5 great podcasts about art forgery

With its longer forms of storytelling, the podcast is sufficiently supple to investigate the labyrinthine qualities of art forgery, the peculiar celebrity of the art forger, and the modern obsession with authenticity.

As a student of the art forger, I’ve listened to dozens of podcasts about art forgery. Here are five of the best.

Forged

ABC and CBC

Forged explores the forging of Canadian Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau’s paintings, a scam that may be the world’s largest art fraud.

Over the six-part series, host Adrian Stimson brings an expert eye and a heavy heart to the narrative which travels from Canada to Australia, connecting forgeries of Morrisseau’s work to forgeries of Australian Indigenous artist Clifford Possum.

The true crime podcast genre does not perfectly align with art forgery, which is often conceived to be victimless, its moral harms abstract, and its notions of guilt incoherent.

However, Forged is replete with incidents of violence and intimidation – and includes an unsolved murder case. The podcast’s multi-episode form offers the bandwidth to clearly identify the guilty, the innocent, and what justice looks like for Indigenous artists whose work is ruthlessly ripped off.

Art Fraud

Cavalry Audio and iHeartRadio

Art Fraud investigates the US$60 million forgery scheme that destroyed the prestigious New York based Knoedler & Company arthouse.

This comprehensive eight-part series is narrated by Alec Baldwin, who brings his A-list voice and dramatic chops to the tale.

The series challenges the art forger’s description of their crimes as “victimless” by illustrating instances of the lives ruined by the fraud.

It gives the listener someone to genuinely sympathise with when Baldwin reveals his own experience of art fraud, a heartbreaking tale of pursuing his favourite painting for years then, when he found and purchased it, discovered he’d been sold a forgery.

Cautionary Tales – The Art Forger, the Nazi and ‘The Pope’

Pushkin Industries

English journalist Tim Harford also approaches a forgery scam from the victim’s perspective in The Art Forger, the Nazi and “The Pope”, an insightful episode of his Cautionary Tales series.

The art forger in question is Han Van Meegeren who notoriously duped the connoisseur Abraham Bredius – the “pope” of the title – into believing his forgeries were authentic works by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.

The podcast uses Bredius’s misjudgement to explore the psychology at work when something appears too good to be true.

The podcast exemplifies the challenge of portraying an unsympathetic victim by not addressing the true victim of Van Meegeren’s scheme: the Nazi to whom he sold his “Vermeer”, Hermann Goering.

What it Was Like – Interview With a Master Art Forger

Superreal

If Van Meegeren is sometimes considered the first modern art forger, convicted art forger Tony Tetro can be studied as an exemplar of the 21st century forger who emerges from prison a celebrity.

In his entertaining interview with Australian journalist Julian Morgans, Tetro recalls the high jinks and even higher life of art forgery in the 1980s, where the bling lifestyle funded by his forgery racket convinced police he was a drug dealer.

Tetro is charismatic and relatable and his insights into the forger’s mindset are fascinating. However you may wonder which other type of arch criminal whose misdemeanours ruined the lives and reputations of so many people they encountered is given such sympathetic airtime.

The Backstory of the Shroud of Turin

Guy R. Powell

By including The Backstory of the Shroud of Turin in this discussion I am not judging the authenticity of the artefact.

This podcast is included because the shroud is rarely examined using the theories that underpin our understanding of art forgery.

Like the art forgery, the controversy about the shroud’s provenance demonstrates not a clash between science and history, but the connections between authenticity and faith.

The authentic is like beauty: it exists only in the eye of the beholder.

Art theorist Thierry Lenain writes that the modern anxiousness that surrounds authenticity is based in the Medieval trade in religious relics.

The belief in these artefacts – despite lacking scientific or historical provenance – suggests a kind of faith. Similarly, perhaps any assertion of the Shroud’s authenticity is not founded in science or history, but also in faith.

Many artworks have an opaque provenance but a stunning aesthetic. Are they by the artists we attribute them to, have they been misattributed, or are they indeed fakes? Scrutinised through the lens of art forgery, the shroud embodies the idea of believing in an authenticity for which there is ultimately no proof.