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Page 183
(if a Claimant comes across Guernica and believes it is the Mona Lisawhich he or she has never seen or has no clear idea aboutthen one is witnessing a simple case of misnaming).
(ii) Claimant's addressees must share a more or less equivalent knowledge of Oa (if a Claimant succeeds in convincing someone that a pink dollar bill bearing the portrait of Gorbachev is good American currency, this would be, not forgery, but defrauding the mentally incapable).
These requirements being met, there is Downright Forgery when the Claimant claims, in good or bad faith, that Ob is identical with Oa, which is known to exist and to be highly valued.
4.1.1. Deliberate False Identification
The Claimant knows that Ob is only a reproduction of Oa. Nevertheless, he or she claims, with intent to deceive, that Ob is identical to Oa. This is forgery in the narrower senseoffering a copy of the Mona Lisa as the original, or putting forged bank notes into circulation. 3
4.1.2. Naive False Identification
The Claimant is not aware that the two objects are not identical. Thus he or she, in good faith, takes Ob to be the genuine original. This is the case with those tourists who in Florence fetishistically admire outside Palazzo Vecchio the copy of Michelangelo's David (without knowing that the original is preserved elsewhere).
4.1.3. Authorial Copies
After completing the object Oa, the same author produces in the same manner a perfect double Ob, which cannot outwardly be distinguished from Ob. Ontologically speaking, the two objects are physically and historically distinct, but the authormore or less honestlybelieves that from the aesthetic point of view they both have equal value. One may think here of the polemics about the "forged" pictures by De Chirico, which in the opinion of many critics were painted by De Chirico himself. Such cases provoke a critical questioning of the fetishistic veneration of the artistic original.
4.1.4. Alteration of the Original
A variant of the previous cases occurs when B alters Oa to Ob. Original manuscripts have been altered, old and rare books have been modified by changing indications of origin and possession, by adding false

 
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