The art of creating ‘fake news’
University of Toronto exhibition examines why we fall for — even embrace — forgeries
Since the vast majority of bogus videos and stories are shared through social media, it’s easy to imagine that hoaxes and fake news are a new, modern, problem — an unintended consequence of digital age communications technology. But a new exhibit at University of Toronto’s Massey College featuring an assortment of fake artifacts from three millennia, shows that forgeries and hoaxes aren’t new at all.
The exhibit, Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prudhomme, A Rare Collection of Fakes, has also been digitized at prudhommelibrary.ca, and its home page illuminates the backstory of this collection of phoney goods — recently “discovered,” found in an attic in Saskatchewan once owned by the Prud’homme family, who apparently liked to collect fakes. The collection includes a counterfeit bronze vase thought to be from China’s Zhou dynasty (circa 1045771 BC), forged sheet music from 13thcentury France, and ancient Roman medical equipment.
A remarkable, almost too-good-to-betrue, story of an unlikely discovery. And, as we know about things that are toogood-to-be-true, well, they probably are. The exhibit’s a hoax; all the fakes are actually fake. And the story about the attic in Saskatchewan is also make-believe. The curators, Heather Jessup and Claire Battershill, worked with about 100 people over two years to create this elaborate sham, which was made possible by a Canada Council New Chapter grant and grew, partially, out of Jessup’s academic work at the University of Toronto, where she studied the cultural importance of hoaxes.
When she was deep into research, some 10 years ago, Jessup contacted Canadian writers across the country and asked them to imagine a forged artifact found in an attic, describe it, then provide an answer to the question, “Why?”
FAKE NEWS continued on E3
Why would anyone perpetrate a hoax? At that point, there were no plans for an exhibit — this was just a group of Canadian creative writers playing around. After the answers came in, though, Jessup and fellow creative writer Battershill were inspired to take it a step further and bring the imaginary artifacts to life.
“In some ways, this exhibit is sort of like the writing prompt gone completely out of control,” Jessup says. “What happened is we paired those writers with artists, so, an opera singer, a sculptor, a painter, a photographer — or whatever worked with the original description of the object that might be found in the attic.”
Instead of conjuring up stories of mercenary forgers or nefarious pranksters, more of the stories turned out to be about sympathetic hoaxsters motivated by their frustrations at hitting glass ceilings and other barriers. One writer imagined a would-be female astronaut accepted into a space program but shut out of the actual space travel. She sought revenge by faking notes that made her male colleagues sound crazy. Another created a tale of a woman academic who “found” 800-year-old sheet music to bolster her failing career in a male-dominated university music department.
“So, these are some of the stories that our writers spontaneously created when we asked about why somebody would create a fake,” Jessup says. “And it was often because they hadn’t been accepted in an academic or scientific institution based on who they were when they were born.”
That isn’t the only reason for creating forgeries, though. While exclusion politics might go some way toward accounting for, say, Clifford Irving’s famously faked biography of Howard Hughes, it’s less helpful in explaining the long, rich history of newspaper pranks in the 19th century, such as the “Great Moon Hoax.” This derived out of a six-part series on the discovery of life on the moon that ran in the New York Sun in1835 — an era called the “epoch of the hoax” by notorious prankster Edgar Allan Poe. That was about selling newspapers. It worked, too.
Forgers’ motivations, however, are only half the equation, and Make Believe also tries to get people to think about why hoaxes work. What’s the audience’s role in their success?
Thanks to the “Great Moon Hoax,” the Sun’s circulation increased, its papers snapped up by readers who were thrilled by the sensational stories about lunar bison and unicorns. They wanted to believe the fanciful descriptions of the four-foottall, winged humanoids that lived on the moon, even if it all seemed a little fishy. While other readers knew it to be a hoax, New York was, nevertheless, alive with debates over lunar bat-people.
People love crazier-than-fiction news, even when they have a sneaking suspicion it’s actually fictitious. The point is that interaction between making and consuming fake news is often a lot more complicated than just being duped. Again, one of Jessup’s central points is that the audience is an important part of the hoax’s success. If we fail to keep that in mind now — and only focus on the nefarious actors and the mediums through which it’s spread — we’re only getting half the picture. Make Believe invites us to think about the interaction through a new lens.
The examples might be new and the artifacts all fakes, but the issues raised by Make Believe are very real and, it turns out, as old as the news itself. Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prud’homme, A Rare Collection of Fakes runs until May 20. Admission is free.