If You're Going To Fake it, You Might as Well Say You're the Best...

From the New York Times and The New Republic come this story and this résumé about a young man named Adam Wheeler who faked his way into Harvard and has apparently falsified nearly everything about his academic life. The image above, from The New York Times, gives details on just a few of his lies. Note the "veritas" on two out of three of the school insignias shown. Wheeler is now being prosecuted for theft of scholarship money from Harvard and has pleaded "not guilty" despite what seems to be overwhelming evidence against him. What is to be done with people like him? What will he do? Will his lying escalate (though I can't imagine what could be bigger than this), or will he be somehow reformed and go on high school lecture tours about honesty? What does a person do once everyone finds out he is a phony?

A Forgery's Worth

One imagines that there is much more to this story than is explained in the news article, but even this small amount of information is fascinating. The story seems worthy of fiction or film: an elderly art dealer who (supposedly) convinces an artist to fake a Picasso "to help catch a thief" and later sells a forgery for two million dollars and pleads guilty to lying to the FBI. The film would likely include more guns, but gunplay wouldn't be too great a stretch, since the FBI is already involved. This is a story about the crook dealer, but what is the forger's story, I wonder?

This story also leads one to further question art's monetary value. The painting, pictured above, is not itself extraordinary, and would not be worth very much as a work by Maria Apelo Cruz. As a forgery, the work of art loses its value as itself: if people believe that the work is a genuine Picasso, it becomes that work, by Picasso, and once the fraud is discovered, all of its value, monetary or cultural, evaporates. Why is this not art? What is it now?

Clerical Imposture

This story is the type of imposture that shocks me for its brazenness, in a similar way that the Presidential State Dinner crashers, pictured here with Joe Biden, shocked much of the United States last November. Is impersonating a religious officiant more grievous than pretending you've been invited to a White House function, or are they more or less equivalent? Do we revere religious events in a similar way to government ceremonies? Perhaps these crashers are living the American Dream, which imagines that a person can become anything he or she wants to be; perhaps we must amend the American Dream to include pretending to become anything he or she wants to be but can't legitimately become.

On Fiction Writing and Liars

Last night my professor said of an author's magazine interview, "of course it's hard to know how much of what she says is genuine, since all writers are liars anyway." Edgar Poe once ran a fake news article about the arrival of a hot-air balloon from across the Atlantic, and gathered huge crowds to buy the paper in which the story appeared. We all know, of course, that writers of fiction must fabricate characters, plots, and settings, as part of the creative process, but it's often difficult to tell to what extent the fabrication extends to the writers' real lives. Do we, as readers of fiction, allow some lying from our authors outside their fiction? Is it possible to know whether truly great fiction writers are lying or not? Perhaps we don't care, as long as the writing is good. Maybe the genuine and the fake are indistinguishable for some people. One wonders which came first, though--the lying, or the fiction writing? It's quite likely that I've been unable to write fiction because I've been unable to lie. Perhaps I could take some tips from Poe.

Pictured is (possibly) Poe in his coffin, from www.celebritymorgue.com. It's quite likely to be as fake as Poe was.

Academic Fraud

Apparently there are repercussions for lying about your academic record!

From the Southeast Missourian:

JACKSON, Mo. (AP) -- A 22-year-old woman has admitting submitting a phony transcript to Southeast Missouri State University.

The Southeast Missourian reported that Danielle Feagin of Malden pleaded guilty to forgery charges on Monday. Sentencing will be May 24.

Feagin told a judge she committed the forgery in hopes of gaining quicker acceptance to Southeast Missouri State. The transcript showed Feagin had a 4.0 grade point average and 89 credit hours at Three Rivers Community College. Actually, she had a 2.4 GPA and 37 credits.

Prosecutors are recommending a suspended sentence and probation.


It's perhaps lamentable that her goal was only Southeast Missouri State--who knows what kind of attention she'd get if she had tried to get into an Ivy League or a UC with a forged transcript. One wonders how many people try to fake transcripts, and also how many people get away with it.

The Cancer-Faker

This woman, Kelly Von Lehmden, raised thousands of dollars to fight her breast cancer, and was later discovered to have falsified documents to fake the disease. Now there is concern for her handicapped son, who may be a victim of her Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. In our age of pathologizing all aberrent behavior, we seem to treat criminals as greater victims than their victims often are. Is this woman mentally ill? Was she simply unable to prevent herself from forging medical records? Is this scandal enough to satisfy her incessant need for attention, or will she continue to pull stunts like this until someone really gets hurt?

The Forger Family

One of the most recent major art forgery operations was carried out by the Greenhalgh family: artist son Shaun and his elderly parents, George and Olive. It seems that there is a psychological difference between a single person who copies artworks (whether for monetary gain or not) and a group of people all committing a fraud together. This article claims that the group did not carry out these frauds for money, but rather due to "resentment of the art market." Shaun's obvious skill suggests that this statement could be true--certainly he could make some sort of living selling copies of great works of art--but these three wanted to undermine the whole art market. Still, a single piece successfully sold and then revealed to be a fake would signal their resentment at least as effectively as several pieces successfully sold and never discovered to be forgeries. I'm not convinced that they were trying to make a point. The art market has always been ridiculous and has never been fair, just like every other market. I'm mostly just certain that they were trying to make money.