The fake Daumier case
Marquis de Sallières, informed by our previous article, discovers that the Daumier he had purchased in 1986 was a fake!
November 8, 2002
In a previous article, we reported on the recent discovery of a fake at the Cairo Museum. At the time, we encouraged owners of artworks to perform some checks. This is what the Marquis de Sallières did regarding the Daumier he had bought for a rather substantial sum at an auction in 1986, which had decorated the salon of his private house in Versailles ever since.
It is hard to imagine, even here, that the experts did not notice the presence of a microcomputer on the table where three clerks are gathered. This time, it is a PC with a double 5-inch floppy disk drive. Naturally, we find the mark of Jean-Pierre Petit, apparently the author of many fakes at that time. Indeed, checks are currently being carried out in various French museums, this researcher having previously, by deceiving the vigilance of the guards, managed to place in a display case of a room at the Louvre Museum a "crouching Nubian slave" statuette, aged by himself, whose unusual presence was only noticed after several months. It is true that in museums, people are more used to thefts than to an uncontrolled enrichment of the cultural heritage.
This page is a hoax! It is me myself who, twenty-five years ago, created these "works", pastiches such as this false Egyptian fresco or this fake Picasso, all of which clearly feature a ... computer. A friend had a magazine called "Administrative Computing" and had asked me to make the covers. Thus, there was this whole series. I have not been able to find a fake Toulouse-Lautrec I made at that time, where a group of women of ill repute are counting their tricks on a ... Macintosh. I never imagined for a second that readers could take seriously pranks whose tricks were so obvious. Who could have imagined that museum directors and art experts could have failed to notice the obvious presence of a computer on an Egyptian bas-relief, a Daumier or a Picasso. But it turns out that some readers were taken in, in good faith.
When I placed on my website a file about the implementation of a test designed to detect stupidity, due to Wilfried Wurmstein and Laetitia Paparrazi, some readers rushed to Google, a reflex that has now become standard, to find traces of these two researchers in what internet users today consider a real encyclopedia.
There is a lesson to be learned from these experiences, where I myself was the first to be surprised. I have written many times "learn to think for yourself, otherwise others will do it for you." These harmless pranks remind us how much information can be manipulated. Some 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 try to do myself. What may be the most interesting about this information dissemination approach on a website is its interactive nature. Readers constantly write to me "what you say is incorrect, Untel never was president of a Franco-Israeli association... things did not happen that way," etc. And I take this into account. Information that, on the Internet, can remain accessible without time limits, becomes dynamic, subject to daily revision, and I am grateful to my readers for that. It is this interactivity that has allowed me to venture into such complex topics as the Israeli-Palestinian issue or, as I am doing now, a reminder of the events of the Algerian War.
Finally, know that Google, so surprisingly efficient, is a creation of the NSA, the American National Science Administration. By becoming immediately the most efficient search engine on the planet, Google enters your home, identifies your interests, locates you, and in the end can manipulate you when you give it... absolute trust. Do you think one can place blind trust... in the NSA? The current world is living through too serious times for us to keep our naivety. Lying is not an invention of our contemporary world. Contemporary history is there to remind us, which reveals its truths so slowly.