Nancy L. Kelker - Faking Ancient Mesoamerica

J. J. A. K. and T. W.

And all the players in the Art World:

forgers, dealers, curators, and scholars who made this book a necessity.

T his volume on fakes, forgeries, and forgers of Mesoamerican antiquities, and its companion book on South America, grew out of an enjoyable Sunday morning in October 1996 that the authors spent at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, viewing and discussing the international blockbuster exhibition, Olmec Art. As we wandered through the maze of display cases, we stopped at some of the more problematic pieces and quietly discussed, from the views of our respective fields of art history and archaeology, what qualities of each piececarving, engraving, posture, size, and so forthpresented red flags that the piece might not be authentic. As we moved through the exhibition, we began to attract a crowd of followers interested in our observations, much to the chagrin of the museum guards, who seemed dismayed not only by our discussion of which pieces might be fakes, but even more so by the group of people following us instead of the official docent giving a scripted tour. There was a moment when it seemed they were about to ask us to leave.

Of course, to a museum professional, fake is the ultimate F-word, and saying it in the midst of an exhibition is the supreme blasphemy. The ugly, oft-swept-under-the-rug truth is that fakes abound in an art world built largely on unprovenanced (looted) works, and no exhibition or collection is unassailably free of their contamination. The Olmec exhibition was not unique in having works of dubious authenticity as part of the display. The authors know from experience as museum professionals and consultants to museums that every museum has some fakes. This is a fact of life: forgery may well be the worlds second-oldest profession. Even museums that do not collect antiquities are not immune from being tricked by forgeries, as the work of living artists is being forged. The venerable Christies auction house was rather dismayed to find that a painting they advertised for sale as a Fernando Botero was not actually one (Hoving 1996, 1516). And then there are the Bolton forgers, who managed to fool the museum world in many media and many time periods for yearsuntil a fake Egyptian antiquity caught them up (Bailey 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d, 2008e).

Traditionally, museum professionals have been loath to talk about the chaff in their collections, much in the way old-line families are reluctant to air the family dirty laundry by talking about the loony aunt or the shady uncle. Ignoring the problem, however, compounds it. When museums inadvertentlythrough lack of staff with expertise in the field, or purposefully because they believe a piece to be beautiful and deserving of displaypresent their fakes as authentic works, it is inevitable that these artistic impostors will become familiar, and sometimes iconic, images in art history texts and the subject of theses, dissertations, and scholarly papersa situation that forever corrupts the integrity of the field.