Here is an interesting perspective on this very topic from the public television show "Antiques Roadshow":
They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And if that's true, it could be said the road connecting reproductions and fakes is usually paved with bad ones — or at least intentions worth keeping an eye on.
ANTIQUES ROADSHOW appraiser J. Michael Flanigan, an antiques dealer in Baltimore, Maryland, defines a fake as "any object made or sold with the intent to deceive a buyer." A reproduction is a copy of an original, advertised as a copy. And the phrase, "intent to deceive" is the key difference between that and an object that is flat-out fake.
To make his point, Michael plucked an analogy from Hollywood, a place alleged to be teaming with illusion, if not deception. "If I cloned Harrison Ford and told everyone that he was made up to look like the famous actor, that would be a darn good reproduction," Michael explains. "But if I implied that my clone actually was the real Harrison Ford, and he tried to use that deception to land a plum role in a new movie, well, in our business, we'd call him a fake." Michael sums up: "A fake isn't necessarily in the making. It's in the representation."
A famous example in the real world involved a chair that is currently held by the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. A collector bought the chair for a hefty sum as an original Windsor chair from early American history. Well, expert eyes cast doubts on its authenticity, and the buyer took the seller of the chair to court. Linda Eaton, curator of textiles at the Winterthur Museum, says that the piece was made in the shops of Wallace Nutting, a promoter of Colonial furniture in the early 20th century who oversaw the construction of fine reproductions sold as reproductions. Sometime after the piece was made, someone artificially aged the piece, erased Nutting's mark, and made a few more alterations while traveling that road from the land of reproductions to the home of the fake. "Nutting didn't intend the object as a fake when it was made," Michael says. "But somebody else did later."
The seller in the case pleaded ignorance and was found not guilty, in large part because experts disagreed on the chair's authenticity. The owner donated the unwanted chair to Winterthur, which displayed the chair in its Furniture Study Gallery next to the same unadulterated Nutting chair.
Whoever tried to turn back the clock on that Windsor reproduction was engaged in a new trend — that of improvising fakes rather than making them from scratch. "Now you see legitimate pieces that have been 'tarted up,'" Michael says. A leg of a fine chair will get subtly re-cut to make it finer, or an inlay might be dropped to improve a piece's class. "It's a shortcut to fakery," Michael says. "And time saved is money earned in that shady business."
While fakes are the devil every buyer wants to avoid in the antiques and collectibles business, many consumers face a greater danger: object illiteracy. "One guy used to say, 'There's more deception by ignorance than by intention,' Michael recalls. He's referring to sellers who make assertions about a piece ("It looks like a Renaissance table to me ... ") without truly knowing what the object actually is.
The solution, according to Michael: "You just have to stay away from sellers who make claims they can't back up. If they won't guarantee a piece, you should go down the street and find someone who will."
