Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age

According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of forging the Mona Lisa, questioning the entire concept of originality.

 

Forged explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects their stories to broader themes about the role of forgeries in society. From the Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto who faked a Raphael masterpiece at the request of his Medici patrons, to the Vermeer counterfeiter Han van Meegeren who duped the avaricious Hermann Göring, to the frustrated British artist Eric Hebborn, who began forging to expose the ignorance of experts, art forgers have challenged legitimate art in their own time, breaching accepted practices and upsetting the status quo. They have also provocatively confronted many of the present-day cultural anxieties that are major themes in the arts. Keats uncovers what forgeries--and our reactions to them--reveal about changing conceptions of creativity, identity, authorship, integrity, authenticity, success, and how we assign value to works of art. The book concludes by looking at how artists today have appropriated many aspects of forgery through such practices as street-art stenciling and share-and-share-alike licensing, and how these open-source copyleft strategies have the potential to make legitimate art meaningful again.

 

Forgery has been much discussed--and decried--as a crime. Forged is the first book to assess great forgeries as high art in their own right.


Author: Jonathon Keats
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 01/03/2013
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.80w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780199928354

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/13/2012 pg. 50
Library Journal 01/01/2013 pg. 86
Shelf Awareness 01/08/2013
New York Review of Books 08/15/2013 pg. 50
Choice 02/01/2014

About the Author

Jonathon Keats is a critic, journalist, and artist. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and has contributed art criticism to Art & Antiques, Art + Auction, Art in America, ARTnews, Artweek, and Salon. His art writing has also appeared in Wired Magazine, ForbesLife Magazine, The
Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is most recently the author of Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology (OUP). His conceptual art has been exhibited at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Wellcome Collection.

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