FORGERIES AND FORGERS ON THE FINE ARTS MARKET

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Many forgeries have been taken for originals for years, even centuries. With the advance of science and technology, it became possible to perform numerous analyses of artifacts whose authenticity is questioned. One would expect that those tests are run routinely, however, that is not the case. Analyses can be costly, may take a long time and some of them can even irrevocably damage the artifact tested. Therefore, even the most prestigious of museums worldwide have forgeries in their collections and the most renowned auction houses auction forgeries at the price of the originals, from time to time. Knowing that those prices sometimes reach millions of euros, it is clear that forgery has become a very lucrative business. Since verifying the authenticity of an artifact which was created in recent years is most difficult due to ready availability of the materials used, it can be anticipated that the art markets in the near future will be flooded with forgeries of modern art pieces.

BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY: THE MAKING OF DANIEL BRAUT (BONDESTUDENTAR) BY ARNE GARBORG

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This article analyses a mismatch between student reality and fictive depictions of student life, in a classic work of Norwegian literature – Bondestudentar (1883) by Arne Garborg. The novel is translated into English as The Making of Daniel Braut. Addressing the dichotomy between (false) ideals and (true) reality, which is in the center of Garborg’s novel, the article explores Garborg’s critique of the idealist myths about academic life. Romantic representations of the student were, at the time when Garborg was writing his novel, still very much alive in the Norwegian literature and thought. His book seeks to unravel the falseness of these idyllic images, by presenting a “realistic” image of the poor, famished, morally collapsed student. While the first part of the article explores the method by which the story unravels the fictitiousness of the ideas of an “ideal student life”, the second part analyses the readers’ reactions to Garborg’s representations of academic life. Majority of Garborg’s contemporary readers did not acknowledge the fictitiousness of his realistic interpretations, finding them to be true depictions of students in the Norway’s capital, and treating the protagonist of the novel as their contemporary.

CULTURE, CLASS AND COUNTERFEIT GENEALOGIES IN ANGELA CARTER’S WISE CHILDREN

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Drawing on concepts from cultural studies and cultural materialism, Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children can be interpreted as a text where struggles between dominant and subordinate groups are fought, illuminating thus the markedly leftist undertones of its narrative. Carter foregrounds the family lies of the Hazard household to destabilize the entrenched notions of paternity, culture and class infrastructure in 20th century Britain, exhibiting a postmodern awareness of the multiplicity of truth and its distortion by the culturally hegemonic groups. The novel’s narrator, Dora Chance, tells her own and her sister’s history of exclusion from the Hazard clan – the British theatrical royalty – and their consequential rejection by the institutions of elite culture. Her account undermines the foundations of the British class system and the low vs. high culture dichotomy by divulging multiple misattributed paternities that underpin these social constructs.

LYING IN THE FILM LOS AMANTES PASAJEROS BY PEDRO ALMODÓVAR

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In his film I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros), Almodóvar assigned direct critical function to his movie. Using many words and expressions to legitimize expressed lies, Almodóvar’s movie provides us with a corpus for analysis of the linguistic means that are used in Spanish in a communication based on lies. Considering that people primarily lie using language, from a linguistic point of view, a lie could be analyzed as an act of speech. Since lying was traditionally an ethical issue, this paper analyses a lie from a linguistic perspective and views their false assertions as acts of speech within a conversational context. Lying is viewed as a speech act of insincere assertion. Telling a lie in a performative construction would destroy it. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, a lie is “a false statement made with the intent to deceive“. To lie is to make a believed-false statement with the intention that that statement be believed to be true by the other person. Grice (1975) concluded that when uttering a speech act, the speaker has certain intentions. To understand a speech act is to uncover speaker’s intention. In order for a lie to be considered a successful speech act, speaker’s intention must be concealed and since it is impossible for an addressee to recognize these intentions every time, the speech act of lying can be accomplished. In terms of conversational maxims, we are interested in the maxim of quality: be truthful. A speech act of lying directly contradicts this maxim. Examples for this paper were found in the film I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013) by a famous Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar. The examples are cited and analyzed chronologically.

PHILIP K. DICK IN AMAZON’S CASTLE

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Amazon’s adaptation of The Man in the High Castle brings about numerous changes to the original Philip K. Dick’s story. However, even if fidelity is no longer regarded as a valid criterion for evaluation of adaptation, as it is no longer considered essential in theory and criticism, the series is not an example of successful adaptation due to its failure to translate the key ideas of the novel into the new form. The series brings into focus elements that introduce, intensify and multiply Dick’s fake fake instead of highlighting those that contribute to the discovery of inner truth. In its centering on the surface, visible consequences of the lost war and not on America as an authoritarian creation in which, due to endless replication, it is no longer possible to discern authentic objects, people and realities from the fake ones, the adaptation fails to highlight key social, economic and political problems and dilemmas that equally plague the present and the past, as Dick’s unique fictional realities do. Unfortunately, the idea of fake fake is successfully conveyed to the viewers – or perhaps it would be more suitable to call them consumers – primarily by transforming the novel into a product with potential for commercial exploitation and its own replication into new seasons.

STANLEY KUBRICK’S CYNICAL DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

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This paper analyses deceiving and self-deceiving aspects of society in Stanley Kubrick’s films, which illustrate the problems of enlightenment from the perspective of critical theory and poststructuralism. A Space Odyssey registers the source of Nietzschean power relations in human nature. A violent humanity is the foundation of the one-dimensional Cold War society and welfare state, where misinforming the communists or its own population is justified by a “higher cause”. Political interests deliver their own version of the truth. Pseudo-individuality and conformity are present not just on this very planet, but also among astronauts in space. The film also shows a countercultural opposition, and the critique of it is further developed in A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick does not accept a classic Marcusean view of the second dimension. The Nietzschean nature forms both language and action of youth subcultures, and the difference between the good and the evil is rhetorically blurred. Aggressive hero becomes the victim of Foucauldian prison discipline, and for Kubrick its consequence is the loss of free will to make moral decisions. By prohibiting lying and violence, i.e. by “normalizing”, good behaviour stops being an action of free will. Also, cruelty of the main character becomes a public virtue (Horkheimer and Adorno’s totalitarianism), and becomes useful to the social elites. Calculative and sadistic aspects of enlightenment are brought in collision, with no clear resolutions, forming life in the risky and reflexive modernity. Kubrick’s dialectics of enlightenment caries a cynical implication that lies and violence are both enemies and constituents of enlightenment.

WHAT APPEARS IS NOT WHAT IS: JEANETTE WINTERSON’S ART & LIES AND THE PASSION

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It would be no mistake to state that among the commonest routes contemporary literature in English takes is one of asserting history’s and reality’s fictionality and dissolving the boundary between real and imaginary. The route is certainly common enough in the work of the controversial British author Jeanette Winterson, whose prose is a never-ending interplay between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. Winterson’s critically neglected Art & Lies (1995) epitomises the disintegration of clear-cut lines between (auto)biography, history and fiction through a set of binaries like art/life, art/lie, or fact/fiction, transforming our ideas of truth and lie. Similar concerns inform The Passion (1987), which is more universally praised. The parallels between the two works suggest a continuum in Winterson’s literary explorations of the nature of truth and reality, the status of fiction and historical record, and the usefulness of binaries and labels. This paper aims at exploring how these polyphonic prose pieces rebel against single points of view, redefine the notions of history as fact and storytelling as fabrication, and exhibit a preference for the truth of the imagination and unofficial perspectives.

THE LIES OF LIBERALISM IN IAN MCEWAN’S NOVELS

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The paper locates moments of exposure of ideological lies of liberalism on a corpus of three novels by Ian McEwan (Cement Garden, Black Dogs and Saturday). In spite of Ian McEwan’s reputation as a liberal intellectual, the paper demonstrates that the novels which are often read as homage to liberalism can in fact be interpreted as a critique of liberalism. In McEwan’s novels one can find moments of fierce critique of the nuclear family as the ideological bedrock of liberalism. Moreover, the novels also establish close links between liberalism and fascism and point to the existence of what Eco called “ur-fascism” in Western Civilization. Also, the paper sheds some light on the paradoxical feeling of a chronic lack of freedom in liberal societies and ends by giving examples of McEwan’s pessimistic attitude towards the future of the liberal society or the modern Western civilization encumbered by the historical baggage of fascism as well as the structural inability to overcome it within the bounds of liberal ideology.

(DE)FALSIFICATION OF SCOTTISH HISTORY IN JOHN MCGRATH’S THE CHEVIOT, THE STAG AND THE BLACK, BLACK OIL

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McGrath’s purpose in staging the political play based on Scottish history was primarily to expose and de-falsify the destructive clearance pattern that had remorselessly been repeated in the last three centuries, but was officially depicted as progressive and developmental for the Scottish region. Although the “brutal” methods of the Highland clearances from the eighteenth and nineteenth century had definitely remained in the past, McGrath posed an important question of whether the phenomenon of clearances had actually been dispensed with in the twentieth century. The theoretical framework of the paper relies on the acutely relevant critical insights of Rich, Dawson, Farber, Brown, Innes, as well as McGrath himself.

TRUE LIES OF MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

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Throughout his literary career, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, has almost constantly dealt with the problem of lies, in different ways. In his eighteen novels, numerous essays and several theatre plays, we can recognize the motif of various forms of lies – mainly expressed through the hypocrisy of the society, military and the clergy – so we can safely say that lies are one of the key themes of narrative and essayistic works of Mario Vargas Llosa. From his point of view, lies are not only part of everyday life, vessels of every society and every subject of fiction, but they are also an integral part of each individual, as well as of life itself. In this paper we have tried to research all the aspects of his interest in the topic – from his childhood to the electoral period in Peru (1990), described in Fish in Water (El pez en el agua, 1993) and his latest novel Five corners (Cinco esquinas, 2016). We have paid special attention to Mario Vargas Llosa’s theoretical views regarding literature and lies, expressed in his various essays: True Lies (Las mentiras verdaderas, 1980), The Art of Lying (El arte de mentir, 1984), The Truth About Lies (La verdad de las mentiras, 1990), The Temptation of the Impossible (La tentación de lo imposible, 2004), as well as his lectures after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (2010).