The art forger who became a national hero

Yeah this has been the hard part for me with both transitioning into a photography business and trying to run a YouTube channel, albeit a different variation on the issue compared to the art world. Both (most) people and algorithms want you to fit neatly into a specific little box, like "high contrast black & white street photographer"; that's the dream for them. They can't deal with or understand somebody who then also takes colour photos of birds, for example. YouTube in particular hates this and has no idea how to show your video to people if it breaks from the niche it thinks your previous work fits into. Many creators find that they get pigeon-holed into the one thing that brings them success and burn out when their attempts to break out of it are met with confusion.

It's much, much harder to build a brand that is you, rather than what people want you to be, but if you can build a brand that is the whole of your personality then you can make a success of anything you publish as people are following you for you, not just your work. As someone with a complete lack of focus this is likely the only way I can make it work for me, but it's still very much a work in progress.

> Frankly, had he not confessed, they'd likely still be Vermeer's today.

Speaking as a Dutch guy with an arts degree, I more or less agree with everything else in your comment if with "art" you mean "prestige and fame in the art world" (you forgot to mention the gallery art and tax evasion angle though), but I'm not so certain about this one. I've seen his paintings side-by-side with actual Vermeer paintings and you can tell they're not the real deal. The faked aging is pretty noticeable. Aesthetically too, the paintings are still "Vermeer as interpreted by someone else", and you can see the "Van Meegeren" touches. Sure, that is with the benefit of hindsight, but I think a side-by-side view would have raised questions regardless.

On top of that, you have to consider how they tricked the art world: they found a vain professor who also had a selfish incentive to be the person to find one of the presumed "missing" Vermeer paintings. They knew exactly who to manipulate.

Being an art critic who discovers a forgery also comes with some prestige, so surely later critics would have been more eager to be skeptical about these "new" Vermeer paintings.

Also, if "F for Fake" has shown me anything it's that forgers kind of want to be caught, because they ultimately want to brag about fooling everyone. So he probably would have announced to the world that he made the forgeries at some point. But that kind of breaks with your "if he hadn't confessed" condition so it doesn't really count.