French museum discovers half of its collection are fakes | Hacker News Reader

French museum discovers half of its collection are fakes

telegraph.co.uk

116 pointssverige43 comments

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.

There is a wonderful documentary about a quite famous and "successful" art forger on Netflix 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...

"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)

"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!

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?

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.

Both the UK and US (and probably other countries) have museums in their capitals called the "National Gallery". Are they galleries or museums? Does the distinction even make sense?

In this case very much so, the museum is dedicated to a painter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Étienne_Terrus) not an aesthetic.

For other cases it can depend on the purpose of the building and the collection. If it's about the art itself it's a gallery, if it's about the artistic movement and its historicity it's a museum.

I totally understand that this museum is interested only in works by a particular artist, and so fakes are unwanted even if they are good art. My point is you seemed to be making a distinction between the idea of a "gallery" and "museum", implying that galleries are interested as art-as-art and museums with art-as-historical artifact.

often, you can buy the works placed in a gallery, while museums you cannot. also, usyally, galleries have rotating stock depending on events etc, whereas museums have storage they rotate out of. additionally, galleries are not, most of the time, focused on non-contemporary artists and works, while museums have a substantial historical focus.

there is a distinction, thats why there are different words. outliers and exceptions not withstanding, since words and their meanings do not force their usage.

Even more so in that case as it's a museum dedicated to a specific painter from the village.

I'd probably make it more interesting to keep the fakes. You could make it a game for visitors to guess which is which.

to be an accurate slice of history, fakes are important! how else are you going to know who was making fakes of the artist and when?

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.

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

That entrance fee would have been lower if the museum hadn't paid as much for copies.

Museums are not places where you can see art, they are places where you can almost touch relics.

I also heard that a lot of museum actually present fakes (despite owning the original) to help maintain and secure the original.

There is a very nice TED talk about this topic:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure

(It starts with a very amusing story)

There is a great book written about this dutch forger which includes this amusing story: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Made-Vermeers-Unvarnishing/dp...

> 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?

Very much so? Museums are about history and historical figures, and this one is about Etienne Terrus specifically, not about pre-fauvist impressionism.

According to your viewpoint: if it's a copy then why spend money going there, when you can have high resolution, fully immersive digital museums?

People mostly go to museums, places and distant countries to see "the real thing".

It's the experience of being close to something unique that makes it worthwhile.

Paintings are not really 2d objects. There are some details that are easier to see with a very high res digital capture, but other things go missing (and accurate color reproduction is hard).

In particular, there are lots of light effects that can't be captured in a 2D grid of pixels.

As I understand, the fakes were not copies of an existing picture but rather an independent work by unknown painter.

> According to your viewpoint: if it's a copy then why spend money going there, when you can have high resolution, fully immersive digital museums?

There are some socialization reasons, but for the art it would be a good example... if such a thing existed. Screens and headsets aren't there yet.

So people trying to get the best visual experience isn't yet proof of the value of the other aspects.

that's such a romantic view.

art museums are about technique history and money.

very few people goes to see when some such technique or style evolved. most everyone else goes for the same reason people go to disneyland. and nobody goes to see pretty pictures.

the money aspect drives the rare and eventful ones. like monalisa, there's nothing to be seen in those works besides their rarity (as can be proved by how monalisa is shown in the louvre), and their rarity spun a whole world of art deals and tax breaks via meaningless collector/museum donations among themselves. And proving those were fakes all along really upsets that hidden world, and that's why they even care. not because of the marketing fueled romantic view of art, which is only there to validate those fake money deals.

if museums were really to show historic art periods only for education, they would only have reproductions. but even reproductions can become rare, as is every single greek sculpture today (they are all XVIII century italian comercial reproductions done with the same methods and tools from today, but a recent reproduction? oh no! unthinkable)

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

For one, because art has for ages (ever since the romantics for example) moved beyond a mere "I like the particular artifact", and into appreciation for the object as a part of a body of work, and of its role in the creator's biography and development of ideas and art.

It's not just about looking at pretty pictures anymore.

> I can understand why someone who bought it because it was made by someone famous would be angry. But a museum?

> state-owned French art museum

It's only a catastrophe now that people know. I doubt anyone who visited the museum before this news broke left feeling like they saw fakes. Art is kinda like magic, just enjoy the experience.

IN "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin argues that it is because we have built up an aura around art. It is the same thing as valuing antiques simply because they are old and not because they are better or beautiful. It is the same reason why people line up to see the Mona Lisa even though we have all seen pictures of it a million times. Or why people go visit some where George Washington slept.

That is true. Thank you for adding this very relevant viewpoint! Walter Benjamin also saw this not as something negative, but rather something neutral, even positive.

Didn’t this concept of “aura” come from Ludwig Klages?

Wikipedia says so. I don't know for sure.

It's not just about the art, also about the history of the art piece. When we stand in front of a painting we don't only think of the painting, but also of the first person to stand before it, the people who have owned and traded it through the years. We think of the type of linen used to make the canvas, the paints used to colour it.

In saying that, I still wouldn't call this a catastrophe. Yes, they will need to drastically reevaluate their presentation of these pieces, but they're still as valid as ever from an historical point of view. My advice would be for the gallery to pivot a few of its rooms and present the history of these fakes, who they were created by, why, how they fooled the gallery, and how the truth was finally arrived at.

Regardless of whether you think a painting is an image, sculpture, or historical artifact, that is a formidable piece of crisis communication. I think if I bought a ticket to that museum I'd be very satisfied that those in charge took what was happening seriously.

Our history does matter - both the real history and the shared short hand fiction we agree on.

And there is always a fight to use evidence from the real history to influence that shared fiction - to say Hispanics fought at the Alamo, that millions were gassed by the Nazis and so on.

Fake paintings and fake art pose a threat to doing this right.

it's not immediate, it's not our most pressing problem, but it is a problem, and it does matter.

I guess it’s not just about mass tourists; they might even appreciate and benefit from the aesthetics of the forgery. The problem is for historians tracing the birth evolution and transformation of artistic movements, tastes and so on. If half of what you’re basing yourself is fake what are your conclusions worth?

People admire the artist more than then art.

If the artwork wasn't made by the artist, it loses the connection to the person we're there to admire.

If this wasn't true, you could have local museums with perfect replicas of the Mona Lisa and hundreds of other masterpieces. But no audience would show up for that. Instead they travel across the world to see the Mona Lisa that da Vinci himself touched, through a thick and reflecting piece of glass and at a distance.

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

Does it matter if a baseball card is "authentic"? To a collector it does.

The French museum are collectors. In this case, art collectors.

You can think of an art museum as a place to see someone's collection. Of art.

When this concept is clear, you arrive at a way to understand their mentality. Not that I agree with their mentality, but that's just how it is.

Museums are used by historians. Art museums are used by art historians — professional, but also anyone interested in questions about the history of art: when and where was this subject, theme, material, or technique introduced; how common was it; who had access to what, when; how did it spread. Fakes and forgeries (these are different) are additional evidence, if correctly categorized as such, but contribute to false theories, if not.

poor france museum

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