- What makes art great?
To figure it out, I made a whole bunch of counterfeit memes.
- All Of them seem fake or all of them are real.
- This is very embarrassing for me.
- Let me explain.
Thank you to Unbounce for sponsoring
a portion of this video.
So I was going through some of my old stuff
because my parents sold my childhood home,
otherwise known as their house, when I found these.
All of my sketchbooks from the second grade
all the way through high school.
It's been years since I've seen them,
and it just made me remember how desperately
I wanted to become a great artist growing up.
And the joke's on you, young Sabrina,
because now I'm a content creator.
This outcome doesn't really surprise me.
Looking through my old stuff,
it feels like something's missing.
That something that makes art feel great or real.
That makes you want to hang it in a gallery.
Like, could you imagine?
And just up ahead on our left, you're gonna see
SpongeBob fan art by Sabrina, circa 2005.
(applause)
Because that's the thing she did.
But what is that thing, exactly?
Do we need to be told that great art is great,
or is it something innate?
Like if I hid a Van Gogh in a bunch of other
blurry paintings of depressed gingers,
would you be able to spot the real one?
So why don't we do that?
That's right.
Today, in this video, you and I are going to figure out
the power behind great art by making fake art.
Wait, does this count as art fraud?
With that worry in mind,
I started reading about art forgery.
I explored some books, tutorials, and exhibitions
to understand the subject a little better.
I always figured the crime only involved rich people,
but as usual, it's a little more complex than that.
So I talked to an expert.
- My name's Colette Loll,
and I'm the founder and director of Art Fraud Insights.
And I'm an art fraud investigator.
- Is what I'm doing illegal?
- Not from my perspective, no, I think you're good.
- All right, so now that I know that it isn't illegal,
here's the plan.
I'm gonna produce a bunch of fakes and forgeries.
But in order to do that, I need to be able to do that.
And do you want to see my attempt
at painting a Van Gogh during an ad read?
You're gonna.
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I'm just gonna start painting an eye.
It's the difference between showing up to an art gallery
only to find disorganized clutter
that takes way too much effort and way too much time
to even get any understanding.
Or, a gallery curated exactly to your interests.
Are bad paintings one of your interests?
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Now, this looks like a bad anime character,
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I can do a little bit more.
Famous last words.
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Anyway, here's my Van Gogh forgery.
More like Van Gross, am I right?
Let's get back to the main video.
So instead of doing traditional art from great artists,
I'm gonna recreate stuff that's a little closer
to my interests and abilities.
In other words, (beep) posts.
And before you say,
"You are trying to find the power in great art.
How are you supposed to do this with memes?"
When was the last time you thought about the Mona Lisa?
And when was the last time you thought about this?
For me, it's every day.
Memes can be great art.
So with that in mind, here's a quick tutorial
on how to do art fraud.
To start, I'm gonna need a bit of help.
- My name is Dr. Noah Charney.
I'm a professor of art history specializing in art crime.
- He also wrote the book "The Art of Forgery,"
and in it, he outlines a few basic approaches.
First, misattributions.
This is when you misrepresent the authenticity of a piece.
Authenticity involves the history of production,
where it was created, when, how, and by whom.
A misattribution can change some of those details
to increase a piece's value.
Now, it is worth noting that in order for misattribution
to count as fraud, it needs evidence of prior intent.
So I am intending to defraud my friends
by misattributing tweets by
my favorite unhinged Twitter user to Kanye West.
In this case, I'm treating the tweet as the art
and the stuff around it as evidence of its authenticity,
I'm misattributing by swapping out Taha for Kanye.
And with that, I had my first set of fraudulent art.
Next, there are provenance traps.
- Provenance is the term for
the documented history of an object.
It can take lots of different forms.
It could be a receipt or a contract
for the commission of an artwork.
It could be a photograph where the object in question
is seen in the photograph.
It could be a letter where somebody says,
"I saw this painting the other day."
So anything that is historical reference to the object.
- A provenance trap works by inserting
a piece of fraudulent art or evidence of its existence
into the historical record.
This makes for compelling evidence of
a piece's authenticity and value.
And what is a better historical to mess with than Wikipedia?
Yes, I am what your elementary school teachers
warned you about.
As you might expect, there are a few ways to pull this off,
including creating art to match existing provenance,
like inserting an original to a preexisting Wiki entry.
Or creating false provenance and adding them to the archive,
like creating a new Wiki entry.
Or you can create false preparatory work
of a known, authentic original,
like a sketch of the Mona Lisa or whatever I'm doing.
So I just faked some screenshots
and finished my second set of fraudulent art.
Next, there are fakes.
This occurs when you alter, manipulate,
or tamper with an object for the purpose of deception.
So I'm gonna alter my favorite works of art,
viral Tumblr posts.
I'm gonna take a few, but alter them
so that their subject matter is now expanding
the Spiders Georg cinematic universe.
It has to be one of the most valuable Tumblr posts out there
because so many of you sent it to me,
including TikTok star Hank Green.
So I spent a way to long browsing for Tumblr posts,
with absurd statistics to attribute to Georg.
Yes, I did use Pinterest for this.
I am a shadow of my 13-year-old self.
However, I pulled it off and finished
my third set of fraudulent art.
Finally, there are forgeries.
They are produced explicitly to deceive
and usually require the most skills,
since you need to know the time-accurate tools, materials,
and techniques to pull it off without raising suspicion.
And what art style am I so confident
that I can recreate from a blank canvas?
Deep fried memes, of course.
Listen, all I need is an overly sharpened visual reference
to 2000s culture with saturation up 500%
and a heaping load of nonsense written in a default font.
Call me Eric Hebborn.
That's a niche reference, but a good one.
Google it.
This one was the most fun to do,
mainly because my sense of humor
was long since consumed by nihilism,
and now only ironic things taken to the point
of unironic effort bring me any joy.
However, with six saturation adjustment layers set to 100%,
my fourth and final set of fraudulent art was complete.
And now it's time to put all of this to the test
and figure out if there's anything
that calls out to us in great art.
That's right, it's time for Sabrina Does Crime,
but not in an illegal way.
In this show, I'm going to present four (beep) posts
and the contestants job is to recognize
which one is the real one amongst the fakes.
Now to welcome in our contestants.
First up, we have Melissa,
who still uses a Sympatico email in 2021.
- I didn't know this was a roasting session.
- And we also have Taha, who is British.
Sad face emoji.
- I just woke up for a nap.
- And finally, we have you, the viewer.
Please engage with our content
by commenting down below with your score
at the end of this.
All right, let's get started with round one.
I'm gonna be showing you four tweets,
all presumably by Kanye West, but not actually.
Only one of them is.
- Oh no.
"Okay, but where is White Friday?"
That sounds like something I've tweeted.
I'm pretty sure I have tweeted this.
- Which one is the real tweet?
- Oh, there's only one real one.
- There's only one real one.
- My initial instinct is that the real one is the last one.
- I'm gonna say the first one is Kanye West.
- Okay, are we ready?
- I feel really confident.
- Well, let's see.
(chiming)
- Wait, three of them were me?
(Melissa laughing)
This is very embarrassing for me.
- [Sabrina] No points all around.
Let's move on to round two, Wikipedia pages.
These Wikipedia pages have been edited or created,
and you need to spot the one that wasn't
edited or created completely fresh.
I'm really bad at summarizing these.
Let's just get into it.
- Isn't that your hand?
- (laughs) Am I white?
- This is fake.
And if this is real, I'm gonna be so upset,
because I know for a fact that is Sabrina's thumb.
- Now that's definitely not your hand.
- Hmm.
- The title in this one is wrong.
- Hmm.
- Why is Kevin McCallister on the left?
- Oh, interesting.
- Well, this one has a space bar.
There's a space that's wrong.
- I think the real one is the last one.
- I think the real one is the thumbs one.
- The real one was this one.
- The text on it is so weird.
It looks weird.
- You can pull it up on your phone right now.
- I'm pulling it up.
- [Sabrina] This is turning out very well.
Okay, are we ready for round three?
This has to do with the darkest part of internet history,
viral Tumblr posts.
Did either of you use Tumblr?
- No.
- Tweet number one.
- Post number one. - Here we see a graph.
- Were you on Tumblr?
Hello?
- I don't think I understand the assignment.
- How many times do you think cow gorg
has been killed by a cow?
- So gang, which one do you think is real?
- Okay, this one is not real.
But there's this concept in philosophy and aesthetics
that Hume came up with that called true judges,
(voice echoing)
something as beautiful,
and there's like a bunch of properties for that.
And one of them is like having familiarity with culture
(voice echoing)
so I feel a bit unconfident.
This one I think is fake.
- I'm so excited for whatever person who is watching this,
who knows the answer, because guess what, Taha?
This is the real post.
- This is the real one?
All of you have whack usernames,
and you should be ashamed of yourself.
- [Sabrina] Final round.
- I hate this game.
- You get points for enthusiasm. (laughs)
- I hate, I hate this game.
- [Sabrina] Round four, deep fried memes.
- Okay, the only one I feel like I have seen
is bottom text with Jimmy Neutron.
- [Computerized Voice] Literally two minutes later.
- I'm losing faith in Bottom Text.
- Three, two, one.
- [Melissa] Bottom Text.
- [Taha] Frog Boy.
- [Sabrina] Melissa wins with Bottom Text.
- I hate my life.
I am so angry.
I am so mad.
- Going into this call,
how well did you think you guys would do?
- Zero confidence.
That's because, what's a real meme?
- That's a good point.
Did you not just create new memes?
Did you not just create baby memes?
So what I'm trying to get to, like in conclusion,
I am Kanye.
- So, at the start of this video,
I wanted to figure out if there was anything inherent
about great art, something that separates it
from the fakes and the bad,
something that calls out to us and goes,
"Hey, it's me, you know it's me."
And the answer is, is that there isn't.
Like, no matter how confident Taha was...
- Memes?
That's easy.
I know exactly which one's Kanye West.
I feel really confident.
I feel pretty good.
- He still got zero points.
Now don't get me wrong, art can fail to meet expectations,
but the great thing about art is that
those expectations are pretty amorphous.
In fact, our comprehension of art
is significantly influenced by what we're told.
- You know, what you're told about something,
especially when it comes to artwork,
really influences how you see it.
- So it's all about perception,
and if you believe that an object is in high demand,
is rare, or unique, and is authentic,
then its value is as if it is whether it is or not.
- There's a great field of study called neuroaesthetics,
and similar to research into say fine wine,
where someone's told that they're drinking
a really good vintage, and to them,
it tastes really wonderful,
only to find out that it was a cheap wine.
Similar to art.
You know, if you're told it's by a great master,
you experience it as beautiful.
- So if the biggest thing we care about is perception,
should we really be spending this time
drawing a line between great art and fake art?
Like, isn't it all the same, as long as the end result
is something we perceive to be worthwhile?
- It's really hard to be able to tell
what's real or what's fake.
- But if someone were to make something
that was the best fake ever, I think it just becomes real.
- But I don't think it's that simple.
While working on this video, as usual,
I had a bit of a crisis and I started to question
what it means to be real, to be authentic.
I learned about these incredible artists
that could make these near-perfect fakes,
but could never achieve greatness
until they pretended to be somebody else.
I learned that there is some famous,
authentic works out there
that are commonly attributed to one person
when they didn't work alone.
And yes, this is my way of admitting
that I thought that Michelangelo
painted the Sistine chapel alone.
Obviously he didn't.
I learned just how often I accept things at face value
without even considering the possibility of nuance,
of a bigger picture.
But it's that bigger picture
that really draws the line between fake and real.
- I think of authenticity as a thread,
and that thread connects an artwork
to the hand of the maker and the time and circumstances
in which it was created.
You trust that what you're looking at is true.
- Now, if you ask someone randomly on the street,
are they worried about, you know,
our understanding of the creation of
historical works of culture,
if that concerns them, if it gets messed with in some way,
most people would probably say no.
But if you're the sort of person
who is concerned about this,
then it's an issue of, for example,
how would it be if suddenly a 10th symphony
supposedly by Beethoven were discovered?
And it was really lousy and it would therefore
damage our impression of the creator
and force us to rewrite our history books.
And it turns out it's fraudulent.
- And art fraud, fake art, thrives in this disconnect.
It's what Melissa and Taha encountered
when they were trying to analyze Tumblr posts.
- Definitely doctored, because that's your hand.
- 100% Sabrina's hand.
- It is not my hand. (laughs)
Where there isn't the care or the expertise
to look past the face value
and verify the context in which a piece claims to sit,
where we can build so much confidence
based off a gut feeling, no matter how misplaced.
- That's not real.
That's not real.
I know for a fact that it's Sabrina's thumb.
- And when it's about memes and tweets, it's funny.
But that fun can stop pretty fast.
- Whenever somebody absolutely believes
that they have a real painting,
first of all, I usually ask them,
"Do you have an art history background?"
And the answer is always no.
"Do you have a technical background?"
The answer is always no.
"But I do a lot of research on the internet."
And then they always have a binder of information
that supports their findings and conclusions,
despite all of the examples and opinion from the experts.
You know, they truly become obsessed
and they dig their heels in.
- And doesn't that sound familiar?
Oops, this video was about more than art fraud.
Classic me.
Now, I don't want to extrapolate ideas
out of their appropriate context.
All of my research for this video was about art fraud.
So take everything that I'm about to say
with a grain of salt.
I think that there is something to be said
about the way we consume information nowadays
and our willingness to disregard where it was created,
when, how, by whom, and for what reason.
It's authenticity, that thread connecting art to artist.
Except now the art can be brands paying people
to forge memes so that they don't look like ads
even when they are.
Or it can be propaganda dressed up as historical documents,
or news, or science.
Great art can come in any form.
But real art, authentic art, is a story.
One that leaks beyond the frames and galleries
and into our lives.
It can shape the way we view the world,
where we dedicate our energy and determine
who we trust and respect.
And while I love a great story as much as anyone,
I'd take the truth any day.
Hey there.
I hope you liked that video.
If you did, please consider sharing it with a friend.
If you didn't, consider sharing it with an enemy.
You might also like some other videos
where we do like a little bit of crime, just a smidge.
The extended cuts of the interviews featured in this video
are available for everyone in the description below,
but the extended cut of Melissa and Taha's
game show struggles will be available
to our supporters on Patreon.
I think that's everything.
But either way, have a lovely day.