed Johnson. The article helpfully reviews the provenance (some of it possibly putative) as well as the modern history and reception of the very strange manuscript.In one throw-away line, Johnson notes that some people have questioned whether the […]
The Marks of a Hoax: Dickens and Dostoevsky
Copy of a Photograph of Charles Dickens (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Russian literature specialist Eric Naiman describes a fake anecdote in “When Dickens met Dostoevsky,” (TLS 10 April 2013), and the bizarre, convoluted, trail that led him to find multiple pseudonyms of someone who seems to be a disgruntled independent scholar. I think some points turned […]
Review by Catherine S. Sezgin on Jonathan Keats’ art forgery book
Catherine Schofield Sezgin at the ARCA (Association for Research into Crimes against Art) reviews Forged: Why Fakes Are The Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats (Oxford UP 2013). (Keats is a conceptual artist living in San Francisco.) Sezgin’s review is a series of excerpts, one on Han van Meegeren. Other of Sezgin’s segmented […]
Conspiracy Theories… among Engineers
Where do conspiracy theories come from? I was fascinated by this link at the technology news site ArsTechnica. The article tries to debunk an urban rumor, “Does Apple really assign engineers to “fake” projects as a loyalty test?” It struck me as a classic conspiracy theory. What gives rise to such thinking? Engineers come to […]