The $100 Canadian bills are identical. You look them over. Same brownish color, same blasé face staring from the centre of the bill. The Royal Ontario Museum tells you that one’s a counterfeit, and the other one’s real, so you look a little closer. And closer. And if your eyes are tearing up, and things are getting a little fuzzy, and you’re getting a little anxious in this cold museum and you haven’t had your morning coffee yet, then the ROM’s new exhibit has done its job: educating you as a consumer, and providing insight into the mind-bogglingly detail-oriented job of museum curators. Apparently, it’s not all about sending out Indiana Jones to steal artifacts from the Middle East from underneath the noses of Hitler’s combat-trained archaeological diggers.
The ROM’s new exhibit is really a showcase of mistakes and relatively meaningless objects. Fakes & Forgeries: Yesterday and Today (which opened January 9) displays 11 cases of missteps—false artifacts purchased by the museum, as well as counterfeit software, money, designer clothes, and even fake male-enhancing drugs. The exhibit is “interactive” in the sense that the viewer has the opportunity to “play detective” and discern between forgeries and real artifacts.
For curators, it would seem that exhibiting these kinds of professional mistakes would be akin to keeping an Xtube channel devoted to seeing what your lamentable one-night stands really look like in the morning. But exhibit curator Paul Denis insists that the idea came from past collections at the ROM, evolving into an exhibition considering the role of counterfeits in our culture and the rising urgency of recognizing fakes. According to Denis, the perpetuation of counterfeits has been on the rise in recent years, perhaps given the availability of new technologies and techniques. Supposedly 500-million-year-old fossils are shown to be fake alongside imitation Prada bags.
There’s an apparent Greek sculpture which was billed as being from the Middle Bronze Age and had sat in the ROM for nearly 70 years before a scholar discovered that it had actually been manufactured in the 19th century. Denis explains that the demand for Greek artifacts escalated around 1870, and rabid demand mixed with low supply created a serious market for fakes. In this way, the study of forgeries is directly related to consumer activity, making it all the more appropriate that viewers take a closer look at these products. Observing two flecked-stone statues of a woman, the details that differentiate the real from the fake seem miniscule. The effect, though, is pointing out the thin line between fact and fiction.
While the concept of the exhibit suggests that perhaps the ROM had to clear out some storage space and is subscribing to a gung-ho “if you can’t fix it, feature it” attitude, the exhibition manages to make a case for questioning authenticity. Forty items from the collection came from the ROM itself—clearly, just because something is in a museum, it isn’t necessarily what the plate says it is.
Fakes and Forgeries runs at the Royal Ontario Museum through April 4. For more information, visit rom.on.ca.
