An Afternoon in Detroit (II of II): Museum.

The museum was hopping and very busy. The exhibit was a ton of fun - it was like 4-5 rooms full of copies, forgeries, and frauds, oftentimes genuine works of artists were exhibited right next to fakes, which made you look really closely at the difference in technique etc. There was also a lot about the science behind detecting forgeries, too, which was fun.

My favorite was the last room, though. One of the exhibits was a photograph that was consistent with Man Ray's techniques and whatnot, but there was no conclusive evidence that it was by him, so the exhibit asked, can you appreciate it without knowing for certain that it's by him? Another was a painting that was trimmed off of a larger canvas and saved and then sold by the trimmer, and the artist disowned it. So, in one sense it was genuine, but was it? The last question asked was whether you could appreciate something's beauty, even if it was a forgery.

After that, we went through a couple other galleries, and every once in a while my godmother would be like, "Fake, fake, fake," as she passed by different pieces.

My mom, too, was like, "I can't look at anything now and appreciate it, because I keep worrying that it's a fake!".

Later that night, when me and my mom were telling my dad and my uncle about the exhibit, my mom was talking about the exhibit and how daring it was to confess that the museum had bought forgeries in the past, and she was like, "And then, in the last room they asked whether you could appreciate something fake, to cover their ass, after they spent all that money to get it and then have all those specialists look at it."

"Huh," my dad was like.