Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age - Hardcover

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Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age
  • Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age
Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age - Hardcover

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age - Hardcover

by Jonathon Keats
$25.90
$25.90

Book Overview

According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of "forging" the Mona Lisa, questioning the entire concept of originality.

Forged explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects their stories to broader themes about the role of forgeries in society. From the Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto who faked a Raphael masterpiece at the request of his Medici patrons, to the Vermeer counterfeiter Han van Meegeren who duped the avaricious Hermann Göring, to the frustrated British artist Eric Hebborn, who began forging to expose the ignorance of experts, art forgers have challenged "legitimate" art in their own time, breaching accepted practices and upsetting the status quo. They have also provocatively confronted many of the present-day cultural anxieties that are major themes in the arts. Keats uncovers what forgeries--and our reactions to them--reveal about changing conceptions of creativity, identity, authorship, integrity, authenticity, success, and how we assign value to
works of art. The book concludes by looking at how artists today have appropriated many aspects of forgery through such practices as street-art stenciling and share-and-share-alike licensing, and how these open-source "copyleft" strategies have the potential to make legitimate art meaningful again.

Forgery has been much discussed--and decried--as a crime. Forged is the first book to assess great forgeries as high art in their own right.
ISBN9780199928354
Author Jonathon Keats
PublisherOxford University Press, USA
GenreArts, History, and Education
FormatHardcover
PublishedJanuary 2013
LanguageENG- English
Pages208
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Art History Nonfiction Reference

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More by Jonathon Keats

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age - Hardcover

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age - Hardcover

By Jonathon Keats

About Jonathon Keats

Jonathon Keats is the author of The Pathology of Lies and has written for Wired, The Washington Post, and San Francisco magazine, among other publications. Keats has been awarded fellowships by Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ucross Foundation, and has chaired the National Book Critics Circle fiction award committee. He lives in San Francisco.

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