Louis the Decorator and his chums in the antiques trade use the word ‘airport’ adjectivally and disparagingly. It signifies industrially produced folkloric objects (prayer mats, knobkerries, masks, toupins, necklaces, tribal amulets, djellabas etc) which are typically sold by hawkers to departing holidaymakers.
This is the basest level of fakery and is ignored by the otherwise doggedly catholic Noah Charney. Its defining characteristic, however, is tellingly akin to that of the multi-million-dollar scams that fascinate him in The Art of Forgery. The duped party is often not all that duped. He is, rather, mutely complicit with the swindler and has faith — that is to say a belief born in witting self-delusion and undemanding of proof — that the chattel is what it is claimed to be. Those swindlers who happen also to be makers meanwhile harbour a yearning to assert their authorship but can only do so by confessing to it or being detected.
Both parties are thus capable of causing the apparatus to collapse. Both strive to keep it standing. They are conjoined in mutual dependence. The oenologist Serena Sutcliffe believes that most collectors of rare wines ‘would rather not know’ about fakes, even though there are more bogus bottles from certain estates in certain vintages than there are genuine ones. But then to collectors the prestige of possessing an object trumps appreciation of it. Especially when appreciation may cost £50k per corked glass or carry the risk of pranging, say, a Facel Vega whose price has multiplied 15-fold since the millennium but whose roadholding hasn’t.
The trade in big-name wines and marques of car is straightforward beside that of the foetid can of worms where painting, prints and objets de vertu writhe in wrapped accord with the market, with fashion, with fluctuating reputation and with the caprices of the court of provenance which is composed of vying panjandrums, venal ‘experts’, committees of backstabbers, committees of placemen, trustees, consultants, museum wallahs and gallery johnnies.
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