Fake Picasso: How Could This Have Happened?
November 11, 2004
This fake Picasso had been in the possession of the Malloway Museum in Toronto since 1947, the year it was acquired. Although the forgery is quite faithful in appearance, it is astonishing that museum staff failed to notice, on the right side of the painting, a microcomputer that did not exist at that time. It was an IT specialist who, upon discovering the painting, suddenly pointed out this anachronism, causing considerable embarrassment among museum authorities—understandably so.
This HTML page is a hoax.
It was I myself, twenty-five years ago, who created these "works," pastiches such as this fake Egyptian fresco or this fake Daumier. All of them conspicuously feature a... microcomputer. A friend had an "Administrative Computing" magazine and commissioned me to design its covers. Thus, this entire series was born. I have not been able to recover a fake Toulouse-Lautrec I made at the time, in which a group of prostitutes are counting their tickets on a... Macintosh. I never imagined, even for a second, that readers might take seriously pranks whose clues were so obvious. Who could have imagined that museum curators and art experts would fail to notice the glaring presence of a microcomputer on an Egyptian relief, a Daumier, or even a Picasso? Yet some readers, in good faith, fell for it.
When I posted on my website a dossier discussing a test designed to detect stupidity, created by Wilfried Wurmstein and Laetitia Paparrazi, some readers immediately rushed to Google—a reflex now standard—to search for these researchers, treating the internet today as a genuine encyclopedia.
There is a lesson to be drawn from these experiences, which surprised even me. I have repeatedly written: "Learn to think for yourselves, or others will do it for you." These harmless pranks remind us how easily information can be manipulated. Some readers write to me: "We follow your writings because we trust you." That is not the right approach. You must learn to read everything that comes your way with a critical mind, as I strive to do myself. What may be most interesting about this method of information dissemination on a website is its interactive nature. Readers constantly write to me: "What you say is incorrect; so-and-so never was president of a Franco-Israeli association... things didn't happen that way," and so on. I take these comments into account. Information that, on the internet, can remain accessible indefinitely becomes dynamic, subject to daily revision—and I am grateful to my readers for this. It is precisely this interactivity that has enabled me to venture into highly specialized topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or, as I am doing now, a reminder of events during the Algerian War.
Finally, know that Google, despite its remarkably powerful performance, operates in "symbiosis" with the NSA, the U.S. National Security Agency. By becoming instantly the world's most powerful search engine, Google gains access to your home, identifies your interests, locates you, and ultimately may manipulate you—once you place absolute trust in it. Do you really believe you can blindly trust the NSA? The current world is living through times too serious for us to afford naivety. Deception is not a recent invention of our modern era. Contemporary history reminds us of this constantly, slowly giving birth to its truths.
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