Fake Stuff

Don't ask me why, but I've always had a strange fascination with forged documents. Passports, ID's, birth certificates and checks can all be forged. And while some people do use forgery for bad purposes such as theft, fraud or other social no-no's, others see forgery as a kind of art form. I can see the validity of getting good enough at faking something that it is passed off as the real thing. I made a fake press pass a while ago. It's not super-convincing, but there isn't much of a standard for press passes and I imagine that it would get past a barely trained minimum wage dude working security at a concert.

If you laminate it and stick it on a lanyard thingy, I'll bet it would work. You'll notice that I look a little different in this picture, that's because I heavily edited it to add a few years to my apparent age. The lower jaw is wider, and there are slightly more wrinkles. As I was doing my google-ing for this post, I found that the technical definition of forgery is "The creation of a false written document or alteration of a genuine one, with the intent to defraud." So I guess you could make an extremely realistic five dollar bill, but rather than using it as cash, if you were to frame it and hang it on a wall, then it wouldn't be forgery. It would be Art. With a capital "A". 

That's what a guy named J.S.G. Boggs did. He would make an amazingly accurate one-sided drawing of a bill, and he would buy lunch with it in restaurants  Only rather than spending it, he would sell it to the waitress as Art. So I guess, even though it wasn't actually currency, the "forged" $20 bills became worth even more than $20. Boggs was arrested in England for counterfeiting, but was later aquited of his "crime" because he was not trying to spend the bills. He sold them as Art pieces.

You can see the level of detail in this dollar bill. That takes a lot of skill and time. And when something requires skill and time to make, then suddenly it's worth something!