Art forgery is the creation and sale of works of art which are falsely credited to other, usually more famous artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler.
This type of fraud is meant to mislead by creating a false provenance, or origin, of the object in order to enhance its value or prestige at the expense of the buyer. As a legal offense, it is not just the act of imitating a famous artist's key characteristics in a piece of art, but the deliberate financial intent by the forger.[1] When caught, some of these forgers attempt to pass off the fakes as jokes or hoaxes on the art experts and dealers they were selling to, or on the art world as a whole.[1]
To excel in this type of forgery, the forger must pass themselves off as incredibly trustworthy and charismatic in order to recruit the necessary middlemen such as art dealers, sellers, experts, etc. as the forger will rarely deal in person. Forgers are often proficient in the current methods of art forgery authentication in order to reverse-engineer their work to cover up any potential mistakes that could get them caught.[1]
Since the 1950s and 1960s there has been a growing demand for indigenous art. Many people began creating and selling faked busts, ceremonial masks, carvings, and sculptures to prestigious institutions such as the British Museum.[1] Some artists even went as far as to create artifacts from cultures of which very little information is known, like Moabite, a Semitic culture that was alluded to in the Old Testament. In the 19th century, an icon painter from Jerusalem began to create clay figures with mysterious inscriptions and sold them to the Altes Museum in Berlin after giving them this false origin.[2]
^ abcdLenain, Theirry (2003) "Forgery". Grove Art Online.
^Celenko, Ted. (2003) "Africa: Forgery." Grove Art Online.
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example of a film which is both about falsification (artforgery and the journalism surrounding artforgery) as well as having falsified moments within the...
art as if it were unequivocally genuine?” In The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler concurred with Saarinen's proposition of “forgery as an art”...
authorship, and historical significance of a piece of art. The proliferation of artforgeries and the increased skill of the forgers who are aware of...
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forgery: Forgery – process of making, adapting, or imitating objects, statistics, or documents with the intent to deceive. Archaeological forgeryArt...
aesthetic theory in art history today and a reconsideration of the limits of human creativity. An essential legal issue are artforgeries, plagiarism, replicas...
the art market's complicity in the deception. De Hory insists he never signed any forgery, and Welles wonders whether, given the fact that all art eventually...
a British artist convicted of artforgery who, with John Drewe, perpetrated what has been described as "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century". After...
José Ramón Mélida.[citation needed] In 1995, art historian John F. Moffitt (1940–2008), published ArtForgery: The Case of the Lady of Elche (University...
Thomas Murchison, an art collector whom Ripley murdered in Ripley Under Ground when Murchison threatened to expose Ripley's artforgery scheme. Pritchard...
art dealers and auction houses as legitimate works and hang in museums, galleries around the world. He was caught after Hiro Yamagata found a forgery...
artificial intelligence (AI) for the purposes of art authentication and the detection of artforgeries, Art Recognition integrates advanced algorithms and...
German artforgery gang". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 27, 2020. "The Long Game: how Wolfgang Beltracchi conned the art world". Art Critique...
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April 25, 2018. "Guy Pearce, 'Phantom Thread' Star Vicky Krieps Board ArtForgery Drama 'Lyrebird'". The Hollywood Reporter. April 25, 2018. Retrieved...
considerable legislative deterrence. The treatment of forgeries of art were not as severe as other types of forgery such as that of legal documents, whereby the...