The next time you're marveling at a painting by Picasso, a statue by Michelangelo, or a carving
from ancient Egypt, don't be absolutely sure that you're looking at the genuine article. Art fakery
has been around since ancient times and is still in full swing — museums, galleries, and private
collections around the world are stocked with phonies. This fact comes to us from an insider's
insider — Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City. In his book False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, he writes:
The fact is that there are so many phonies and doctored pieces around these days that at
times, I almost believe that there are as many bogus works as genuine ones. In the decade
and a half that I was with the Metropolitan Museum of Art I must have examined fifty
thousand works in all fields. Fully 40 percent were either phonies or so hypocritically
restored or so misattributed that they were just the same as forgeries. Since then I'm sure
that that percentage has risen. What few art professionals seem to want to admit is that the
art world we are living in today is a new, highly active, unprincipled one of art fakery.
Ancient Egyptian objects are particularly likely to be bogus. Furthermore, Hoving estimates that
the fraud rate for religious artifacts from pagan and early Christian times is literally 99 percent.
As many as 5,000 fake Dürers were created after the master's death, and half of Vienna master
Egon Schiele's pencil drawings are fakes.
The World's Museums Contain Innumerable Fakes
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