Fakes, forgeries, and CBS's Bush memos

I have no particular expertise on typewriters and type faces, but the ongoing debate over the authenticity of the 60 Minutes memos has been a fascinating exercise in second-hand connoisseurship. Digging through the various arguments is very similar to what players in the art market routinely do: weighing conflicting opinions, trying not to be led astray by a desire for a given result, and -- perhaps most relevant here -- not confusing the possible with the probable.

For after having given a listen to the memos' defenders (Kos thread here) and dismissers (Instapundit's list of links here), the picture that emerges is that while the memos might have been able to have been typed on an early-'70s typewriter, their overall appearance is both anomalous for the era and disturbingly consistent with the norms of our own.

This is, of course, a classic red flag for art historians on the lookout for fakes: not just the anachronistic detail, but that more fundamental anachronism arising from the forger's inability to recognize (and suppress) the impress of his own time. And when I read attempts to explain how the memos could be genuine, they sound just like a tenaciously deluded owner of a painting, purportedly the work of some great old master, who points to one feature after another that can be paralleled in the master's oeuvre, while failing to see how they add up to a whole that is entirely modern in conception.

Some may object that genuine artworks are sometimes mistakenly dismissed as copies or fakes (and vice versa). Yet does this really call into question the commonsense wisdom of demanding a higher standard of proof when there is good reason for suspicion?

ADDENDUM: I've lost the reference, but at least one commentator has now nicely pointed out that while one must examine an item in person before declaring it genuine, the same standard does not apply when recognizing a fake. When something is there that doesn't belong, it is as apparent in a photo as in one's hands. One more thing art world types have known for a long, long time. . . .

AND DON'T MISS Evan Kirschhoff's acerbic riff on the whole affair.

UPDATE: What are these people thinking? It's bad enough reading such irrationality in our comments, but this is from the BBC:

Correspondents say the row over the authenticity of the documents has distracted attention from their contents.

NOTE: Comments are now closed.

AND what does the whole episode so clearly show us? In the words of Virginia Postrel, "how quickly we forget how much the everyday world has changed". For those who remembered how typewritten documents looked back in the '70s, the CBS memos stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. But clearly, many could/can no longer see the past without assimilating it to the present.

Posted by David on September 10, 2004 10:02 PM