How can you tell the difference between
a fake and a genuine piece of art?

The team of artfakes is often confronted with this question, and for good reason. For a non-connoisseur it can be extremely difficult to judge for instance whether a particular painting is a fake or not. Some more than others as is the case with one of the most (if not the most) misused artist, namely Pablo Ruiz Picasso. However here are some guidelines, which you can use for yourself:

Start by studying some genuine works of the painter, you want to learn more about. See if you can catch a common denominator in his works. It’s like a fingerprint. Every artist has got his own fingerprints. That goes for a writer, a composer and for a painter, which is the main issue for our little chat here.

Take for example the famous composer Ludwig van Beethoven! Having heard his music over and over again, as I actually have for 40 years now, you are able to distinguish him from his contemporaries during the Vienna classical period: Mozart and Haydn. For a person who knows nothing or very little about classical music, he will indeed have extreme difficulty to distinguish between Mozart and Beethoven the most comparable of the three.

What makes the whole issue so difficult to explain is the fact that art is not understood with your common sense but rather with your intuition, which lies in the right, holistic part of your brain, the one with which you understand a situation as a unified whole. The other part, the left part of your brain you do calculation with, you spilt things up into small elements, analyses them and put them together again.

You can do no such thing with art, and that’s why you must use a lifetime learning to understand it. We, artfakes, have through hard work and intensive study learned to distinguish between fake art and genuine art, we can see the artist’s fingerprints in his work, and we can also see the fakers fingerprints, because no matter how well a falsification is done, having our skills, he cannot fool an art expert except from some very rare cases.

Read more about the famous art forgers


This text was composed in co-operation with artfakes.dk