Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part 1 The Art of Forgery
• Part 2 Six Modern Masters
• What Is Belief? (p. 31)
• Lothar Malskat (1913-1988)
• What Is Authenticity? (p. 50)
• Alceo Dossena (1878-1937)
• What Is Authority? (p. 67)
• Han van Meegeren (1889-1947)
• What Is History? (p. 93)
• Eric Hebborn (1934-1996)
• What Is Identity? (p. 109)
• Elmyr de Hory (1906(?)-1976)
• What Is Culture? (p. 134)
• Tom Keating (1917-1984)
• Part 3 Forging a New Art
• Further Reading (p. 177)
• Acknowledgments (p. 181)
• Index (p. 183)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Keats (art critic, San Francisco Magazine; Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology) explores the role of the counterfeit within the history of art. His aim here is twofold: to establish the historical mutability of our present-day conception of authenticity and fraudulence, and to elevate the cultural status of the forger from maligned imposter to esteemed artist. He describes past attitudes toward forgery that contravene our own (e.g., the penchant of Roman copyists to proudly sign their works), before recounting the stories of six notorious modern forgers who challenged prevailing notions of authenticity in idiosyncratic ways. While Keats's first claim is relatively incontrovertible, his second is far more provocative. The author goes so far as to claim that forgers have become more radical than artists: not only do they extend the critique of authorship and leveling of aesthetic value carried out by such avant-gardists as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, but they exceed those artists' gallery-based provocations by disrupting the systems of attribution and authentication on which the art market and art history rely. VERDICT Whether or not the reader follows Keats to this conclusion is almost beside the point; this engaging polemic will edify and entertain many art enthusiasts.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In his introduction, critic, journalist, and artist Keats (Virtual Worlds) asserts that fakes-old forgeries and new works falsely attributed to old masters-are "the great art of our age." While acknowledging that their artistic merit lies elsewhere than in the aesthetic, the author claims that "art forgeries achieve what legitimate art accomplishes when legitimate art is most effective," namely, causing us to confront troubling truths about "ourselves and our world." To substantiate this claim, Keats devotes the bulk of his book to portraits of six fakers throughout history, highlighting different questions that their work raises. But with the exception of the author's consideration of forger Eric Hebborn, who subverted the view of art history as a progressive continuum, these profiles don't do much to substantiate Keats's bold claims. He saves the heavy lifting for his conclusion, in which he considers contemporary approaches to art that riff on the forger's work, such as appropriation and street art. But as he decries most appropriation as being locked in a self-referential holding pattern, while declaring science the new frontier of boundary smashing, it's unclear why Keats has devoted most of his book to profiling artistic frauds. Agent: Elise Capron, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Forged registers a sincere appreciation of the forger's art, but its brevity regarding related philosophical impulses and ramifications leaves readers at an impasse. According to this volume, art is forgeable when a culture produces art, thereby eliminating ancient Egypt "because there was no art as we now construe it." Similarly, "there was nothing to be falsified" when Romans copied Greek spolia for architectural settings. Forgery arose only when authenticity became an issue. From this discriminating art historical selection, critic, journalist, and artist Keats proposes that forgeries succeed where legitimate objects seldom do by "provoking us to ask agitating questions about ourselves and our world." This reasoning is later reversed when the book asserts that the best legitimate art simulates the "violations that forgers perpetuate." Deceptively little effort is made to develop these intriguing notions. Principal chapters recount instances of fakery challenging a community's ideas of belief, authenticity, authority, history, identity, or culture. The final entries unsuccessfully locate late 20th-century appropriation and contemporary practice within the lineage of forgers, as in the case of Warhol, who "proved that legitimate art could be as powerful as the counterfeit." Summing Up: Not recommended. W. B. Folkestad Colorado State University--Pueblo

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jonathon Keats is a critic, journalist and artist. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine, and has contributed art criticism to Art & Antiques, Art + Auction, Art in America, ARTnews, Artweek, and Salon.com. His arts writing has also appeared in Wired Magazine, ForbesLife Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is most recently the author of Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology (OUP). His conceptual art has been exhibited at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Wellcome Collection.