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home about the abundance of “furried animals and fish” in Canada, was asked to provide a specimen, and duly did so. Fakes, in order to last more than a summer, must insert themselves into an appropriate crevice of probability and want: the Abominable Snowman, whose impressive tracks were almost certainly fabricated by a disgruntled British mountaineer, hits an exact nerve of phantasmagoric need in us. So did the bewhiskered trout: we imagine the deep and icy Canadian waters, and it suddenly seems plausible to us that survival is reserved only for those specimens which adapt—for instance, by sprouting fur. This fishy canard has tenaciously endured, been kept alive in recent years by an Ontario entrepreneur. About twenty years ago, an inquirer brought one of his products—white rabbit fur neatly attached to a brown trout—to the Royal Scottish Museum. The museum recognized the hoax and so didn’t retain the object. But news of the “find” got out, and public demand was such that the museum was obliged to re-create the furbearing trout. And this hallucinatory hybrid—a rare double fake, in fact, being a fake of a fake—now takes its rightful place in the British Museum show alongside a easeful of other questionable items of zoology: a unicorn’s horn, a griffin’s claw, a couple of mermen (dried monkey atop a fishtail), and the famous “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.”
    There are various sinister examples of “hostile fakes.” During the Second World War, for example, the Germans produced an excellent set of standard British postage stamps with two minute and subversive emendations: the crown above King George VI’s head was topped off by a Star of David, and the
D
of the pence sign was constructed from a hammer and sickle. (It seems from this distance an improbable insult to claim that the impeccably British monarch consortedwith both Jews and Communists, but totalitarian abuse delights in the portmanteau mode: Shostakovich in his memoirs recalls Zhdanov’s berating of the poet Akhmatova as “both a slut and a nun.”) In the main, however, there is frequently a kind of tender complicity between faker and victim: I want you to believe that such-and-such is the case, says the faker; you want to believe it, too, and in order to cement that belief you, for your part, will give me a great deal of money, and I, for my part, will laugh behind your back. The deal is done. And public opinion, which likes to see the humiliation of the expert, usually gets over its first shudder of moral disapproval and ends up gleefully on the side of the faker. The best-known British art forger of postwar years, for instance, was a man named Tom Keating. Born in 1917, he had hopes of a regular career as an artist—or, at least, as an art teacher—but when thwarted began to diversify, first into art “restoration” at the shadier end of the market and then into straight forgery. He claimed to have produced a couple of thousand “Sexton Blakes”—as he referred, in Cockney rhyming slang, to his fakes—over a period of twenty years, specializing in the work of Samuel Palmer. He was finally unmasked in 1976 by the art-market correspondent of
The Times
. Keating then made a general confession at a press conference, claiming (with some justification) that he had begun forging as a protest against the exploitation of artists by dealers, and adding that he had in any case frequently given away his sly simulacra. He was arrested the following year, but the case never came to court: all charges were dropped because of Keating’s poor health. Thereafter, his popularity rose no end: his “Sextons” changed hands at respectable prices, he gave a series of television lectures on the painting techniques of the great masters, and after his death, in 1984, a sale of his work fetched £274,000—seven times the auctioneers’ estimate.
    Keating’s case offers a paradigm, and the fact that his forgeries often aren’t much good increases his