The charm of the forger

Abstract

Despite the confusing yet attractive name of “false documentary” to describe the cinematographic modality with which Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1974) inaugurated an era, his unstoppable recurrence to such distinctive and diverse concepts such as false, falsification, fraud, magic and even truth and lies (both added to the title of the French and Spanish version of the documentary) are not central to this work. Neither is the documentary as discourse, or other important notions. What is at the center of this article is one of the topics Welles addresses in his last work: falsification and the falsifier. The latter will be analyzed in relation to the famous person with whom he confronts – the artist, with a double object. In the first place, the purpose is to examine the work in Visual Arts, as modern and contemporary art in its diverse disciplines and languages have done none other than make evident the diversity and extension of operational and productive modes that very often question every specificity of the artistic work. And in second place, the aim is to demonstrate how, apart from showing the high standing of the figure of artist, the falsifier hides a fundamental paradox: it questions the statute of the artist as creator but its existence depends on keeping that statute alive