Article Arts
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A Neglected Anniversary
Type: Journalistic Hoax. Summary: Text of an article detailing a false history of the bathtub. What follows is the complete text of Henry L. Mencken’s article “A Neglected Anniversary,” published in the New York Evening Mail on December 28, 1917. The article presents a false history of the bathtub. Details…
Blue Laws of Connecticut
Type: Fake History. Summary: An eighteenth-Century historian wrote about repressive “blue laws” supposedly once practiced in Connecticut. The term ‘Blue Laws’ describes harsh, puritanical laws that regulate public morality. Such laws supposedly existed in colonial America, making it illegal to do such things as kiss a child or shave on…
Claire Chazal Experiment
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: A French magazine mocked a celebrity author by submitting a disguised copy of her novel to her own publisher, which rejected it. Claire Chazal Claire Chazal was a well-known newswoman who presented the evening news on France’s TF1 network. Like many French celebrities, she had decided…
Death in the Air
Type: Photo Hoax. Summary: Photographs of World War One aerial dogfights were, decades later, discovered to have been faked. A book called Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot was published in 1933. It contained numerous pages of spectacular aerial photographs of World…
Eighteenth-Century Literary Hoaxes
Type: Literary Hoaxes. Summary: The eighteenth century is regarded as the great age of literary forgery. During the eighteenth century literary fakes poured forth from the pens of writers. A number of factors contributed to this. First, this was the period during which print culture became ascendant over oral culture.…
Elmer de Hory
Type: Forgery Summary: Elmyr de Hory fooled the art world for thirty years with his expert forgeries of works by Picasso, Renoir, and other masters. To this day, many of his forgeries remain undetected and are in museums and collections throughout the world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1955, Harvard…
Fritz Kreisler
Type: Musical Hoax. Summary: The musician Fritz Kreisler claimed that works he had written himself were actually “lost classics” written by famous composers. Fritz Kreisler During the early twentieth century, Fritz Kreisler was considered to be one of the leading violinists of his time. Part of his popularity stemmed from…
Giant Bear
Type: Real photos, inaccurate captions. Summary: Photos circulated via email showed a hunter posing with an enormous bear. Theodore Winnen poses with the bear he shot.A photo showing a hunter posing with an incredibly large bear began to circulate via email in late 2001. The large size of the bear…
J.S.G. Boggs
Type: Art. Summary: Boggs draws money that’s almost convincing enough to pass for the real thing. J.S.G. Boggs is a contemporary artist whose work deals with the tension between money’s aesthetic value and its economic function. He draws currency: Dollars, euros, or whatever the currency is where he happens to…
James Macpherson and the Ossianic Controversy
Type: Literary hoax. Summary: An eighteenth-century schoolmaster claimed to have found poems written by a third-century Scottish bard. The poems were actually written by the schoolmaster himself. James MacphersonIn 1760 a young Edinburgh schoolmaster named James Macpherson (1736-1796) published a translation of ancient Scottish verse titled Fragments of Ancient Poetry,…
Janet Cardiff - Walking Tours
Type: Art that blurs fiction and reality. Summary: Canadian installation artist Janet Cardiff has created a new art genre: alternative big city historical walking tours. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian multimedia artist. She is best known for creating a new…
Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota
Type: College Prank. Summary: The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pail and Shovel Party promised that, if elected to student government, they would move the Statue of Liberty to Lake Mendota, and they made good on their promise. Lady Liberty sinks into Lake Mendota. (Photograph by Ravi Kochhar). In February 1979 an…
Madagascar or Robert Drurys Journal
Type: Undetermined. Probably not a hoax. Summary: There has been continuing debate about whether a popular tale describing survival in eighteenth-century Madagascar was truth or fiction. Ask your average eighteenth-century Englishman about the faraway land of Madagascar, and all you’d get was a blank stare. For the English, Madagascar was…
Man Flies By Own Lung Power
Type: April Fool’s Day Hoax. Summary: A widely printed photograph showed a man flying by means of a device powered by the breath of his lungs. AdditionalApril Fool’s Day ContentTop 100 April Fool’s Day HoaxesThe April Fool’s Day Database In April 1934 numerous U.S. newspapers printed a photograph distributed by…
Marcel Duchamp
Type: Art Prankster. Summary: Throughout his career, French artist Marcel Duchamp was known for playing outrageous pranks on the art world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) always held the snobbishness of art collectors and gallery owners in disdain. While he was a revolutionary artist with at least one…
Melancholy Reflections
Type: Exposé of a journalistic hoax. Summary: Text of an article in which H.L. Mencken admitted inventing a false history of the bathtub. What follows is the complete text of Henry L. Mencken’s article “Melancholy Reflections,” published in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926. In the article, Mencken admits…
Milton Rejected
Type: Literary Hoax Summary: During the late nineteenth-century a hoaxer sent disguised copies of a work by John Milton to publishers, most of whom rejected it. Text from: Walsh, William. (1893). Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities. J.B. Lippincott Company. Philadelphia. 1893: 469-470. A very different sort of hoax was recently practised…
Modest Proposals
Type: Genre of satirical hoax. Summary: A form of satire that makes its point by shocking people with a socially taboo proposal. In 1729 Jonathan Swift published a short work titled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents…
Moving the Body
Type: Technique of photo fakery. Summary: Photographers can create misleading images by arranging the elements in a scene. Photo fakery usually involves the use of darkroom tricks or image-manipulation software in order to alter a photograph. However, fakery can also be achieved simply by posing people or objects in artificial…
New York Evening Graphic and Composographs
Type: Inventing the News. Summary: The story of publisher Bernarr MacFadden and The New York Evening Graphic, America’s first tabloid. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Although publisher Bernarr MacFadden’s newspaper, The New York Evening Graphic, only lasted a few years, its impact on mass media is still felt today, for better…
Retractable Capitol Dome
Type: Satire Mistaken as News Summary: A Beijing newspaper mistakenly reported that the U.S. Congress was demanding the installation of a retractable Capitol dome. On June 3, 2002, the Beijing Evening News scooped its competitors with a shocking story from America: the U.S. Congress was threatening to leave Washington DC…
Spurious Submission Hoaxes
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: A hoaxer takes a well-regarded work and alters a few key details, such as the title and name of the author. He then submits the manuscript to a publisher. Usually the publisher fails to recognize the work and rejects it. Every year publishers receive thousands of…
Stotham Massachusetts
Type: Hoax. Summary: A Massachusetts town, described as an example of an unspoiled New England village, turned out not to exist. Frontispiece to Ripley’s articleThe White Pine Monograph Series was a series of carefully researched, high quality brochures, paid for by Weyerhaeuser mills and edited by Russell Whitehead, that collected…
Sympsychography
Type: Hoax. Summary: A scientific article describes a new photographic process that is able to capture thoughts on film. A sympsychographic image of a cat. From Popular Science Monthly (Sep., 1896): 601.An article by the famous scientist David Starr Jordan (president of Indiana University and Stanford University) appeared in the…
Theft of the Sacred Cod
Type: College Prank. Summary: In 1933 Harvard students “codnapped” the Sacred Cod of Massachusetts. The Sacred Cod of Massachusetts. Theft is one of the classic and most-often-used tools in the toolbox of college pranksters. All manner of prized items are regularly spirited away at campuses throughout the world: statues, bells,…
Thomas Chatterton
Type: Literary forgery. Summary: A young man in eighteenth-century England claimed to have found poetry by a fifteenth-century priest. The Death of Chatterton, Oil Painting by Henry Wallis, 1856As a young boy growing up in Bristol, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) spent a great deal of time with his uncle, the sexton…
Total Body Replacement
Type: Technique of photo fakery. Summary: A common form of image manipulation involves cutting-and-pasting a person’s head onto someone else’s body. Image manipulation software such as Adobe’s Photoshop allows photo editors to alter the appearance of their subjects in many ways. With a click of a mouse they can erase…
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
Illustration from the earliest printed edition of Mandeville’s Travels showing some of the various races and species that Mandeville claimed to have encountered, including (clockwise from top left): the wild men with horns and hoofs; the people with eyes in their shoulders; the folk that have but one foot; and…
Trial of Polly Baker
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: The story of a woman tried for giving birth to five children out of wedlock provoked widespread popular outrage during the eighteenth century. In 1747 the text of a speech delivered by a woman, Polly Baker, accused by British magistrates in a court in Colonial America…
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There are 19 subcategories for this categoryArticles in category "Arts":
There are 29 articles for this category
A Neglected Anniversary
Type: Journalistic Hoax. Summary: Text of an article detailing a false history of the bathtub. What follows is the complete text of Henry L. Mencken’s article “A Neglected Anniversary,” published in the New York Evening Mail on December 28, 1917. The article presents a false history of the bathtub. Details…
Blue Laws of Connecticut
Type: Fake History. Summary: An eighteenth-Century historian wrote about repressive “blue laws” supposedly once practiced in Connecticut. The term ‘Blue Laws’ describes harsh, puritanical laws that regulate public morality. Such laws supposedly existed in colonial America, making it illegal to do such things as kiss a child or shave on…
Claire Chazal Experiment
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: A French magazine mocked a celebrity author by submitting a disguised copy of her novel to her own publisher, which rejected it. Claire Chazal Claire Chazal was a well-known newswoman who presented the evening news on France’s TF1 network. Like many French celebrities, she had decided…
Death in the Air
Type: Photo Hoax. Summary: Photographs of World War One aerial dogfights were, decades later, discovered to have been faked. A book called Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot was published in 1933. It contained numerous pages of spectacular aerial photographs of World…
Eighteenth-Century Literary Hoaxes
Type: Literary Hoaxes. Summary: The eighteenth century is regarded as the great age of literary forgery. During the eighteenth century literary fakes poured forth from the pens of writers. A number of factors contributed to this. First, this was the period during which print culture became ascendant over oral culture.…
Elmer de Hory
Type: Forgery Summary: Elmyr de Hory fooled the art world for thirty years with his expert forgeries of works by Picasso, Renoir, and other masters. To this day, many of his forgeries remain undetected and are in museums and collections throughout the world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman In 1955, Harvard…
Fritz Kreisler
Type: Musical Hoax. Summary: The musician Fritz Kreisler claimed that works he had written himself were actually “lost classics” written by famous composers. Fritz Kreisler During the early twentieth century, Fritz Kreisler was considered to be one of the leading violinists of his time. Part of his popularity stemmed from…
Giant Bear
Type: Real photos, inaccurate captions. Summary: Photos circulated via email showed a hunter posing with an enormous bear. Theodore Winnen poses with the bear he shot.A photo showing a hunter posing with an incredibly large bear began to circulate via email in late 2001. The large size of the bear…
J.S.G. Boggs
Type: Art. Summary: Boggs draws money that’s almost convincing enough to pass for the real thing. J.S.G. Boggs is a contemporary artist whose work deals with the tension between money’s aesthetic value and its economic function. He draws currency: Dollars, euros, or whatever the currency is where he happens to…
James Macpherson and the Ossianic Controversy
Type: Literary hoax. Summary: An eighteenth-century schoolmaster claimed to have found poems written by a third-century Scottish bard. The poems were actually written by the schoolmaster himself. James MacphersonIn 1760 a young Edinburgh schoolmaster named James Macpherson (1736-1796) published a translation of ancient Scottish verse titled Fragments of Ancient Poetry,…
Janet Cardiff - Walking Tours
Type: Art that blurs fiction and reality. Summary: Canadian installation artist Janet Cardiff has created a new art genre: alternative big city historical walking tours. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Janet Cardiff (born March 15, 1957) is a highly acclaimed Canadian multimedia artist. She is best known for creating a new…
Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota
Type: College Prank. Summary: The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pail and Shovel Party promised that, if elected to student government, they would move the Statue of Liberty to Lake Mendota, and they made good on their promise. Lady Liberty sinks into Lake Mendota. (Photograph by Ravi Kochhar). In February 1979 an…
Madagascar or Robert Drurys Journal
Type: Undetermined. Probably not a hoax. Summary: There has been continuing debate about whether a popular tale describing survival in eighteenth-century Madagascar was truth or fiction. Ask your average eighteenth-century Englishman about the faraway land of Madagascar, and all you’d get was a blank stare. For the English, Madagascar was…
Man Flies By Own Lung Power
Type: April Fool’s Day Hoax. Summary: A widely printed photograph showed a man flying by means of a device powered by the breath of his lungs. AdditionalApril Fool’s Day ContentTop 100 April Fool’s Day HoaxesThe April Fool’s Day Database In April 1934 numerous U.S. newspapers printed a photograph distributed by…
Marcel Duchamp
Type: Art Prankster. Summary: Throughout his career, French artist Marcel Duchamp was known for playing outrageous pranks on the art world. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) always held the snobbishness of art collectors and gallery owners in disdain. While he was a revolutionary artist with at least one…
Melancholy Reflections
Type: Exposé of a journalistic hoax. Summary: Text of an article in which H.L. Mencken admitted inventing a false history of the bathtub. What follows is the complete text of Henry L. Mencken’s article “Melancholy Reflections,” published in the Chicago Tribune on May 23, 1926. In the article, Mencken admits…
Milton Rejected
Type: Literary Hoax Summary: During the late nineteenth-century a hoaxer sent disguised copies of a work by John Milton to publishers, most of whom rejected it. Text from: Walsh, William. (1893). Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities. J.B. Lippincott Company. Philadelphia. 1893: 469-470. A very different sort of hoax was recently practised…
Modest Proposals
Type: Genre of satirical hoax. Summary: A form of satire that makes its point by shocking people with a socially taboo proposal. In 1729 Jonathan Swift published a short work titled A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to their Parents…
Moving the Body
Type: Technique of photo fakery. Summary: Photographers can create misleading images by arranging the elements in a scene. Photo fakery usually involves the use of darkroom tricks or image-manipulation software in order to alter a photograph. However, fakery can also be achieved simply by posing people or objects in artificial…
New York Evening Graphic and Composographs
Type: Inventing the News. Summary: The story of publisher Bernarr MacFadden and The New York Evening Graphic, America’s first tabloid. Posted by: Elliot Feldman Although publisher Bernarr MacFadden’s newspaper, The New York Evening Graphic, only lasted a few years, its impact on mass media is still felt today, for better…
Retractable Capitol Dome
Type: Satire Mistaken as News Summary: A Beijing newspaper mistakenly reported that the U.S. Congress was demanding the installation of a retractable Capitol dome. On June 3, 2002, the Beijing Evening News scooped its competitors with a shocking story from America: the U.S. Congress was threatening to leave Washington DC…
Spurious Submission Hoaxes
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: A hoaxer takes a well-regarded work and alters a few key details, such as the title and name of the author. He then submits the manuscript to a publisher. Usually the publisher fails to recognize the work and rejects it. Every year publishers receive thousands of…
Stotham Massachusetts
Type: Hoax. Summary: A Massachusetts town, described as an example of an unspoiled New England village, turned out not to exist. Frontispiece to Ripley’s articleThe White Pine Monograph Series was a series of carefully researched, high quality brochures, paid for by Weyerhaeuser mills and edited by Russell Whitehead, that collected…
Sympsychography
Type: Hoax. Summary: A scientific article describes a new photographic process that is able to capture thoughts on film. A sympsychographic image of a cat. From Popular Science Monthly (Sep., 1896): 601.An article by the famous scientist David Starr Jordan (president of Indiana University and Stanford University) appeared in the…
Theft of the Sacred Cod
Type: College Prank. Summary: In 1933 Harvard students “codnapped” the Sacred Cod of Massachusetts. The Sacred Cod of Massachusetts. Theft is one of the classic and most-often-used tools in the toolbox of college pranksters. All manner of prized items are regularly spirited away at campuses throughout the world: statues, bells,…
Thomas Chatterton
Type: Literary forgery. Summary: A young man in eighteenth-century England claimed to have found poetry by a fifteenth-century priest. The Death of Chatterton, Oil Painting by Henry Wallis, 1856As a young boy growing up in Bristol, Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) spent a great deal of time with his uncle, the sexton…
Total Body Replacement
Type: Technique of photo fakery. Summary: A common form of image manipulation involves cutting-and-pasting a person’s head onto someone else’s body. Image manipulation software such as Adobe’s Photoshop allows photo editors to alter the appearance of their subjects in many ways. With a click of a mouse they can erase…
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
Illustration from the earliest printed edition of Mandeville’s Travels showing some of the various races and species that Mandeville claimed to have encountered, including (clockwise from top left): the wild men with horns and hoofs; the people with eyes in their shoulders; the folk that have but one foot; and…
Trial of Polly Baker
Type: Literary Hoax. Summary: The story of a woman tried for giving birth to five children out of wedlock provoked widespread popular outrage during the eighteenth century. In 1747 the text of a speech delivered by a woman, Polly Baker, accused by British magistrates in a court in Colonial America…
