Week 11: The market for authenticity

Why fakes matter economically as well as aesthetically — insurance, provenance markets, and what the demand for authenticity actually prices.

5 October 2027

Everything the semester has covered so far treats authenticity as a question of fact — is this the real one. Markets treat it as a question of price, and the gap between the two is where most of the real money in forgery actually sits: an attributed work is worth a multiple of an identical, unattributed one, which means the incentive to forge attribution (not just the object) is enormous, and largely legal until someone can prove otherwise. Insurance, auction-house due diligence and the entire authentication-services industry exist to price a claim that’s much harder to verify than most financial claims, which is exactly why the final project asks for a provenance file convincing enough to move a price, not just convincing enough to fool an eye.

Outline#

• why attribution changes price independently of the object
• authentication as a service industry: what auction houses and insurers actually pay for
• the perverse incentive: forging paperwork is cheaper and safer than forging objects
• final project, “Provenance,” work time begins in this week’s studio