Art fakery is a peculiar beast. Sometimes driven by pure greed. Sometimes it's driven by misplaced artistic admiration -- these thieves don't steal for profit, but because they covet art objects for their personal enjoyment.

How long has this been going on?
The following tidbits lead us to believe that art crime is one of the older professions.

Ancient Romans adored ancient Greek art, and workshops in the imperial city were cranking out chariot-loads of reproductions. Some of this stuff was good. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, writes that "Today it's almost impossible to tell what's genuinely ancient Greek and what's Roman fakery." (See his engaging wrap-up of fraud through the ages in "False Impressions..." in the bibliography.)

In a specialty called document forgery, Mark Hofmann, a rare-documents dealer, made the Mormon Church squirm in the 1980s by threatening to expose damaging documents he'd "uncovered." The case ended in 1987, when Hofmann was convicted of forgery and two murders committed to conceal his crimes (see "Salamander:..." in the bibliography).

Shall we steal?
Ancient artifacts have been a magnet for forgers. And archeological sites have been a magnet for looters.

Perhaps the largest art rip-offs in history occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when Nazi Germany, and then the Soviet Union, systematically plundered art from their conquered lands. Much of this art remains stolen.

On a slightly smaller scale, the 1990 theft of 13 paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston, by thieves dressed as police officers, remains unsolved. In 1998, two convicts claimed they could produce the booty, valued at $200 million. But they were apparently just con men trying to get themselves sprung from prison.

For an illuminating look at the long history of art forgery, see "Fake?... " in the bibliography.

So how much stolen or bogus art is really out there?

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