Red and Green Flags (British History)

[Mick Harper]

I see it everywhere now. Essentially it is the taxpayer buying fakes from people who they pay to identify fakes. It started in the second half of the nineteenth century and is now a global phenomenon.

It is conjoined with that other pastime de nos jours, passing fakes off as looted artefacts.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Art is not about nice paintings or sculptures etc. It is a sytem of value without a simple recognised store of value, ie it's similar to, say, a cryptocurrency, there is no single central national institution (national bank) to guarantee value.

So you have to ask the question how is value continually created, recreated, and stored.

The answer is something like this actually happens by word of mouth (spin), exhibitions, artist reappraisals, auction house and private sales, resales, new artists, new finds of old masters, etc.

The odd forgery is actually functional in this as it acts as a (weak) guarantee to the buyer, that his/her is an original, ie it's probably not a forgery as hopefully this will have been spotted before, and expert so and so has taken a look.

The problem is that of course there is no single central national institution to guarantee value, so caveat emptor and, worryingly, everyone with an internet connection can now have a view rather than simply art historian Buffy Eccles, who can, so they say, tell a genuine Warhol.

If MJH comes along and and advises there are a whole lot of forgeries it could of course crash the currency, therefore it is everybody's interest, from auction house, to gallery, to museum, to professor of art studies, to buyer, to owner, to seller, to forger, to money launderer, to government (eg the UK treasury needs to allow the payment of taxes in the forms of artwork given in lieu) to carry on playing the game of original unless proven otherwise....

[Wile E. Coyote]

It's really a forerunner of crypto.

[Mick Harper]

As I emphasise in RevHist I have no objections whatsoever to art and antiques malpractice. As you say, when supply is (functionally) nil and demand astronomical, new stock from somewhere is essential. Otherwise we'll be back with gentry libraries holding the world stock of everything that is worth looking at.

It is only when fakes'n'forgeries start perverting the course of history I feel it my duty to step in.

[Wile E. Coyote]

No, it's bad enough you are intent on crashing the art market, we defo don't want you involved in the heritage/tourist market as well.

You overlook that with manufacturing at 8% of GDP we do have to keep up appearances for the pilgrims, and why not?

They love it.

[Boreades]

I'm personally aware of an "antique" desk maker in Beverley, Yorkshire. Who makes new desks with new wood, but carefully "distresses" the assembly. With the application of painted-on ink, dirt and other materials that give the desk an "aged" appearance. Some parts get a light toasting with a blowtorch to improve the "weathering". Oh, and a damn good flogging with a bunch of keys. To give it all the battle scars one might find on the genuine article. Then sold on to dealers in London, who invent some "provenance", then sell them to rich Americans.

[Mick Harper]

This is the modern day version of providing English milords on the Grand Tour with a Roman bust. The Yorkshire dude is not doing anything illegal, he is just making modern repros. (Unless he's in on it which he presumably is.)

The Bond Street dealer is guilty of 'passing off' or whatever it is by providing a fake provenance but, since this isn't a Hepplewhite or anything, he could just say, "I've got this man up north who does big house clearances, I think' and he can't say anything more except 'It looks school-of Hepplewhite to me but I can't give any guarantees.'

The point is nobody really suffers and lots of people benefit.

[Boreades]

Is Hepplewhite himself a forgery?

[Mick Harper]

Good grief, I was only using him as an example. Investigate!

PS Because I am busy investigating the possibility that Vivaldi's Four Seasons was composed by Ezra Pound. Oh, you already knew that. Fair enough, I won't bother in that case.

[Mick Harper]

We are not concerned with fakery qua fakery, we are interested in fakery's effect on history. We are even more interested in the way academics diss those who shout 'fake!'

History doesn't come more important than the US Declaration of Independence so here is how Dr. Boyd, historian and librarian of Princeton University, author of “The Declaration of Independence: the Evolution of the Text” (1947) treated someone who had the temerity to cry 'bollocks!'

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

The whole thing originated with Pete Jones sending me the original article. I assume the Declaration was penned by Paine but I agreed with Pete's theory that they couldn't have a such a foundational document written by an Englishman so they pretended it was written by Jefferson.

Something like that. I don't find it significant who wrote it, only that (a) there is some mystery surrounding its authorship and (b) the perfervid attempts, even all these years later, to keep the thing out of Paine's hands. Even though he is a beloved character in their own revolution.

I do however recognise the extreme worth of the text. Mountebanks can be geniuses too.

[Pete Jones]

I appreciate the credit, but it was the author's thesis as opposed to my theory. He also argued that Paine was far too radical and infamous a propagandist (due to Common Sense, published 6 months before the DoI) to be accepted as a founding father. You don't want rabble-rousery to overshadow the intended solemn nature of the document.

The best evidence he gave (going on memory) was that after the soaring rhetoric of the opening, the DoI devolves into a list of the King's crimes:

[Mick Harper]