Opinion: In Defence of Fakes

The simplest way to create a great work of art is to copy one.

Copies, fakes, dupes, replicas, bootlegs, pastiches, forgeries, facsimiles — these have been the engines of culture since long before the age of mechanical reproduction. Rubens copied Titian; Mazo copied Velázquez; Cézanne copied dozens of artists including Frillié. Michelangelo learned about art by copying Giotto, Masaccio and others. Those reproductions are now considered some of the greatest drawings of all time and are themselves frequently reproduced.

“Fake it till you make it” isn’t a dishonest life hack. It’s a tried-and-true path to mastery. Even the works of forgers, who engage in deliberate deception, can become collectible and celebrated in their own right. British painter Tom Keating, for example, successfully sold hundreds of pieces at auction under his own name, after being outed as a forger. One of his J.M.W. Turner pastiches sold for £27,500 in 1989 (about $45,000, or $120,000 today), a few years after his death.

As we transition from a century dominated by the US to one dominated by China, the world will have to start grappling with its attitude toward copies and fakes, which are far more accepted there than they are in the West. Might the Asian attitude be the more enlightened one?

To copy is to comprehend: The South Korean philosopher Byung-chul Han writes in his 2017 book “Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese” that “there is no essential difference between forgers and connoisseurs.” The major drivers of dupe culture indeed often know more about artisanal details than most shoppers at luxury boutiques.

Copies also ratify greatness. Walk down Manhattan’s Canal Street, and you’ll find countless fake bags and watches bearing the marks of luxury — Chanel, Goyard, Audemars Piguet, Rolex. Dupes can elevate these brands into the pantheon of desirability. Many companies complain about counterfeits and consider a sold fake to be a lost sale, but research by Italian professors of business and marketing has shown luxury knockoffs can increase consumers’ willingness to pay for well-known original brands. Jane Birkin, whose very genuine Hermès Birkin bag sold for $10 million last year, said in 2011 that “if people want to go for the real thing, fine. If they go for copies, that’s fine too. I really don’t think it matters.”

Besides, if they really thought their business was being eviscerated by dupes, the big luxury houses would spend more on countering them. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, the largest and perhaps the world’s most duped luxury-goods maker, spent $45 million on anti-counterfeiting efforts in 2024, or 0.4 percent of the $11 billion it spent on advertising.

When branded Labubus get remixed into beloved Lafufus, or even a concrete Labubrut, everybody wins. The Mona Lisa is a painting so legendary it single-handedly attracts millions of visitors a year and will soon have its own dedicated gallery at the Louvre. It gained its status entirely through the power of reproduction — first in the media frenzy following its theft in 1911, then, thanks to modern technology, through endless reproduction in the postwar period. Today’s social media images of the artwork have no inherent value, but in aggregate they’ve conferred billions of dollars in value on the original itself.

Many copies, on the other hand, do have value. Editioned works of art — multiple identical versions of the same piece, often signed and numbered — have been crucial in creating the supply needed to meet demand. Some artists encourage others to copy their work: Contemporary artist Cory Arcangel, for instance, gives his gradient works titles that allow anyone with access to Photoshop to re-create them. Sol LeWitt in the 1960s gave clear instructions on how to re-create his works, allowing artists such as Eric Doeringer to do exactly that 50 years later.

Artists even copy their own unique works, as Ross Bleckner famously did in 2010, in a painting he made for Alec Baldwin (a lawsuit followed). Another great artist, Sturtevant, whose paintings from the early 1970s have sold for as much as $5 million at auction, created only copies, as commentary on how power and value are manufactured in the art world.

It can be difficult to grasp the way in which copying is good and necessary because of how it’s become so stigmatized and even criminalised, at least in the West. In our culture, appropriation without attribution is seen as a cardinal sin.

Much of the modern economy is built on copyright — the convention being that copying a creative work is illegal unless expressly authorised. But copyright has been extended far beyond the intent of the Founding Fathers, in a series of moves that have benefited large corporations at the expense of the very creators the laws were designed to help. “It is illegal today for people to create the way Walt Disney was allowed to create,” says Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, an expert on the subject.

Originality has been elevated to the greatest of critical virtues, while forgery is punished harshly. Wine forger Rudy Kurniawan, for instance, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and later deported to Indonesia after defrauding collectors, who, unlike buyers of fake handbags, expected the real thing — in this case, Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Even if Kurniawan deserved his punishment, the bottles themselves were interesting and important copies. In the wake of the sentencing, a lot of people would have loved to taste the great forger’s illegitimate wines, perhaps side by side with the originals — which might have made it easier for experts to identify fakes in the future. But those bottles, with both reused and counterfeit labels like Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, ended up being destroyed en masse in 2015.

In China, copying can be a creative act, celebrated as shanzhai. “The Chinese idea of the original is determined not by a unique act of creation, but by unending process, not by definitive identity but by constant change,” writes Han. It’s a form of creativity that’s going to become increasingly important in this Chinese century, he writes, and that “will elude the West if the West sees it only as deception, plagiarism, and the infringement of intellectual property.”

A plagiarised work, inspired by one piece, can in turn inspire the next; the infraction is one of attribution and who should get the credit. In cultures, including China’s, that are less prone to celebrating individual genius, that’s not nearly as important as it is in the US.

Han gives the example of the terra-cotta warriors, objects that were always mass-produced, even 2,000 years ago. When they were excavated, a replica workshop was set up on the excavation site. “The Chinese were trying to restart production,” Han says, “that from the beginning was not creation but already reproduction.” When Western museums found out in 2007 that they were exhibiting replicas, they refunded tickets. Yet, writes Han, “the Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals.” An exact reproduction, or fuzhipin, is “of equal value to the original” and “has absolutely no negative connotations.”

The contemporary West, with a history of thought that emphasises originality over everything else, struggles with these ideas. This is the main reason the venerable Ise shrine in Japan, which is rebuilt every 20 years, will never achieve World Heritage status from Paris-based Unesco. Many cultures, including all oral traditions, look to continual reproduction, rather than conservation or restoration, as the go-to preservation technique. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Renaissance sculptors including Bernini would create new heads or noses or arms to complete parts that had fallen off Roman copies of Greek originals. To denigrate such heritage with mild pejoratives such as “facsimile” is to miss the most important part of what’s going on. To renew, to restore, to reinvent, to create more of something greatly admired: All of these things are on a spectrum.

Recall the Book of Genesis, which tells us the most important creative act of all time was also an act of copying (“God created man in his own image”). It’s silly to sneer at copies, which are, most of the time, an abundance-coded attempt to increase supply to meet demand. Why insist on making something new when people already know what they want?

“The word ‘copy’ comes from the Latin copia, which is the root of ‘cornucopia.’ It’s about plenty and multitudes and having more stuff out there,” says Doeringer, the artist. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

By Felix Salmon