18 November

Han Van Meegeren was the most famous forger of the 20th century. His fakes made between $100 million and $200 million. This is him painting a fake during his trial, to prove he’d created them. The much more interesting question for me is, if even experts struggled to tell the difference between his works and those of old Masters, why would a ‘real’ Vermeer for example get you $20 million, but a Van Meegeren maybe a few thousand? Why do we place such astronomical value on the ‘authentic’ or the original, if it’s indistinguishable from a fake? Understand that and I think we start to understand something very important about images.