Fake Picasso: How was this possible?
November 11, 2004
This fake Picasso has been in the possession of the Malloway Museum in Toronto since 1947, the year it was acquired. While the painting itself seems quite authentic, it’s astonishing that museum officials didn’t notice the presence of a microcomputer on the right side of the painting—a device that didn’t exist at that time. It was a computer scientist who noticed this anachronism; this discovery put the museum officials in an awkward situation.
This HTML page is a hoax. Twenty-five years ago, I created these “artworks” myself—imitations like this fake Egyptian fresco or this fake Daumier. All of them feature a microcomputer. A friend of mine had a magazine dedicated to “administrative computing,” and he asked me to create covers for it. That’s how this series came about. I couldn’t find another fake Toulouse-Lautrec painting I made back then; it depicted a group of women counting their money using a Macintosh computer. I never imagined that anyone would take such obvious jokes seriously. Who would have thought that museum curators and art experts wouldn’t notice a microcomputer on an Egyptian relief, a Daumier painting, or a Picasso artwork? But some readers actually believed it, in good faith.
When I posted an article on my website about a test designed to detect stupidity, written by Wilfried Wurmstein and Laetitia Paparrazi, several readers rushed to Google to find information about these two researchers. This has become a common practice nowadays. There’s a lesson to be learned from these experiments: I myself was surprised by the results. I’ve often said, “Learn to think for yourself; otherwise, others will do it for you.” These harmless jokes remind us how easily information can be manipulated. Some people write to me, “We trust your writings.” But that’s not the right approach. You must learn to critically evaluate everything you read, just as I try to do. What’s most interesting about this way of sharing information is its interactivity. Readers constantly write to me saying, “What you say isn’t true; so-and-so never served as president of any Franco-Israeli association…” I take these comments into account. Information on the Internet remains accessible indefinitely, making it dynamic and subject to constant revision. I’m grateful to my readers for this. This interactivity allowed me to discuss complex topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the events surrounding the Algerian War.
Finally, remember that Google, despite its impressive performance, operates in “symbiosis” with the NSA, the U.S. National Security Agency. By becoming the world’s most efficient search engine, Google gains access to your personal data, learns your interests, and can ultimately manipulate you if you place absolute trust in it. Can we really trust the NSA? The current world is too serious for us to remain naive. Lying isn’t a modern phenomenon; history shows us that truths are revealed slowly over time.