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The Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) defines forgery as 1. the action or

craft of forging metals 2. invention, excogitation; fictitious invention,
fiction 3. the making of a thing in fraudulent imitation of something. As the
first definition is labeled obsolete and the second, now only poetical, the

Archives

third definition prevails in respect to relevance. Application of the adjective

January 2012

fraudulent is made necessary by the absence of culpability in the O.E.D.

September 2010

definition of imitation as a copy, an artificial likeness; a thing made to look

August 2010

like something else, which it is not; a counterfeit. A sense of fraudulence is

only found in the attributive definition of imitation as a thing made (of less

May 2010

costly material) in imitation of a real or genuine article or substance. Though

Main Pages

the use of parentheses implies an externality to the inserted conception of

adaptation

quality, imitation is still marked as inferior in being made of less costly

Digital Storytelling

material while the assumed original is purportedly superior in being made of

History

more costly material. Forgeries are culpable exactly because they do not

Keywords

appear inferior or cheaply made; they are passed off as and pretend to be the

absence/presence

original. They pose the practical problem of identification and the theoretical

abstraction

dilemma of differentiation, affecting how works of art are looked at, troubling

advertising

critics and art historians with the possibility of wrongful attributions,

aesthetics

connoisseurs with the prospect of loosing money, and philosophers with the

affect

question of aesthetic value.

agent/agency
alphabet

In the Grove Dictionary of Art, the fraud enacted by art forgeries is defined as
a departure from transiently agreed canons of authenticity.1 Anxieties over
authenticity [link] have affected the categorization of media according to the
potential of forgery. Nelson Goodman offers the split between autographic
arts, in which the distinction between original and forgery is relevant, and the
allographic arts, in regards to which the distinction is redundant.2 While
painting and sculpture have been plagued by forgery, the concept of
fraudulent imitation is foreign to music and the verbal arts. The inability to
forge literary works and musical scores is reliant upon their definite

alterity
amateur
analog/digital
animation (1)
animation (2)
architecture
archive
artifact
audience
aura (1)

notation, or their consisting of a certain number of signs or characters that

aura (2)

are to be combined by concatenation.3 These particular signs, such as the

auteur

word order, punctuation, and spelling of a poem, function as the required

authenticity

RESOURCES

features of the work. As long as spelling is correct, a copy of a literary work

avant-garde

acts as a legitimate original since the identity of the text is not bound to any

beautiful/sublime

copy or physical form. In painting, Goodman points out, with no such

body/embodiment

alphabet of characters none of the pictorial properties is distinguished as

book

constitutive.4 Following this assertion, identity in painting and sculpture

camp

remained reliant upon the establishment of the works historical fact and the

code

identification of the product of the artists hand. Expert forgeries enact this

collective consciousness

substantive connection between artist and artwork by imitating an artists

color

style in exactly copying their work.

comics
common sense

The transience of authenticity stipulated by the Grove definition becomes

evident in respect to differing conceptions regarding the duplication of
objects. In the sixteenth century, Italian painter, architect, and artist
biographer Giorgio Vasari praised the forging of an antiquity as a triumph of
artistry.5 In his stories about Michelangelo, Vasari praised the artists
reproductions of antiquities as original creations. But even in this positive
conception of forgery it is possible to identify hints of fraud, since according to
Vasari Michelangelo was in the habit of returning forged antiquates in place of
the originals to their owners.6 In the restoration of ancient churches and

compression
creativity
cybernetics
cyberspace
cyborg
dance
decoration
dialectic
digital art
discourse

cathedrals during the Victorian era the concept of forgery is placed in

drawing

opposition to the act of restoration. This tension originates in the Victorians

ear

custom to replace early features with modern ones believing they were lending

ekphrasis

them a higher truth. While at the time these gestures did not appear to be

epic theater

problematic or questionable, such restorations were later denounced as

event

forgeries.

exhibit/exhibition
exteriority

Despite its transience, the concept of authenticity foregrounded by the Grove

face

definition, underwrites the socio-cultural relation of power and value realized

fantasy (1)

through collections and their exhibition.7 If the possession of a collection of

fantasy (2)

original art works is a demonstration of power, following the anthropology

fashion

scholar Richard Leventhal, art forgeries violate such a conception by

fidelity

pretending originality. Behind assertions of authenticity emerges the

figurative/figural

traditional connoisseur who also became the first art historian with the self-

film

ascribed agency of assessing quality and differentiating between authentic

filter

objects and imitations.8 The connoisseur arrives at the moment culture is

forgery

commodified, when art works and objects of antiquity are transformed into

form

market commodities.9 In this transformation the value of the original objects

is augmented as rarity and uniqueness enhance value.
During the golden age of forgery, roughly delineated from 1850 to 1940,
connoisseurs asserted varying methods of authentication in an insistent drive
to perfect the detection of forgeries masquerading as the genuine thing.
Between 1874 and 1876 one such connoisseur, Giovanni Morelli of Italy,

frame (1)
frame (2)
game
gaze
genre
gesture (1)
gesture (2)

argued that paintings should be properly attributed through the identification

graphic novel

of minor stylistic details, especially those least significant in the style typical

grotesque

of the painters school.10 Claiming that museums are full of forgeries and

handwriting

wrongly attributed works, Morelli sought to attribute works and establish

hieroglyphics

authenticity by noting peculiar details in a painters works, such as earlobes,

hypermedia

fingernails, and the shapes of fingers, that could only be found in originals and

icon

not in the forgery. Though Morelli made dozens of new attributions in

iconoclasm/iconoclash

galleries throughout Europe, his method was called mechanical and crudely

ideology

positivistic, and was quickly ostracized. Despite its fate, the Morelli method

image

points toward an appreciation of the detail of the whole, leading to

suggestions that it exemplifies a more modern approach to artworks.11 As art
historian Edgar Wind notes, this method suggests, in tune with modern
psychology, that our inadvertent little gestures reveal character far more
authentically than any formal posture.12 In this light, the Morelli method
locates the authenticity of the work within the artists idiosyncrasies. In
contrast to Goodman, Morelli appears to claim that forgeries could not access
this facet of the artwork located outside of its medium.

imagination
immediacy/immediate
information
installation (1)
installation (2)
intention
interactive
interpellation
intuition
involution

By concentrating on content Morelli departed from the connoisseur obsession

irony

with establishing the historical fact of an artwork, best exemplified in the

kanji

advent of the Provenance, or the history of the ownership and display of the

keyword

object.13 Morellis method necessarily bypasses the early authenticating

kitsch

device of the artists signature, which had become unreliable already by the

landscape

fifteenth century. At this time the forging of Albrecht Drers name and

language

monogram necessitated an order from the Nuremberg City Council that read,

law

prints containing Drers signature would be confiscated unless his cipher

liminal

was removed.14 More recently, the forgers ability to imitate almost every

listen

possible aspect of artwork leads art historians and connoisseurs to use x-ray,

literacy

infrared, and laser microanalyses in authenticating artworks. In revealing

logic

what is behind the surface of a work, scientific methods have the potential to

magazine

devalue art as mere surface representation of chemical media and optical

manuscript

structures.15

mask
mass media

The paintings of Han van Megreen are often cited in discussions of artistic

material/materiality

values of forgeries. In 1945, van Megreen confessed to painting eight

mediation

paintings, six that were sold as the legitimate works of Johannes Vermeer and

medium specificity

two as that of Pieter de Hooghes works. His Disciples at Emmaus hung in

Rotterdams Boymans Museum for seven year and received the highest praise.
Noted scholar and critic Abraham Bredius exalted its artistic value, calling
Disciples at Emmaus the masterpiece of Vermeer.16 In identifying the fraud
of van Megreens painting Alfred Lessing asserts, The fact that the Disciples is
a forgery is just that, a fact. It is a fact about the painting which stands entirely
apart from it as an object of aesthetic contemplation.17 For Lessing this fact

melos/opsis/lexis
meme
memory (1)
memory (2)
metaphor/metonymy
mimesis (1)
mimesis (2)

can only be meaningful in reference to the concept of originality, by which he

mind

means the novelty and innovation attributed to every good work of art.

mirror

Lessing draws the conclusion that the fault of van Megreens most notorious

mode

work is its lack of original artistry, since it presents nothing new or creative

money

(in terms of style or technique) to the history of art even though it may well

montage

be as beautiful as the genuine Vermeer pictures.18 But as van Megreens

movement

paintings show despite their lack of originality, forgery can easily pretend

multimedia

authenticity.

museum
music

The transience of the agreed canons of authenticity reflects the shifting

interests and the shifting history of artistic, technological, economic, political,
and moral experience.19 These shifting interests and experiences are
necessarily attributed to shifts and developments in the varying media of
artistic production. Evincing this notion, Walter Benjamin states, Confronted
with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the
original preserved all its authority; not so vis vis technical reproduction.20
For Benjamin the question of authenticity is displaced in the age of
mechanical reproduction, no longer relatable to artistic production that stands
more independent of the original work of art than manual reproduction.

music
narrative/lyric/drama
network
newspaper
noise
notation
numbness
object petit a
objecthood
olfaction
orality

Richard Princes rephotographs, such as his Untitled (Cowboy) (1989) series

painting

in which he closely cropped images from cigarette advertisements, confront

palimpsest

the displacement of the authentic that begins with the coming of the

perception (1)

photograph. As Princes rephotographs take on the appearance of paintings

perception (2)

they prompt the questioning of their identity. Are these works forgeries?

performance/performativity

David Lowenthal offers the assertion, Every relic displayed in a museum is a

perspective

fake in that it has been wretched out of its original context. 16 Is there a

phenomenon

difference in the refashioning of the past and the refraction of the present

photography

culture?

Picture
poetics

Though the question of authenticity and artistic value of forgery continues to

portrait

be debated within the lengthy discourse on fraudulent imitation, forgery for

post

profit has moved away from fraudulent imitations of high works of art into

postal system

mass production of brand-named goods. Mark Jones notes that people

posthuman

purchasing these forgeries, better know as counterfeits though the

practice

definitions are relatively the same, are fully aware that are not purchasing the

print

original at the price they are paying.21 This move is in large part due to the

process

sophisticated methods of material analysis and the rigor of modern

attribution. Within contemporary high artistic practice, forgery is utilized to
test the power and mode of operation of the artistic effect.22 As Sndor
Radnti asserts, in the age of reproduction the referential character of the
original was abolished, along with the imitational character of both the copy
and forgery.23 As reproduction is inscribed into the media of new art, forgery
becomes an artistic tool for the interrogation of tradition and the banal.

projection
propaganda
prosthesis
protocol
publish
purity
radio

Through this gesture culpability inherent in the O.E.D. definition of forgery

reading

is stripped of its agency, as forgery is not kept secret but laid bare and its

reality/hyperreality (1)

implications mobilized.

reality/hyperreality (2)

Zdenko Mandusic

reception
reciprocity

NOTES

repetition
replica

1. Grove Art Online, Forgery.

representation
rhetoric

2. Nelson Goodman, Art and Authenticity? in The Forgers Art: Forgery and
the Philosophy of Art, 103.
3. Ibid, 105.
4. Ibid.
5. Sndor Radnti, The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, 5.

rhizome
scopic / vocative
screen (1)
screen (2)
sculpture
semiotics
semiotics (2)
sequence
shock
sign

6. Ibid.

silence
simulation / simulacrum

7. Geopolitics of Archaeology: Global Market for Stolen Antiquities.

simulation / simulacrum (2)

Worldview. Chicago Public Radio. WBEZ 91.5 FM, Chicago. 8 Feb. 2008.

site
site

8. Grove Art Online, Forgery.

smartphone
social network

9. David Lowenthal, Forging the past, in Fake? The Art of Deception, 19.

space/time
spectacle/spectator (1)

10. Carlo Ginzburg, Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and

spectacle/spectator (2)

Scientific Modeling, in The Sign of Three, 82.

speech
spirit

11. Ibid.

star
stimulus/stimulation

12. Ibid, 84.

storage
surface

13. Grove Art Online, Forgery.

symbol/index/icon
symbolic/real/imaginary

14. Lowenthal, Faking In Europe from the Renaissance to the 18th century
in Fake? The Art of Deception, 120.
15. Lowenthal, Forging the past, 19.
16. Alfred Lessing, What Is Wrong With Forgery? in The Forgers Art:
Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, 59.

synaesthesia (1)
synaesthesia (2)
system
tableau vivant
taste (1)
taste (2)
technology

17. Ibid, 64.

telegraph
telematics
telephone (1)

18. Ibid, 72.

telephone (2)

19. Joseph Margolis, Art, Forgery, and Authenticity in The Forgers Art:

television

Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, 167.

text
theater

20. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction

thing

in Illuminations, 220.

touch
transitivity/intransitivity
translation

21. Mark Jones, Why Fakes? Fake? The Art of Deception, 13.

transmission
type/print

22. Radnti, The Fake, 207.

uncanny
unconscious/subconscious

23. Ibid.

ut pictura poesis
vehicle

WORKS CITED

veil
video

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

virtuality
virus

Forgery. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford

voice/sound

University Press. 22 Jan. 2008.

weapon
wiki

Forgery. The Grover Dictionary of Art, 2008. The Grover Dictionary of Art.

window

Oxford University Press. 22 Jan. 2008.

writing
zoographia

Geopolitics of Archaeology: Global Market for Stolen Antiquities.

Worldview. Chicago Public Radio. WBEZ 91.5 FM, Chicago. 8 Feb. 2008.

Members
Adam Shapiro
Adam Weg

Ginzburg, Carlo. Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific

Andrew Mall

Modeling, in The Sign of Three: Duping, Holmes, Pierce. Ed. Umberto Eco

Bill Brown

and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,

Dan Clinton

1983.

Dan Knox
Eduardo de Almeida

Goodman, Nelson. Art and Authenticity? in The Forgers Art: Forgery and

Hans Belting

the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California: University of

Harper Montgomery
James Elkins

California Press, 1983.

Jenifer Schadlick

Imitation. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online.
Oxford

University

Press.

22

Jan.

2008.

http://dictionary.oed.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/.
Jones, Mark. Why Fakes? in Fake? The Art of Deception. Ed. Mark Jones.

Joanna Slotkin
Joel Snyder
Kasia Houlihan
Kirsten Rokke
Kristan Hanson

Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1990.

Kristine Nielsen
Mal Ahern

Lessing, Alfred. What Is Wrong With Forgery? in The Forgers Art: Forgery

Nicholas Mirzoeff

and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California: University of

Rebecca L. Reynolds

California Press, 1983.

Roberto Kutcher
W.J.T. Mitchell

Lowenthal, David. Forging the past, in Fake? The Art of Deception. Ed.
Mark Jones. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1990.

Projects
About Face
Media Taxonomy Models

Margolis, Joseph. Art, Forgery, and Authenticity in The Forgers Art:

Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California:
University of California Press, 1983.
Radnti, Sndor. The fake: forgery and its place in art. Translated by Ervin
Dunai. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.

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