
French museum discovers half of its collection are fakes - sverige
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/28/french-museum-discovers-half-collection-fakes/
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michaelbuckbee
Something that always messes with my sense of the passage of time and how the
world works are _old_ fakes.

Often what seems to happen is that people get bamboozled by an 1840s fake of a
painting done in 1790. It's old enough that many of the modern detection
techniques don't exist, etc. In the article's case the fakes were only caught
out because someone noticed that the buildings in the paintings only went up
after the artists death.

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mrleiter
There is a wonderful documentary about a quite famous and "successful" art
forger on Netflix
[https://www.netflix.com/title/80015279](https://www.netflix.com/title/80015279)
(Beltracchi)

There is also F for Fake, by Orson Welles, but I cannot seem to find it on
Netflix...

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bshepard
"The Morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather
than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments
that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators.
Instead, as Carlo Ginzburg analysed the Morellian method, the art historian
operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed
by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting".
These unconscious traces— in the shorthand for rendering the folds of an ear
in secondary figures of a composition, for example— are unlikely to be
imitated and, once deciphered, serve as fingerprints do at the scene of the
crime. The identity of the artist is expressed most reliably in the details
that are least attended to. The Morellian method has its nearest roots in
Morelli's own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease
through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself"
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Morelli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Morelli))

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jccalhoun
"An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to
Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist’s
death in 1922."

I literally laughed out loud at that. I guess that is pretty solid proof!

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js8
I don't understand why people care. Either you like the painting or not. Why
does it matter who painted it?

I can understand why someone who bought it because it was made by someone
famous would be angry. But a museum? The article quotes somebody:

"It’s a catastrophe. I put myself in the place of all the people who came to
visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It’s
intolerable and I hope we find those responsible."

People came to museum to see art, and they saw art. What this guy wants is
people visiting museum not because there is art in it, but because it was made
by famous person. Is that really the reason why have the museum?

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c22
But as a museum they're not concerned with merely presenting an aesthetic
experience (that would be a gallery), but also with preserving and displaying
an accurate slice of history. I tend to agree with you that there should be no
problem with "fake" works of art being displayed in a museum, but it would be
rather disconcerting to find out that 50% of any museum's exhibits were
grossly historically inaccurate or misattributed.

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magoon
Visitors truly did see a slice of history - this will go down in history,
itself, as a great fraud that you can no longer experience.

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theywereart
The curators at the Museum of Art Fakes are already hard at work preserving
this tasty morsel of history.

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akditer
poor france museum

