The Art of Deception

This January, The Art of Deception will take visitors to Cambridge’ Whipple Museum of the History of Science into the dark underbelly of the world of collecting. How do fake artefacts end up in museums? Who made them, and why? And how do we detect them?

This new exhibition, opening Saturday 17 January,  puts the forged scientific instruments that have hoodwinked collectors and experts under the spotlight. From an intricate “silver” globe to eye-popping medical prints, visitors will encounter over a hundred notorious objects, as well as the patient detective work that caught them out.

‘Forgery is the inevitable dark side of collecting,’ said the Museum’s Director, Dr Joshua Nall. ‘If people are willing to pay good money for an historical artefact, then other people will always be willing to deceive them through the production of fakes. As early as the 1950s, Whipple curators have been identifying suspect objects in the Museum’s collection, many of them hiding in plain sight. We now know there’s an ever-growing world of fraud and deception in the market for scientific artefacts.’

‘The range of fake objects is really astonishing,’ said the Museum’s Curator, Dr Hannah Price. ‘Some are extremely sophisticated: others you can’t believe fooled anyone. Visitors will have to make up their own minds...’