The Museum in Vienna Looks Like Any Other, Every Canvas on Its Walls Is a Lie

A small museum in Vienna, opened in 2005, devotes itself entirely to forgeries. The Museum of Art Fakes collects work made by people who, by most reasonable definitions, are criminals. Visitors come anyway. They come, I suspect, for the same reason people slow at the scene of an accident, but also for something stranger: the suspicion that what hangs on those walls carries not only deception but a kind of skill we lack the vocabulary to name.I have been thinking about this museum for weeks. It strikes me as a small, polite act of cultural rebellion: the Austrians, of all people, building a monument to dishonesty and treating its practitioners with the curatorial seriousness one might extend to a minor Flemish master. The signage is sober. The lighting is correct. The frames are nice. The implication, never spoken aloud: something in these objects rewards looking, even after we know.The long con, considered historicallyArt forgery is older than most institutions designed to police it.…