Jonathon Keats > Quotes

“The art of our time is anxious. Gone are the reassurances of religion and reason and progress. The modern world is alienating, and almost every serious modern artist addresses our precarious position, drawing our attention to the inhumanity of the world we’ve built. The only solace is our cosmic insignificance.”
― Jonathon Keats, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age

“Art forgery also provokes anxiety. Because art is a rare refuge from the mass-produced inauthenticity of the industrialized world, we are hypersensitive to any threat to the authenticity of art.”
― Jonathon Keats, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age

“Still more beautiful were the intrigues of young Michelangelo. One day while still apprenticed to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, he was lent an old master drawing of a head to copy. He rendered it so precisely that, in the words of his first biographer, Ascanio Condivi, “when he returned the copy to the owner in place of the original, at first the owner did not detect the deception, but discovered it only when the boy was telling a friend of his and laughing about it.”
― Jonathon Keats, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age

“art forgeries achieve what legitimate art accomplishes when legitimate art is most effective, provoking us to ask agitating questions about ourselves and our world.”
― Jonathon Keats, Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age