Ancient art.
What’s to like?
That it connects us to millennia of human history?
Eh.
The excuse to look at a buncha butts and feel like an intellectual?
Ehh.
How about the fact that tons of it’s fake, and most of the people who own it don’t
have a clue?
That’s pretty fun!
Ancient art forgeries aren’t just the stuff of blatant eBay scams.
They’re the stuff of—for example—the Met, which we know because former Met director
and knockoff Inspector Gadget Thomas Hoving said so.
Specifically, he said that 40% of the art he came across in his time there was probably
fake.
So basically, fake art is to the biggest, most well-funded collectors and institutions
in the world as phishing emails are to your inbox—the only difference is that those
fancy art people are clicking the link.
But how is this such a big thing?
First off, there’s loads of money in the art world, meaning a good fake can fetch millions.
And ancient art is actually pretty great for faking: While there are forgeries in every
corner of the art market, ancient artifacts are mostly fetching delicious mid-market prices,
which are perfect.
Think about it: if you were to forge at the high end—a multi-million dollar Van Gogh
or something—people might bother with the due diligence.
If you were to mess around in the low end—trying to rip off my frog sculptures—you wouldn’t
make enough money for it to be worthwhile.
Also, with ancient art you don’t have to do the hands.
Hands are really hard.
All this means it’s way more common to forge ancient art than most people think, but it’s
not way easier.
Good forgers are as crafty as they are, well, crafty, and their combination of artistic
ability and scientific savvy has managed to keep the fun police on their toes for generations.
The first ancient art forgers were…
other ancient artists.
Ancient Phoenecians faked Egyptian stuff with gibberish hieroglyphs, and the so-called precious
gems in King Tut’s tomb are just ancient colored glass.
Yep, even Tut got tricked.
That’s why nine-year-olds shouldn’t be pharaoh, and you can quote me on that.
So people have been faking artifacts forever, and getting very good at it.
They know which materials are easiest to get away with: stone is one, because if you can
source it from the right place, it’ll pass every compositional test and you’ll only
get caught if you’re a subpar sculptor.
Gold is great too, because it doesn’t corrode, making it easier to fake age it than, say,
bronze, which ages in layers of cupric chloride, brown patina, and crystal cupric oxide.
They also know to replicate ancient production techniques, like making black paint by burning
olive oil rather than using the Crayola stuff.
Once a scam artist makes the fakes, they age them.
That can mean anything from chucking them in an acid pit for a month to burying them
underground and planting basil on top to give it root markings.
They’ll also sometimes break and repair the pieces, feigning a lifetime of use.
But remember: this is a game of cat and mouse, and the cats have tons of ways to spot forgeries.
Sometimes it’s as simple as finding an impossibility: a Qatari Sheikh paid five or six figures for
this “fifth century” unfired clay head, even though an unfired clay head still looking
like a head after sixteen hundred years is about as likely as your head still looking
like a head in sixteen hundred years: not very, unless there’s cryogenics involved.
The pros also spot fakes from tiny stylistic anachronisms.
Like, if you’re going to pass a human statue off as ancient Greek, it can’t have real
human proportions—they constructed their human figures to a mathematical ideal of perfection.
Not enough torso, and you can count it out.
This is also how they cast Love Island, but that’s another video.
Fakehunters also look at the wear and tear.
Some artifacts, like this tiara, are suspected fake because all their damage is suspiciously
located on unimportant, non-protruding parts of the piece.
Fun police need a sharp eye for all this and more—or a sharp nose.
In the 1800s, Egyptian art expert T.G.
Wakeling insisted he could smell the ancientness of Egyptian wood, which was really effective
for weeding out fakes… until forgers started buying up peasant mummies, boiling them, and
dumping the juice onto their stuff to cheat his nose, which is a clever trick, but a waste
of perfectly good peasant juice!
What am I supposed to moisturize with now?
Peasant… blood??
Once someone suspects a fake, there are a bunch of sciencey ways to check whether it’s
really as old as it’s cracked up to be.
Under UV light, legitimately old marble will glow yellow due to centuries of sun exposure,
while younger marble will glow more purple.
For anything that used to be alive—like wood, fibers, bone, whatever—you can radiocarbon
date it by seeing how much of the Carbon 14 isotope is kicking around.
That’ll tell you when the material was harvested, though not necessarily when it was made into
a little horsey.
For other materials, they do compositional analyses with X-Rays which can show—among
other things—exactly where a piece of rock came from.
If it’s not the same place the alleged ancient artists got their rocks from, that’s probably
a fake.
They even analyze the patina, or the buildup of dirt and grime on the piece.
Forgies often attach patina with an artificial binder, while real old stuff is just genuinely
grimy—like a dorm shower, or Elon Musk… well, before the breakup, I guess.
But despite all these fake-spotting tools, forgeries are still everywhere.
In that guy’s book, which came out in 1997, he names a bunch of things at famous museums
that he thinks are fake, and tons of them are still on display!
There are even fakes in this video—those weren’t my frog sculptures, one of my dumb
writers is just starting a side hustle!
What gives?
Turns out, for all the incentive to make a fake, there’s very little incentive to spot
one.
Why would an owner want to know they got duped?
Why would a seller check if their stuff’s fake, as long as it’s fetching real prices?
The logic goes that what you don’t know can’t embarrass you… which is totally
true except in the cases of open fly, spinach in teeth, and most other facets of being alive.
But remember: the art industry is run by and for people who pay exorbitant sums to appear
wealthy and cultured, and any art—even fake art—that keeps up that appearance is doing
its job.
Are we really shocked these folks bop mediocre stuff around in hopes that everyone will just
assume it’s legit?
It’s sort of their whole thing.
So you know what?
Go whip up some ancient art!
Scam a rich clown!
It’s not legal, but it is funny, and that’s so much more important.
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