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Monday, 09 May 2005 20:45 |
Financial Times (UK)
By Charlotte Mullins
 The star of the new London play by scientist Carl Djerassi is almost as old as art itself. It is art’s antithesis, the fake. Phallacy is based on the true story of “Youth from Mt Magdalene?, a valuable Roman bronze of a lifesize nude man. For many years, the “Youth? was the centrepiece of the classical collection in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches museum. But in 1986 it was revealed to be a 16th-century copy. And yet it remained a beautiful artwork, one that had deceived experts since entering the collection in 1806.
So just what is wrong with a fake? Certainly not enough to stop forgery becoming a multi-million dollar business. Across Europe, America and Asia, anywhere from 15 per cent to a staggering 80 per cent (in Africa and China) of artworks offered for sale are thought to be fakes. Cases such as the gang of French and Belgian forgers jailed in 2001 for reproducing Cesar’s “compression? sculptures make headlines. And the Impressionist forgers John Myatt or Elmyr de Hory became so well known that their works are sought after because of the forger rather than the forged.
The stakes are so high that academics researching provenance and authenticity of works by artists such as Modigliani have received death threats when a work’s authenticity is called into question, and catalogue authors have been offered bribes from collectors to keep particular paintings or sculptures in their publications. When a real Modigliani painting sells for more than $14m, perhaps this isn’t surprising.
The repercussions of forgery are manifold. Most obviously, the value of a work is drastically affected. Often it is an object’s place in history that determines, in large part, its price. In 1983, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu bought a statue of a youth from the Greek Archaic period for a reported $8m. It is now thought to be from the same hand as a known modern fake, and is practically worthless.
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