F for Fake

[version]

‘We got a kick out of it’: art forgers reveal secrets of paintings that fooled experts

Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Helene sold fake paintings for millions before some inauthentic white paint led to their capture

www.theguardian.com

 

[Murphy]

“The Hostage Years” audiobook by Terry Waite

Fake!

 

[shakahislop]

that text luka said he got from craner, i didn't want to say but i've got a bit of a suspicion that it might have been fake

 

[version]

this one coulda fooled me

the fakesimiles are getting more and more convincing

it's difficult not to assess them purely on how much they can pass as old school, i'm not sure is that the point or not

 

[Murphy]

Authenticity as subjectivity?

 

[version]

There's a certain mystique and skill to art forgery. I might have a begrudging respect for someone who fools me with a fake painting and the fact it's a fake may even appeal, but I can't say the same for knock off tools, clothing or electrical equipment.

 

[version]

 

[Murphy]

Physical objects often sell themselves by their provenance or biography, the prestige of ownership chains before blockchain. Look at food, whiskey and wine, appellation contrôlée, class markers for many

Drawbacks. Discogs was a fucker with small runs of fake presses that may/may not have arrived as said original listed, all the Balearic edits (since removed), lot of Black Cock boogie tape edits but must be tons of other examples. There’s a China track @pattycakes zeroed in on going for £400 which you wonder if you’d be getting the o.g

Lockdowns put a brake on certain tune buying, lack of access to P.O etc saved a few quid too

 

[IdleRich]

I understand that in Ordnance Survey maps they would often include a small stream or lane that in fact did not exist. They could then identify any map that represented that feature as being based, not on genuine research by that manufacturer's own cartographers, but rather on simply copying from their already extant map. It's an idea that makes sense I guess, but you have to think that some hikers or explorers have been disappointed when they attempted to walk down Nowhere Lane and fill their water bottles at Lost River... only to discover that neither existed.

Similarly I understand that historians often include spurious details in their works. Say they described the colour of a diplomat or politician's tie at a famous meeting and then they will know if any other historical book describes Hitler's pink spotted tie, then that book is based not on the author's own research but that in fact he has simply re-written the other guy's research in his own. And so a lawsuit will be incoming. But again, I think, what of the curious reader who will always now believe that when Hitler met Chamberlain he was wearing a tie with bright pink spots?

A similar tactic is when you want to discover which of your colleagues is leaking to the press. Feeding different versions to different suspects and seeing which is the version emerges. A practice which reached its acme in the so-called WAGatha Christie scandal when Wayne Rooney's wife was trying to work out which of the other WAGS was leaking her, no-doubt extremely important, secrets to the bloodthirsty press which was pursuing her hotly at the time...

 

[version]

Beyond Borders: Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries​

As word of the Paris forger’s abilities spread in Resistance networks, the laboratory on the rue des Saints-Pères began to receive as many as five hundred orders a week, from Paris, the Southern Zone and London. On one occasion, Penguin told Kaminsky that a raid on Jewish homes in the Paris region was imminent, and they needed papers for three hundred Jewish children in three days. This meant nine hundred documents, and seemed impossible. But Kaminsky calculated that he could make thirty fake documents an hour and refused even to take a nap until they were done: if he slept for just an hour, he reckoned, thirty people would die. One of his colleagues had to remind him that ‘we need a forger, Adolfo, not another corpse.’

 

[luka]

read it already

 

[version]

The bit about him forging huge quantities of money to destabilise the French economy in support of Algeria is great.

In Brussels, Kaminsky grew close to Boudaoud, a man of ‘serenity, intelligence and rapidity of judgment’ who admired him in turn as a Jewish résistant who had embraced the Algerian struggle. He and Boudaoud collaborated on the wildest act of forgery of the Algerian War: producing an enormous quantity of counterfeit francs in order to destabilise the French economy. But on 18 March 1962, the war ended with the proclamation of the Evian Accords between the French government and the FLN. Kaminsky and his partner at the time, an American surrealist painter called Gloria de Herrera, had to burn the money. (He hadn’t numbered the bills, as a precaution.) ‘I watched a year of work go up in flames,’ he recalled. ‘I liked ... seeing the banknotes burn up.’ He was ‘elated’ at the thought of peace.