“Art forgers tend to almost all be Caucasian, middle-aged men with strained relationships with the women in their lives.”
By his own admission, Noah Charney is “half criminologist, half art historian”. An academic and a prolific writer, he is widely acknowledged to the world expert in the area of art forgery. His book, The Art of Forgery, examines how to value art and weird things, but it is also a book about psychology and the manicness of the men (and they are nearly always men) who try to one-up the high world of art institutions. In the latest instalment of The Context, Charney talks to Sinead O’Sullivan about what constitutes original work, the biggest cons attempted, and why the De Vinci Code is riddled with inaccuracies.
