Fake Crystal Skulls
Lots of news this week in the world of fake art. Three museums announced that their Aztec crystal skulls are fake. The Quai Branley Museum in Paris announced the news about their fake crystal skull less than three months ago. Fake crystal skulls have also been reported by the British Museum in London, and the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. At first these crystal skulls were believed to be the product of the Pre-Columbian era, now it has been revealed that these are contemporary creations.
These crystal skulls have been art museum stars before the latest installation of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. These prominent museums employed scientists with micron microscopes to examine the crystal skulls. The micro examination revealed that modern jewelry grinders with rotary wheels created the crystal skulls rather than ancient instruments. Another clue was a small amount of silicon carbide found in a nook of one of the skulls. Silicon carbide is used in industrial abrasives and shows further proof that these skulls were created with modern implements and therefore fakes and forgeries.
Fake Coptic Art at Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum in New York City has announced that probably about a third of its Coptic art from ancient Egypt is fake. (One third! That's a lot!) Dr. Edna Russmann is a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and decided that coming out about the forged artwork was something that had to happen. It does seem to save face by the art institution coming clean about its own mistakes in acquiring artifact forgeries. Additionally, Dr. Russmann is planning a special exhibition that will help to promote the Brooklyn Museum and to serve as an educational tool for other museum professionals. Credit must be given to Gary Vikan, a Byzantine art specialist who first called attention to the possibilities of fakery and forgery as early as the 1970s. While this does devalue the monetary value of the museum's collection, it gives credibility back to the Brooklyn Museum.
How To Identify a Fake Van Gogh
Computer scientists are helping art museum curators identify fake and authentic works of art using grayscale, high-resolution digital scans. The Vincent Van Gogh Museum and the Kroller-Muller Museum, both in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, worked together to provide 101 high-resolution scans of alleged legitimate Van Gogh paintings. Before these scans could be fully utilized a statistical model had to be created that in essence identified the artistic thumbprint of the painting of Vincent Van Gogh. An international team of scientists created this statistical model based on the style of brushstrokes used by Van Gogh.
The Digital Painting Analysis team includes art historians and scientists from Penn State, Princeton, Maastricht, Dartmouth-Cornell, Stanford, Wisconsin WPI, and the Museum of Modern Art. The second Image Processing for Artist Identification Conference is being held from October 20-21, 2008, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Stay tuned for more fake and forged art news.
