fake aura

“The effective lifespan of a forgery, [Agnes] Mongan often said, is but a single generation. We’re not likely, in other words, to get fooled by the fakes of our fathers. Looking at forgeries much later, a person schooled in different aesthetic traditions and comfortable with other visual languages can see them for what they are, noting, say, the forger’s overly fancy, even fussy line, which, in the case of Mongan’s fake Matisse, bears the mark not of the modern master but something more conspicuous and contemporary, a more than passing resemblance perhaps to certain elegantly drawn department-store advertisements from the 1950s.”

(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 101.)

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