ABSTRACT
Fake is an exhibition about deception, or rather the material evidence of the myriad deceptions practised by men upon their fellows over three millennia. It is a record of human frailty, of the deceit of those who made fakes and of the gullibility of those who were taken in by them – a curious subject at first sight for exhibition in the British Museum. The sense of history revealed by fakes is sometimes remarkable. Equally surprising is the almost total lack of any such sense demonstrated by some of the fakes surviving from Renaissance Europe. Just as the fake itself is evidence of the historical sense of its maker and recipients, so its critical history is a gauge of the development, or decline, of such a sense thereafter. Some are rendered more acceptable by restoration, a process that provides the same kind of evidence for the history of taste as fakes themselves.
