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prejudice of the time, but it’s no mere catty hyperbole. A casual tramp through the average stately home will take you past walls hung with pictures still confidently identified as being by Raphael, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and other masters. Were most of them entered at auction, they would suffer the gentle torture of politely vilifying qualification—“school of,” “style of,” or the humiliating deletion of the painter’s Christian name to denote uncertainty. It’s not that the British are more naive or more aesthetically dim than other races; it’s simply that fakery follows wherever money leads (the Japanese taste for Impressionists and for the work of Bernard Buffet is doubtless inspiring contemporary forgers, while in Buenos Aires, for some reason, the favorite fakee is Guido Reni), and Britain has for many centuries run a financial surplus. Besides, an artist rarely produces at exactly the rate the market requires; spare capacity or spare cash is the usual condition. Sometimes this results in the artist breakinghis back or his talent to accommodate the patron. Thus Canaletto was known to the Venetians as “the painter the English spoiled” (and it does seem unfair that for all his fecundity there is scarcely a Canaletto to be seen in his native city). More usually, the gap between creative output and market demand is met by a merry band of fakers. Gazing at the rows of bumped and blackened Old Masters that still adorn the Big House, with their crazy-paving glaze and shameless attribution, one is tempted to imagine the circumstances of these questionable purchases some two or more centuries ago. It makes a little Italian genre scene, a picturesque morality. The svelte young milord posts into town on the second leg of his Grand Tour, accompanied only by a wise old tutor and a bag of doubloons; he expresses ardent interest in the local artists, and perhaps the more famous ones from the larger cities; and before Milord has dusted off his hat the word has gone out to old Luigi round the corner to put a little extra age on that veritable masterpiece he bodged together the week before last.
    So London is the natural home for an exhibition on this subject. “Fake? The Art of Deception” at the British Museum is a most enticing show, and various to the point of being higgledy-piggledy: it takes in painting and sculpture, books and manuscripts, furniture, jewelry, pottery, stamps, coins, newspapers, cutlery, and torture instruments; it covers every civilization whose artifacts have attracted collectors and, therefore, fakers. It also serves as a wry example of curatorial economy, or how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. For where does this disgraced Dürer drawing, this dubious vellum miniature of Columbus landing in America, this dud “seventeenth-century” Turkish carpet come from? Why, from the British Museum, the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum. What was shamefully consigned to the deepest vaults is now back on display, and the conned experts of yesteryear blush—or perhaps chuckle—from their graves.
    As you wander round this Aladdin’s cave of bogus objects, you also encounter a wide spread of the baser human motives: the lust to deceive, to make money unlawfully, to swindle the faithful (as with the Turin Shroud), to destabilize the enemy’s currency, to undermine the democratic process (the “Zinoviev Letter” of 1924, which stirredup the classic Red Scare in Britain), to foment anti-Semitism (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). But overall the show leaves one uplifted rather than depressed—exhilarated by human inventiveness, charmed by these guerrilla attacks on the authority of the cognoscenti, amused, and even reassured, by the gullibility of our species. Who could resist, for instance, the case of the little-known Canadian furbearing trout? Belief in this exceptional fish seems to have first arisen in the seventeenth century, when a Scotsman wrote