rivista on-line del Seminario Permanente di Estetica

anno IX, numero 2

Aesthetics of Fake
An Overview
Andrea Mecacci

The definition of an «aesthetics of fake», its configuration and problematization, covers

the history of aesthetics with many ambiguities. The word «fake» and its several
synonyms (copy, forgery, simulacrum) touch on a number of ontological and mimetic
issues that since Plato have led directly to contemporary debates. In the present survey
we will try to outline a «grammar of fake» through three points: a) the issue of pseudos
in Plato and its impact on contemporaneity; b) the notion of hyperreality as absolute
fake; c) the dimension of operative fake, grasped in its postmodern enucleation.

1. A grammar of pseudos

The problem of fake emerges forcefully in Plato’s aesthetics. The complexity of the
Platonic discussion of fake is known and depends on the interconnection of different
aspects that cannot be isolated: the true, the good, and obviously, the mimetic (Halliwell
[2002]). The issue of fake is not only at the centre of Platonic mimesis, but is also the
most visible and recognisable translation of that space of untruth involving the human
being in all manifestations of logos. In the Sophist and the Republic Plato worked out
subtle classifications to give an account of this illusory space that gives rise to an actual
«technique of deception» (Soph. 264d6). At least three types of fake emerge. They are
not always distinguishable from each other, but apparently produce three different
experiences: the eikon (copy), the eidolon (image), and the phantasma (appearance).
These experiences take shape in relation to their degree of difference with the truth
and/or with the original model they reproduce. So the eikon is a perfect copy of an
object, whereas the phantasma is an illusory appearance that does not respect the real
proportions of the object.
Beyond these distinctions, however, Plato maintains the belief that the fake is, at a

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first stage, the most elementary moment, and is actually the result of an erroneous
equation, that is the equivalent of phantasia and aisthesis, appearance and sensation
(Theaet. 153c3). The matching between what appears and the sensation mediating this
appearance not only creates a false perception, a deception of senses, but it is also the
first degree of a possible technique of deception. In the Republic Plato indicates this
perceptual fake as the first moment, obviously fallacious, of the cognitive process («the
theory of the line»). The eikasia, this perceptual dizziness that produces false
appearances, not only indicates the ambiguous realm of opaque images (dreams,
hallucinations, shadows), but also gives a definitive negative meaning to the image with
respect to knowledge and truth: «Understood thus in its broad sense, the image not
only comes to be integrated into the domain of doxa in respect of that which makes it
the opposite of episteme, but it also seems to be introduced into the heart of doxa,
whose boundaries and whose field of application it reveals at one and the same time»
(Vernant [1979]: 179).
The conflict between appearance and reality, triggered by the mimetic process, leads
not only to the awareness that one can have a distorted reproduction of reality, beyond
any reproduced likeness, but also to a scenario in which the fake is assumed to be a
possible reading of reality as a whole – overall, as Plato states in the allegory of the cave, a
false idea of the world. What remains of Plato’s condemnation of fake is obviously a vision
(moralistic according to some authors) that considers the pseudos as a project of the
global falsification of reality, a falsification that has to do not so much with the production
of objects, as with the production of fluctuant and humoral opinions, subject to the
constant fascination of the sensible world. This shift shows the fake as a place revealing
where a deeper question can be put. The fake reveals the distinction between being and
appearing in all its tangibility, the location of the image within the various degrees of
reality and its coincidence with the universe of doxa (Vernant [1979]: 181-184). From a
phenomenology of fake, one proceeds not only to an ontology of truth, but also of its
contrary as shown by the example of three beds in book X of Republic (597a-598b) the
ideal form (the eidos of bed, the «bedness») to its material objectivity (the multiplicity of
beds made by the carpenter) and finally to the imitative reproduction of the second level
by creating an additional stage that is easily identified with the domain of the fake. Where
there is falsehood, there is the possibility of an art of deception, the mimesis of fake: «And
if there’s falsity then there’s deception. And if there’s deception then necessarily the
world will be full of copies, likenesses, and appearances» (Soph. 260c6-9).
The Platonic dialectic of the original and the copy has defined, especially in the

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context of the reflection on artwork, a distinction between what is authentic and what is
not. The negative fetish of the inauthentic is one of the most enduring legacies of
Platonic aesthetics. It is a devaluation that was initially aesthetic and then became a
moral condemnation: the inauthentic as a territory of seduction and guilt as shown, just
to give two examples, by the modernist attacks on kitsch or the vexed suspicion toward
cosmetic surgery. Platonic admonitions against the pseudos (ontological, moral, and
mimetic) pour into what remains one of the most obsessive attempts to work out a
grammar of counterfeit art: the 1897 essay What is Art? by Tolstoy. The specificity of
Tolstoy’s text, a sort of ante litteram x-ray analysis of kitsch, is that what is analysed and
considered as a product of counterfeiting (poddelka) is not a series of minor works,
immediately recognisable as artistic surrogates if not as consumer products, but the
great works of nineteenth-century modernity, the first being Wagner's
Gesamtkunstwerk. Reading these pages, Platonic legacy appears obvious at least on a
censorious level (Murdoch [1977]: 16-17). It is the modern art as a whole to define it as
an immense simulacrum of an authentic idea of folk art, of an ethical communication
system according to the definition of Tolstoy: «We cannot fail to observe that art is one
of the means of intercourse between man and man» (Tolstoy [1897]: 47).
The fake (counterfeit in Tolstoy’s lexicon) is just what contradicts this request. Unlike
in Plato’s work, the counterfeit is not so much a perceptual error or an illusory
appearance, as a strategy to create only an aesthetic pleasure, an act of enjoyment (and
indeed Plato might agree on this point). To realise this purpose the poddelka shows
itself through four characteristics: borrowing, imitating, striking effects, and interesting
(Tolstoy [1897]: 106). The first two are related to the object, the second two to the
subject. The borrowing (zaimstvovanie) is the use of clichés, the recycling of familiar
images and content, whereas the imitating (podrazhatel’nost) is the tendency to fill in
the work with details, descriptions, in this way trying to make a kind of cast of reality. In
turn, the striking effects (porazitel’nost) represent the ways in which the subject’s
senses are solicited in her/his fruition (violence and sex scenes), whereas the interesting
(zanimatel’nost) is both a mere intellectual dimension, for example analysing the plot
complexity or the author’s technical competence, and at the same time a distracted
fruition, a mere entertainment.
Plato and Tolstoy consider the fake and the relative grammars as a mimetic
dimension that repudiates an ontological (Plato) and artistic (Tolstoy) authenticity and
they arrive at an ethical characterisation of the aesthetics of pseudos. In modernity this
interweaving will be maintained only in the criticism of kitsch, while the issue of fake will

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mutate into another inquiry: the possibility of identifying criteria to recognise the
authentic or the identity of artwork, and its definition.
For Goodman and Danto, the fake (the inauthentic) is the key to exploring a possible
definition of what a work is compared with an artefact (identical to the artwork), or to
distinguishing between two perceptually identical works/objects. Although they are
conducted with obvious and not irrelevant distinctions, Goodman’s and Danto’s theses
find their start with the theory of indiscernibles, where the indiscernibility is always
perceptual, retinal. The known examples (a picture and a perfect copy of it, Warhol's
Brillo Box and that one sold in a supermarket), the «perfect fake» according to
Goodman’s terminology, lead back the fake to a matter of hypermimetism where what
will eventually appear as the relevant crux is the same aesthetic signification of
authenticity. The impossibility of distinguishing between the original and its double is
overcome not without difficulty by a view that moves the perceptual experience of non-
recognition to a cultural one of recognition. «Although I see no difference now between
the two pictures in question, I may learn to see a difference between them. I cannot
determine now by merely looking at them, or in any other way, that I shall be able to
learn. But the information that they are very different, that the one is the original and
the other the forgery, argues against any inference to the conclusion that I shall not be
able to learn» (Goodman [1976]: 103-104). This perspective, based on the exercise and
development of capacities of discernment (Goodman [1976]: 111-112), a view that is
not so far from what Hume stated in his Of the Standard of Taste, does not exhaust the
problem of fake. Goodman detects the dimension of what cannot be faked in the
distinction between autographic and allographic works. So Goodman may work, not as
Plato, with respect to levels or degrees of ontological falsification, but may detect the
relevance or dimension of the signification, the fake itself in the aesthetic experience.
«Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the distinction between
original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact
duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine. If a work of art is autographic, we
may also call that art autographic. Thus painting is autographic, music nonautographic,
or allographic» (Goodman [1976]: 113). Danto, discussing Goodman’s thesis on the fake
(Danto [1981]: 41-44), insists on his idea of the overcoming of the aesthetic for the
definition of an artwork which he applied to the fake too. The fake is not a «perceptual
concept» and the indiscernibility is somehow his definitive proof or at least makes it
apparent. The distinction between fake and copy cannot be stated through perceptual
predicates, but the essence of fake has to be searched for elsewhere: «Its being a

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forgery, one would think, has something to do with its history, with the way in which it
arrived in the world. And to call something an art work is at least to deny that sort of
history to it – objects do not wear their histories on their surfaces» (Danto [1981]: 44).
The fake of art, the central example Eco develops in the chapter “Fakes and
Forgeries” in his The Limits of Interpretation (1990), is a pretext to test the criteria for
acknowledging authenticity. The semiotic method, namely the conception of fake as a
sign, unfolds in four criteria of which Eco cannot but emphasise their weakness. It is
worth noting that Eco shifts the analysis of fake from perceptual criteria (what
represents the starting point in Goodman and Danto) to criteria of historical purport,
and even to criteria of social convention. The four tests listed by Eco – 1) proofs through
material support; 2) through linear text manifestation; 3) content; 4) external evidences
or referents (Eco [1990]: 193-197) – show a weakness which can only be amended by a
social agreement, a cultural sharing. The theoretical weakness of criteria for authenticity
gives way to a pragmatic principle: «Even though no single criterion is one-hundred-
percent satisfactory, we usually rely on reasonable conjectures on the grounds of some
balanced evaluation. Thus we cast in doubt the socially accepted authenticity of an
object only when some contrary evidence comes to trouble our established beliefs.
Otherwise, one should test the Mona Lisa every time one goes to Louvre, since without
such an authenticity test there will be no proof that the Mona Lisa seen today is
indiscernibly identical with the one seen last week» (Eco [1990]: 201).
The ontological impasse of fake leads to new scenarios. The contemporary
aestheticisation seems to modify the experience of fake. In daily practice the
discernment of authentic, the final outcome of the aesthetic taste, is replaced by artistic
fetishism. It is a condition that leads directly to what Eco and Baudrillard define as
hyperreality. So we see the uncontrolled phenomenon of fake aesthetic, where the
ontological and mimetic problem has now mutated into a dimension, so to speak, for
tourists. Certainly the Parthenon in Athens is «historically» better than its 1897 replica in
Nashville, a reproduction of the Parthenon in every detail, showing it to us as it should
appear in its original appearance (Eco [1990]: 184-185, 201). In this difference we still
feel the dimension of the fake: tourists who in Florence fetishistically admire outside
Palazzo Vecchio the copy of Michelangelo's David (without knowing that the original is
preserved elsewhere) (Eco [1990]: 183), or the Getty Museum in Malibu where «original
statues and paintings are inserted in very well reproduced “original” environments, and
many visitors are uninterested in knowing which are the originals and which the copies»
(Eco [1990]: 185).

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2. Hyperreality and absolute fake

In the account of his journey into the American make-believe in the mid-1970s, Eco
notices a decisive dialectic: the relationship between the real thing and the absolute
fake. No longer platonically opposed in an ontological conflict, these poles now define a
continuous exercise of the desire in a culture increasingly tied to the image. The desire
for authenticity can only be expressed in the logic of absolute fake. Everything is
duplicated, particularly the past that undergoes a pervasive iconic cannibalisation: «The
“completely real” becomes identified with the “completely fake”» (Eco [1977]: 7). This
involves a shift in the role played by the mimetic. Now Plato’s targets, activated by the
mimesis (illusion, double, iconic seduction), become a cultural strategy: the fake parts
from the mimetic process, that process which considers itself still tied in a subordinate
way to an original model, becomes the sign of itself, creates a new dimension of reality,
the hyperreality. Even the aesthetic pleasure aroused by the hyperreal has its own inner
logic. The fake is not so much the reaching of a technical perfection as the theorising for
which, in front of this absolute iconism, the real will always be inferior and therefore less
pleasant and desirable: the falsification (absolute) turns into a criterion of aesthetic
pleasure. And this marks, as we shall see, the shift from the urban paradigm in Las Vegas
to the one of Disneyland (Eco [1977]: 39-48).
In parallel with Eco, Baudrillard has analysed these processes of derealisation by
interpreting contemporaneity as an evident agony of the real and rational that is the
modern, and as an input into an era of simulation: to the time of production follows the
time of simulation, as to the logic of sense follows the logic of fascination (or seduction).
The simulation is the dimension that exceeds or denies the ideology of representation,
namely the ideology of a still hierarchical relationship between reality and image that
has as its goal the attestation of the truth. It is around this belief that the whole
philosophy of Simulacra and simulations focuses; it is the test by which Baudrillard in
1981 gives definitively his theory of the hyperreal fake: «It is no longer a question of
imitation, nor duplications, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of
the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its
operational double» (Baudrillard [1981]: 2).
Baudrillard has repeatedly insisted on the articulation of fake indicating three phases
(Baudrillard [1976]: 50). The first phase, the counterfeit, dominates the classic period of
modernity, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. It is the impulse toward
artifice, the negation of the natural. The first modernity engages in a gigantic enterprise of

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imitation of nature before moving to its own production. This is the second stage, one that
coincides with the Industrial Revolution: the imitation of nature is followed by the
technological production. The simulacrum of the natural is overcome by the introduction
of the replicable model, the seriality. The fake turns into industrial code and the centrality
of the authentic and unique falls definitely, although it re-emerges as a fetishistic
condition. The third stage is the simulation: medium after medium, the real accomplishes
itself. The industrial code turns to the communication code. The art itself takes this
principle of simulation that removes every other competitive principle, be it reality or
pleasure. In this radical perspective the question so often formulated by Danto around
Warhol's Brillo Boxes – «Given two objects that look exactly alike, how it is possible for
one of them to be a work of art and the other one just an ordinary object?» (Danto [2009]:
62) – seems almost an untimely academic exercise. So modernity has produced in its
course three types of simulacra: a) the natural or mimetic simulacrum based on image and
counterfeiting that is the simulacrum condemned by Plato; b) the industrial simulacrum
that is the expression of the technologisation of reality simulacrum, finding in Benjamin
and McLuhan its decisive interpreters; and c) the simulacrum of simulation that defines
the contemporary hyperreality. Where there was reality there is now simulation; where
there were objects constituting reality, now there are simulacra.
The latent Platonism of Baudrillard emerges clearly with a further classification of the
image, this time in four parts. To the three Platonic dimensions of falsification (eikon,
eidolon, phantasma) Baudrillard responds with an increasing absence of image
references with respect to the real, with the path from representation leading to
simulation: image «is the reflection of a profound reality; it marks and denatures a
profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any
reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum» (Baudrillard [1981]: 6).
The paradigmatic expression of this historical condition is Disneyland which Baudrillard,
like Eco, does not hesitate to define as the exemplary model of all simulacra. Beyond every
pleasure principle (the ideology of amusement and cultural industry embodied by
Disneyland), beyond every reality principle (the evolution of postmodern cities from Los
Angeles to Disneyland via Las Vegas), Disneyland exhibits the final dimension where the
aesthetics of fake overturn every Platonic principle in a specular way (and so it reveals
itself as deeply Platonic). Disneyland exhibits hyperreality to its most primordial degree; it
is the step that will activate – just to give two examples – the sinister dystopias of a reality
simulated by machines and their dictatorship (Matrix), and a further variant of the myth of
the cave, the world as a reality show (The Truman Show). «It is no longer a question of a

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false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no
longer, and thus of saving the reality principle. The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true
nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in
the opposite camp» (Baudrillard [1981]: 12-13).

3.The operative fake

Disneyland is, however, at the same time, the end and the beginning of a path: it marks
a border between reality and hyperreality. It records the historical moment when the
fake, as suggested by Eco, becomes an absolute fake and in this process its
confrontation with the authentic loses all its meaning. In postmodern hyperreality the
fake is realised as an operational dimension, a concrete dimension of the everyday. So
we do not have to consider Disneyland (nobody lives at Disneyland), but those cities
where the fake is still in conflict with the idea of an original model. If we admit that
contemporaneity has experienced three great processes of aestheticism – pop (from the
mid-1950s to early 1970s), postmodernism (from the 1970s to the late 1980s), and
diffuse aesthetics (1990s to present) – then you will need to focus on the later stage in
which the most varied practices fall into an immense strategy of falsification and
hybridisation: kitsch, aesthetics of fake, cult of quotations, cult of appearance, and
fiction. If Los Angeles is the city that still belongs to a definite pop culture (Banham
[1971]) and Disneyland to a third phase of early hyperreality, Las Vegas exhibits that
central moment when the hyperreal did not yet emancipate itself from the logic of
falsification: it has not yet arrived at the absolute.
The Austrian architect Hans Hollein proposed a first analysis of architectural fiction,
where the image (the simulated simulacrum) is more central than the reality that may
be experienced (the building): «A building can become entirely information – its
message might be experienced through informational media (press, TV, etc.). in fact it is
almost no importance whether, for example, the Acropolis or the Pyramids exist in
physical reality, as most people are aware of them through other media anyway and not
through an experience of their own. Indeed, their importance – the role they play – is
based on this effect of information. Thus a building might be simulated only» (Hollein
[1968]: 462). Recovering Benjamin's reflections discussed in The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction, Hollein focuses on the aesthetic experience of the role of
the image in the media universe, no longer a substitute for the original, but the unique
usable dimension: the exhibition value is the new real.
It is in the way this exhibition’s value is narrated that postmodernity sharpens its

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mimetic strategies. The processes of falsification are poured out in a cultural

hermeneutics which is translated into a «replication of the permanent past» (McHale
[1969]: 104), like the Parthenon in Nashville had already anticipated. However, the
replication logic still admitted a relationship with the past model, whereas in
postmodernism, all that declines as shown by the toponymy of some American cities
that do not even require the adjective new to recognise their identity. If in fact the
addition of new was changed to old, by reactivating the hierarchy of the European
model and the American copy (Orleans and New Orleans), now this dynamic would be
removed. The copy is the archetype of the self: Naples (Florida), Rome (Georgia), Venice
(Florida or a neighborhood of Los Angeles), Palermo (California), Milan (Michigan).
Another example, in which the postmodern already appears as hyperreal, is the case of
the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Here you can see in action the operative fake in the
falsifying overlapping of signified and signifier when a dimension of the past, ancient
Egypt, is replicated. The signifier (the word «Luxor») does not indicate the reproduction
of the Luxor Temple but has another meaning, the sphinx and the Khafre pyramid at
Giza, although the size of the hotel refers not to the Khafre pyramid, the second largest
after that of Cheops, but to the pyramid of Menkaure, the third and smallest at the site.
The operative fake, the «semantic eclecticism» (Jencks [2011]: 56), is still an exercise
of accumulation of cultural referents, a conscious exercise of quotations, and is the last
stage before the hyperreal. If today Piazza d’Italia (1976-1979) by Charles Moore in New
Orleans has become a symbol of postmodern architecture, at the same time it is also an
implicit model (more or less conscious) of every Italian outlet store. The revival of the
old as a solution to contemporary needs can also take the form of the ironic provocation
that the fake often brings deliberately with itself, as evidence, one of the most mocking
moments of the postmodern Bible scoffers, Learning Las Vegas, where the styles
(hypothetical or real?) of the Nevada city are listed: «Miami Moroccan, International Jet
Set Style; Arte Moderne Hollywood Orgasmic, Organic Behind; Yamasaki Bernini cum
Roman Orgiastic; Niemeyer Moorish; Moorish Tudor (Arabian Knights); Bauhaus
Hawaian» (Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour [1977]: 80).
The history of Las Vegas, in the years that separate it from the year of the first
publication of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), shows the passage from a city modulated
according to an iconographic logic (the signs on the Strip) to a city identified with its own
scene-design strength (as documented by the Luxor Hotel). This dramatisation of urban
space, its hyperreal Disneylandisation, leads to the extreme logic that postmodernism
had developed in its relationship with modernist aesthetics – a game of mirrors that

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seemed to repeat what had established Platonic mimesis, the conflict between true and
false. The German historian of architecture Heinrich Klotz at the conclusion of his The
History of Postmodern Architecture has identified ten oppositions between the modern
and the postmodern (Klotz [1984]: 421) and one might add that just in the space
opening from this dialectic that fake finds its operativity. The ten characteristics
proposed by Klotz revolve around a basic bipolarity: the postmodern has placed at its
centre a fictional representation marginalising the totem of modernist planning, the
function. In other words, it replaced the function of truth, the realisation itself of techne,
with the tale of illusion, the extemporaneous work of the imagination. It dismissed the
primacy of technological utopianism and replaced it with a multiplicity of meanings. This
grammar resumes wholly the vocabulary of fake (fiction, illusion, allusion) and
transforms the fiction (the fake) into the new function (the truth), a perfect exchange of
values that leads directly to Disneyland.
In conclusion, all that remains is to rely on three suggestions. It is possible to accept the
fake as a viable and unproblematic aesthetics – and indeed it is so – but it is not possible
to ignore the sinister presage of a humanity that resolves in a replication of itself, has its
own image in its specular simulacrum, the «more human than human», the motto of
Tyrell Corporation, the company that produces replicants in Blade Runner. It is not
possible either to pretend to have forgotten a premonitory piece of Burgess’s A Clockwork
Orange, reported by Kubrick’s film version without failure: «It’s funny how the colors of
the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen» (Burgess [1962]:
115). The last suggestion, less depressive and more conciliatory, is a phrase of Morris
Lapidus, the architect precursor of postmodernism to whom we owe, among others, the
Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where the initial scene of the film Goldfinger was filmed.
The sentence, expressed by Lapidus in “Progressive Architecture” in September 1970,
could be cited in Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour [1977]: 80):
«People are looking for illusions; they don’t want the world’s realities. And, I asked, where
do I find this world of illusions? Where are their tastes formulated? Do they study it in
school? Do they go to the museums? Do they travel in Europe? Only place – the movies.
They go to the movies. The hell with everything else». Today, it would be enough to
replace only the monitor type in this sentence and the result would not change.

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