How To Spot a Really Good Art Forgery 

i vaguely remember reading about a mexican art forger who made such good fakes that he got arrested for trafficking ancient pre-columbian art. he then asked his lawyers for clay and produced a fake inside his cell, which was appraised as genuine by the same specialist that police used to send him to prison, thus proving he was a forger and getting him released. iirc he got hired by a museum as an appraiser

That's why I keep getting caught. Thanks!

Just wanted to say that sometimes really old copies weren’t really forgeries-it was and still is common for art students to copy famous works. This is especially common with sketches-is it the prototype for the very famous artwork, or a copy made from a student in a gallery or museum?

3:21 - That Tiara is the Tiara of Saitapharnes and the selective damage was only one clue it was faked. Nowadays it's known for certain to be a fake because its creator (Israel Rouchomovsky) proved he had actually made it (embarrassing the Louvre in the process).

Fun fact : the Louvre museum (yes, the one in Paris) has the only particle accelerator in the world that is used for art, and to spot art forgeries. It's one of the best way to do it since it doesn't not require removing a piece of material, thus doesn't damage the piece of art if it's actually an authentic one. I don't remember how it works though. That's how the Louvre discovered that one of their most prized possessions (a blue glass head from Ancient Egypt) was a fake. Also, I wonder if art museums don't use fakes just to keep the real ones safe. Why would you risk having a precious painting punctured by an idiot or an asshole ? Every single museum on the planet has the same "no touch no flash" rules but somehow, there's still idiots who think they're above everyone else.

It's pretty insane that powdered mummified human remains used to just be a regular commodity like any other, widely available and used for all manner of things (including as the crucial ingredient in the aptly named "mummy brown" paint...) Imagine having that on your shopping list!

The stuff in King Tut's tomb wasn't fake. Glass like that would have been very valuable at the time.

One of my art professors was banned from the Met for pointing out fakes. That's how I know she's legit

I really hope that the frog sculpture side hustle writer is the same one that learned how to crochet on Sam's time. I hope their Etsy store is going well.

This ties in SO WELL with the repatriation debate- if the vast majority of people can't tell a real work from a fake, why not display a recreation and send the original back to its rightful homeland?

"What am I supposed to moisturize with now, peasant blood?" Whoa there, Lady Bathory

"Hands are really hard" HaI is ai, it's confirmed now

Gold can be traced to its source by trace elements. Western Australian gold for example always has traces of selenium from the copper selenide ore it is extracted from.

Some forgeries by famous forgers are worth a lot of money. The forgeries are so good and so close to the original, it has created a maret for them.

I visited the British Museum in London long ago and saw the Rosetta Stone. It looked fake because it was in pristine condition and looked like it was made recently. I suspect it really was a fake one on display so the original couldn't be damaged by viewers.

I know how! You bring it to Blathers the owl at the museum and have it assessed.

How many times did Sam say "Ankcient"?

I should start making fake art instead of cooking videos with wiener jokes

Regardless of value/price/etc, fakes claiming to be a work by a known artist will always be a lot harder to pass of as legit than fakes of things with no artist attached.

Missed sponsorship opportunity for masterworks :P

I do love "Angshent Art", Sam.

"its not legal but it is funny and thats so much more important" Sam-2023 based af

Hey maybe you can explain how Pallet Lending works? I keep seeing pallets with 'property of' on them, and I'd like to know if it actually works and what the logistics of it are. Just a thought for a future video.

What I find funny about this is that there are some famous fakes! There are art forgers throughout history that in some circles nowadays their fakes are seen as quite valuable. Which might mean there's an extra level of forgery here where there's a fake of a famous fake!🤣

"Scam a rich clown, it's not legal but it's funny!" Yes! I never laughed so hard as when I found out the clowns from Hobby Lobby and their "Museum of the Bible" got ripped off so hard buying up Dea Sea Scroll fragments that were so obviously fake the experts were just about facepalming when they saw them.

Finally, this will help me with my Animal Crossing New Horizons collection.

If anyone is actually making frog sculptures I would happily be a customer

The coloured glass in king tut's tomb was placed there as a status symbol because, at the time, the technology for producing it was cutting edge. It's basically bragging. It's the same reason why the Washington monument has an aluminum tip. At the time aluminum was prohibitively expensive, and it was meant as a flex of the nation's wealth.

I was picking my nose @ 5:20 ... you are a prophet!

One of my favorite things to do with out-of-town guests is to take them to a famous museum in my city and walk around airing the exhibits' dirty laundry. Pointing out the fake statue the museum bought for a million dollars and therefore won't acknowledge is fake ... showing off the exhibit widely celebrated as having the best ass in the museum (it's in a gallery designed around it to allow optimal viewing of its posterior) ... and, of course, pointing out all the ancient Greek "wrestlers" who are doing nothing of the sort.

Really love the pronunciation of "anxient art"

As a prospective artist I really appreciate the mention of how hard hands are lol. And just think, that's not even to mention TOES

You can tell this is a real HAI video, as there's a typo in the quote at 0:28. Unless 40% of the works at the Met were actually telecommunications devices.

Having both channels upload at the same time gives me same vibe as that DVD screensaver hitting corner

What about the techniques used to create retaining wall facade forgeries?

Another way of considering this: as long as a fake can impart to people the same cultural and historical experience as the original, then even if they had the genuine art piece, would they have any reason to not use the fake as a display version and keep the original somewhere better suited to preserving it?

I need to have a word with Crazy Redd.

Plus copying art was an age-old past-time. Ever wonder why so many marble sculptures are weirdly standing my next to a piece of foliage or rock that doesn’t make sense being there? That’s a sign that what you are looking at is probably a marble copy of a more famous bronze sculpture.

3:05 Is there a source for that? I found some references to Leronardo da Vinci regarding 7:1 ideal body proportions, but nothing ancient greek or roman.

"It may not be legal, but it is real fun - Which is far more important" - HAI, 2023

What's the name of the frog sculpture business??

3:47 - Oh, is that from the Liz Bathory collection? I hear that’s good stuff.

Now I know the name of that 'r' sound the king always uses in his speech!

Colored glass you say. Heh, I bought some amethyst on ali express that I determined to be colored glass. The density of it was something like 2.2g/cm^3 where it should have been closer to 1.6 +/-0.1. It's weird because I bought a bunch of other amethysts from the same place which WERE real. It was just these polished ones that were obvious fakes. Not that I was out more than a few bucks. And they still look really nice. There are other types of colored glass like blue sandstone which are stunning in real life.

Hey where's the second clip of footage from? I'm pretty sure I've been there before.

If there is a video on RU-vid sceaming for a MasterWorks sponsor, this is it. If there is a video on RU-vid screaming out MasterWorks bubble, this is also it.

Honestly, if I had that kind of screw-you money, I'd buy a bunch of cheaper fake art and pretend it was real. Most real art is stolen from the people and locations it was found in anyway (looking at you, British Museum), so I would argue there's less of an ethical dilemma involved in buying the fake stuff

moral of the story: scam the rich

big fan of sam using an absolute built muscular avatar to represent himself

Tell more about these frog sculptures...

Great video THank you

Is there anyway to prove if an artist or his/her student made the art? I'm thinking of the Salvator Mundi, was it done by da Vinci or a student, same thing with the last couple Van Gogh's that may have been done by people he lived with right after his death.

The way he says “ancient” sounds like anxious😂

Thanks. I’m waiting for the one viewer who saw this to do his thing. It’ll be quite a show. Good prank.

I wouldn't mind having one at home

Wow, so with Factor I can get frozen food just like from the grocery store, but with the benefit of buying it on the internet and also

The quote from Thomas Hoving at 0:28 says that "Fully 40 percent were either 'phones' or..." I'm sure that should be 'phonies'...unless of course the Ancient Greeks were somehow trying to pass off the latest Samsung as a bust of Athena.

1:02 Van Go 💀

1:40 It sure would be inconvenient to point out how difficult glass was to make at that time, period, let alone sculpt and craft into art such that if it could be done, it would be only for the most important of people and events and valued more than natural gemstones.

"it´s not legal but it is funny, and thats so much more important"- HaI

0:11 why are u using a magnifying glass?

I appreciated the Love Island joke

The fine art market is just a craven tax dodge for the uber rich these days so I kind of like them getting ripped off by forgeries.

3:44 wouldn't it actually be peasant broth?

I'm glad this video wasn't sponsored by Masterworks 😂

So this begs a question, how long does a fake artefacts need to be preserved before it can be recognized as authentic fake artefact like King Tut's?

There is a weakness i theories behind a lot of forgery detection. Like the idea the Greeks created statues to a mathematical set not reality, is that ancient artists had little to no variety and basically always did things the same way....over hundreds or even thousands of years. There is little space for that avant garde artist of the 4th century BC who did things their own way and some single rich bloke he convinced to go along and pay for it. Or whose marble shipment didn't arrive and so he had to grab stone from somewhere else (that isn't on the list of where "artists got their stone). It may be a good way to raise suspitions and double check the due dilligence.

Important discrepancy: the practice of preserving human body parts for long periods of time using mildly low temperatures is _cryonics,_ not cryogenics (and cryogenics experts, who deal with temperatures cold enough to turn gases into liquids, will get very angry if you mix them up). While a human head would probably be mostly the same after 1500 years immersed in liquid nitrogen, it could have internal and external scars from the initial dunk. Cryonics generally uses temperatures just above freezing, to try and avoid those problems.

So that means if I time travel back in time bring back a sculpture it would be passed on as a fake?

This is such a great Masterworks ad. Masterworks: it’s mostly fake.

Thanks Sam, that stupid fox living in his boat will never scam me again!

Honestly, if there is that good art then whatever! It looks really damn good and genuine enough that the only different thing is how old it is.

2:43 Hysterical, but more info and less cleverness

The video starts zooming into butts as if the title isn't "How To Spot a Really Good Fart"

Sam, more like Sammyboi213 back from the NeoPets days

I have an idea for a new video about ancient brincks.

Imagine if the guy who stole the Mona Lisa actually just made a fake and that’s the one they “found” after catching him

I already finished at least 100 frog fakes, bummer.

Boiling peasant mummies? Lol.

Interesting

Isn't ancient glass jewelry just as precious? Was it common before modern mass production?

Anyone else get more ‘anxious’ every time the guy from Wendover says “ancient”?

Great video.

Having fake art is like exposed ductwork or booze on display in your house, works if your poor or if your super rich, but in a middle class house it just doesn't fit in 🤣

All you have to do is take your art to Blathers and he’ll tell you it’s fake

My head won't even look like a head in 16 years.

is the coupon code for factor box just for Americans?

Great content, hate the advertisement

The girl at 5:39 looks like Sam from Wendover.

0:09 brick

Crazy!

Somehow I find myself unconcerned about silly rich people getting duped by highly skilled forgers. I'm firmly on the side of Team Forger here.

Make forgeries of forgeries

With this RU-vid video, Redd from the video game Animal Crossing New Horizons will be cleaned out by me.

3:28 You shouldn't use an apostrophe when writing the numbers for centuries. The correct format is "1800s" instead of "1800's." As for decades, you would write "50s" instead of "50's" or "'50s."

Fake art is like Wisconsin: It isn't real.

0:10 Why is there a smiley on this butt?

What if this was just a scheme by the museums all along to get people to make good replicas for them without having to do any work themselves?

6:08 wait: frozen food is unhealthy? Says who?

Also for ancien art provenance is pretty much non existant. So one less thing to worry about.