Genuine Fakes
How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Does an authentic Andy Warhol painting need to be painted by Andy Warhol? Why do audiences feel outraged when they find out that scenes from their beloved blockbuster documentaries are staged? Can people move past assuming that a diamond grown in a lab is a fake? What happens when a forged painting or manuscript becomes more valuable than its original?
This is a book about genuine fakes – the curious and complex objects that provoke these very sorts of questions. Genuine fakes fall into the space between things that are real and things that are not; whether or not we think that those things are authentic is a matter of perspective. Unsurprisingly, the world is full of genuine fakes – full of things that defy simple categorisation.
From stories of audacious forgeries to feats of technological innovation, historian Lydia Pyne explores how the authenticity of eight genuine fakes depends on their unique combinations of history, science and culture. The stories of art forgeries, fake fossils, nature documentaries, synthetic flavours, museum exhibits, Maya codices and Palaeolithic replicas show that genuine fakes are both complicated and change over time.
Drawing from historical archives, interviews, museum exhibits and science fiction as well as her own research, Pyne brings each genuine fake to life through unexpected and often outrageous stories. Genuine Fakes will make readers think about all the unreal things they encounter in their daily lives, and why they invoke the reactions – surprise, wonder, understanding or annoyance – that they do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Pyne (Seven Skeletons) offers a thoughtful examination of what it is to be fake, using case studies ranging from instances of outright deception to clearly labeled recreations, with plenty of gray area in between. In the process, she raises a host of provocative questions, not least of which is this: can a replica be good or authentic, or can it even "stand in for the genuine thing?" For example, Pyne notes that many modern artificial food flavors are chemically and structurally identical to their natural equivalents. Elsewhere, she demonstrates the utility of fakes by pointing to the painstaking recreation of France's Chauvet Cave, in which Paleolithic paintings were found, in order to preserve the actual site as it was. Pyne doesn't neglect instances of outright deception, such as by prolific 18th-century Shakespearean forger William Henry Ireland, who made his fake documents, letters, and plays more convincing by spelling Shakespeare's name inconsistently, just as the Bard did himself. Thanks to this and plenty of other odd and intriguing facts such as that synthetic banana flavoring was codified in the late 19th century and thus mimics a now-extinct variety of the fruit Pyne's well-written survey illuminates the ramifications of various types of fakery, even while showing how murky the concept of what is fake can get.
