• A large portion of art/artifacts are forgeries. Everyone is alright with it because galleries and collectors want to brag about having some unique old art piece and forgers are very good at making pieces that would fool anyone who is just looking at it.

    • @GCanuck@lemmy.world
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      411 year ago

      My personal conspiracy theory is that almost all art the public is exposed to is a forgery. Why show the plebs the real thing? We wouldn’t notice a difference anyway.

      • Random Dent
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        231 year ago

        Maybe whenever you hear those stories about a famous work of art being stolen and later recovered, they’ve actually just stolen the forgery and the galley just puts up a new fake one.

        The robbers then can’t sell it because they have a worthless fake and the ‘real’ one is clearly on display in the gallery, and they can’t expose the fraud because then they’d out themselves and go to jail.

        The perfect scam!

      • @RivenRise@lemmy.world
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        111 year ago

        That’s what they do with a lot more paintings that you would think. Not because they don’t want the plebs to look at them but because being exposed to the environment would cause irreparable damage to it. So they have experts make recreations and display those.

      • @bitsplease@lemmy.ml
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        41 year ago

        This isn’t really a conspiracy theory is it? I thought it was something they were open about that they often have replicas on display for security/preservation reasons

    • @some_guy
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      81 year ago

      There was a fantastic interview on The Jordan Harbinger Show podcast with a professional forger. I’d recommend searching for it. I’ve been meaning to give it a second listen for a few years, but have too much other content.