Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation

432 pages with 16 pages of color platesAugust 2021. Softcover.$49.95 | 9781733957953 An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by Antoinette LaFarge, herself a “fictive-art” practitioner. Stealthily occupying the remote corners of history, literature, and art are curious fabrications that straddle the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination — non-existent people and poets, Edgar Allan Poe’s hot-air-balloon to the Moon hoax, crypto-scientific objects like fake skeletons, psycho-geography, faked inventions, and staged anthropological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs, “captured” in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, “fictive art” (the author’s term) continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. The shift from the early information age to our “infocalyp