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By Root 427 0

forgery, art about art, photographs of photographs, films about films, identity theft, facial transplants, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, swaps, Enron, virtual reality, reality TV, Viagra, fake Viagra. The line that has long separated fake/real, artificial/natural, illusory/true and inauthentic/authentic has been erased. Fascination with the fake is as old as the imagination itself but the shift from mechanical to digital and electronic means of production and reproduction takes simulation to another level. What are the aesthetic, philosophical, social, ethical and political implications of the disappearance of what once was called real? In addition to readings and class discussions, there will be visits by an investment banker, a detective, a journalist and experts on art forgery and counterfeiting. Students are required to post to a blog regularly and to participate in a weekly media lab in which they will learn how to create multimedia hypertexts and interactive websites. Instead of writing a term paper, students will be required to select an example of contemporary faking and complete a multimedia project on it. Works to be considered include: Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man; James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Jacques Derrida, Counterfeit Money; Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality; Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder; and Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. We will also study two films—Orson Welles’ F for Fake and Christopher Nolan’s Memento—as well as the website for the Las Vegas hotel and casino New York–New York.

This course cut across as many disciplinary boundaries as possible—class discussions probed works of philosophy, literature, art, economics and even biology. While the course as a whole has an integrity, different parts could be connected with courses in other departments. I invited a colleague from the economics department to discuss with the class how new financial instruments like derivatives related to these issues; a biology colleague helped us consider the implications of genetic engineering and cloning vis-à-vis natural organisms.

The course also bridged the divide between the academic and nonacademic worlds with two field trips. We attended an exhibition on the practice of appropriation in postmodern art and photography at the nearby Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Later in the semester we visited the restoration laboratory of the Clark Art Institute, where students learned about the scientific methods used in restoring artworks. The director of the lab, who made his reputation restoring a famous Jackson Pollock drip painting that was badly damaged in a fire, gave a fascinating talk about the legal and ethical issues involved in art restoration. What are the limits of restoration? Who determines those limits? When does the original disappear and the restoration become the work of art? When the restoration is complete, whose name goes on the work? He concluded by admitting that he took great pride in the fact that the most sophisticated computer analysis could detect no difference between his drips and Pollock’s. I knew students understood what I was trying to teach them when a young woman asked, “So is the copy as good as the original and if it is, who is the artist?” I also invited a journalist, who discussed several much-publicized plagiarism cases. He explained how digital technologies and the proliferation of news outlets on cable TV and the Internet complicate questions of authorship and ownership of intellectual property. I arranged a visit by the head of the New York City Waterfront Commission, which is responsible for controlling the traffic in counterfeits and fakes. With suitcases filled with hot loot and a PowerPoint designed to shock, the police officer opened students’ eyes to a vast global underworld network dealing not only in watches and fashion