Establishing a distinction between the fake and the authentic in the art world means questioning the status of the artist as an author, and examining notions that are essential to the perception of art history: the value of style and signature, the practice of imitation and pastiche, the links between master and workshop, methods of attribution, the history of taste and art institutions, and finally the question of authenticity in reproduction and multiple images. The speculative, paradoxical attitudes of artists themselves with regard to falsification and imposture often demonstrate the degree to which forgery goes hand in hand with creativity... not forgetting that the notions of fake and real, original and copy, are radically different for Eastern and Western artists.

This book can be considered encyclopedic insofar as the foremost specialists in every discipline have contributed to defining the aesthetic, technical, legal, sociological, and cultural aspects of the phenomenon, essentially in the field of the visual arts, but also in those of literature and music.