An April 2025 story in The Art Newspaper contains the headline “Miami dealer charged for hawking fake Warhols.” I must admit that the phrase “fake Warhol” forced an audible laugh; the American Pop Art icon’s work is saturated in “fake,” within the term’s connotations of “inauthentic,” “imitation,” and “unreal.” Warhol “forged” so much of his work insofar as his critique of consumer culture essentially replicated existing images and objects, which he then called “his” art. Sure, he added colors to Marilyn and Mao, took the time to re-present a Brillo Box, and copied and warped a Campbell’s soup can. Yet in the end, so much of his “influential” artistic output merely tried to pass off things that someone else had already created as his own work. To put it more bluntly, as an artist, he faked it.
Is that too harsh a criticism? Am I not giving his artistic critiques their fair due? Maybe. Warhol did finally create some original works toward the end of his career. But even here, there is something fake about his art. His Rorschach Paintings (1984) imitated the psychological test of the same name, and his Camouflage Paintings (1986) extracted the existing patterns from US Army fatigues and other standard-issued camouflage, which he then enlarged and re-colored. His Oxidation Paintings (1978) are probably the most “original.” He and his assistants created these abstract works by urinating on a canvas layered with metallic paint, which ultimately appears to be simply an unsanitary twist on Pollock’s drip paintings and a dramaturgical homage to Duchamp’s Fountain urinal (1917).
Of course, the federal wire fraud (which is how forged art is generally prosecuted) and money laundering charges against the accused parties center more on the “hawking” aspect in the headline. According to the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of Florida, the esteemed Miami art dealer allegedly conspired “to sell forged art using fake and fraudulent invoices and authentications” and “fraudulently represented the art as original pieces created by renowned artist Andy Warhol.”
Yet the crime here is as much philosophical as it is financial (transactions totaled six million dollars). The buyers–Matthew, Judy, and Richard Perlman–thought they were purchasing “real” Warhols. However, if the aesthetic value of these counterfeit artworks was originally enough to make Warhol famous, which then justified such financial costs, then why would it matter if the Miami dealer’s artworks were not real “Warhols?” In other words, why would they care if, as I have said, the artworks at root are inauthentic (or modified) imitations of things someone else created? That is what made them so artistically unique and historically significant after all.
The quotes around the artist’s name tell the tale. When people purchase a historical—or even contemporary—artwork, they believe they are obtaining something valuable, which the artist’s name represents. In this case, the buyers were counting on each specific object to be the original artwork that the artist himself generated at a certain time and space. Put another way: the real thing they were purchasing was the slice of reality that the artwork’s time and space embodies. Copies or photos are merely replicas of the historical occurrence of a genuine, authentic, true, and actual work of art. And as such, they do not have the economic value of the original, regardless of whether a copy is just as aesthetically satisfying.
The acquisition of an original historical object is very important to many people. This is one reason why autographs are so interesting. A signed baseball, poster, record, or other item tells the world that its (original) owner was in the presence of the person whose life or actions made the object significant. It situates that item, and by association its possessor, in a certain time and space. It makes that object real. The same thing occurs with a signed and dated painting. Museums and collectors take great care to establish the provenance of an artwork. This documentation confirms that the artwork is “real.” It tells the owner and viewer that they are in the presence of the same object, in both time and space, as the artist at the moment of the artwork’s origination.
Aesthetic objects inherently seem to inhabit this spaciotemporal state of affairs. Women pay a great deal of money to carry real Birkin, Hermès, and Chanel merchandise. And a profitable knock-off industry surrounds these brands, since even owning a reasonably realistic fake version still has cultural value. The same thing applies to watches, sneakers, and high fashion. Here, the deception involved in convincing the casual onlooker that one owns a high-value original product may or may not constitute fraud in the criminal sense. In France, for instance, a person can be fined, prosecuted, and even arrested if caught by Customs carrying knock-off brands while entering the country, as they are considered “counterfeit.”
The artistic phenomenon of fakes and forgeries compels one to reflect upon the human need to possess what is real. The amount of money people spend on acquiring a slice of reality, and the criminal outrage that results when they are denied that reality through fraud and deception, suggests that perhaps we feel that we are in some sense surrounded by the unreal.
Western philosophy and cinema support this contention. Plato thought that our senses provide us with a world of imperfect imitations or replicas, and that the real or objective world lies in the purely intellectual realm of the perfect Forms that the things we perceive “participate” in. Kant held that our minds structure time and space so that we can experience what we call “reality.” But in actuality, he argued, we can never know a “thing-in-itself,” but only the phenomenal mental perception of it that we conceive as “real.” We see echoes of these ideas in the cinematic arts, as in The Matrix, which tells the provocative story that our “reality” is not real, but merely electrical signals externally fed into our brains.
So, the fraudulent activity of the Miami gallery owner raises many cultural and philosophical questions about what is real and why fake items present so much trouble to human sensibilities. It is also an example of where the “art world” and the so-called “real world” collide in the cause and effect of statutory regulation and its legal ramifications. The FBI’s Art Crime Team (ACT) and INTERPOL investigate thousands of forgery reports. But the irony surrounding the Warhol case helps highlight some of the interesting aesthetic and economic considerations involved in art, philosophy, and reality itself.
Robert Edward Gordon is Vice President of polyhymnia.local/
