ABSTRACT
From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, as Andre Malraux tells it in The Museum Without Walls, museums functioned in this way – it was necessary to visit the actual painting in order to see it. The museum in Paris cannot or will not consciously glamorise counterfeiting, because if the forgeries were too persuasive, or too creative, the line between the copy and the original would start to erode, and one would start to see the officially produced ‘originals’ instead as particular types or styles of copy. The readymade and conceptual non-objects preserved in the collections of art museums had already proven that painting as self expression had long been dead, or at least no longer a necessary condition for ‘art’. The Springfield Museum’s show ‘Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World’, presented in 2014, offered something similar, presenting famous fakes by forgers such as Elmyr de Hory and Mark Landis alongside originals.
