amphibious heterodox @nihilisticplatypus - Tumblr Blog

Could a depressed person do this??!?

Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.

glumshoe

Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.

cipherface-deactivated20200224

I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.

glumshoe

“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.”” And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.

skweebs

Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.

His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny.

“ Bob Simon: What do you think this Max Ernst would be worth? Wolfgang Beltracchi: This one? Simon: Yeah. Beltracchi: $5 million, I think. Simon: $5 million. And you can do it in three days? Beltracchi: Yeah, oh yes, yes, sure, or quicker” -From a 60 minutes interview with Bob Simon

In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.

“Beltracchi estimates he has done 25 Max Ernsts. He is not copying an existing work. He’s painting something he thinks Ernst might have done if he’d had the time or felt like it.” - The Con Artist: A multi-million dollar art scam

His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.

At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”

out-there-on-the-maroon

Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible.

therobotmonster

That’s just rapscallionry.

digitaldiscipline

This is what AI wants to take from us.

lucybellwood

Let’s add Tom Keating to the mix, yeah?

Keating painted more than 2,000 forgeries by over 100 different artists in his sixty-six years. Many had fraudulently sold at auctions with the total profits estimated at over 10 million dollars. “I flooded the market with the work of Palmer and many others,” the artist said. “Not for gain (I hope I am no materialist) but simply as a protest against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead. It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty,” he defended in The Fake’s Progress, his autobiography. “All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death.” […] Keating had a great respect and understanding of all the artists he imitated but was always reckless in his handling of the materials. He often used house paint and poster paint to mix in with his acrylics as a cheaper way to achieve the impasto works. At times he wouldn’t bother preparing his antique canvases he found at the junk shops out of laziness, so that in just a few years the paint would peel right off to reveal what was originally underneath. Keating often planted what he called “time bombs” like this in his paintings. Because of his understanding of the chemicals used in art restoration, Keating would purposely paint with layers of glycerin, which would destroy the painting once it was cleaned by a restorer, proving it was a fake. He often wrote obscenities under his paintings, like “Bollocks!”, in lead white so that it could be seen by the experts who x-rayed the painting to check its authenticity.

- Darby Milbrath, Tom Keating on Painters

nemfrog

Before the excavations.

A history of all nations from the earliest times. 1906.

Internet Archive

fromdarzaitoleeza

{Words by José Olivarez from Citizen Illegal /@fatimaamerbilal , from even flesh eaters don't want me.}

frankiedotbiz

THIS IS WHAT THE AMERICAN FLAG WILL LOOK LIKE IF IT WAS AWESOME

frankiedotbiz

handblogfortherecentlydeceased

“The Obsolete Man,” The Twilight Zone

nihilisticplatypus

What big eyes you have... what big teeth you have!

Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999)

nihilisticplatypus

I WANT TO BELIEVE

nihilisticplatypus

ONIBABA (1964)

director Kaneto Shindo

I built a portable LRAD, powered by two 18650 batteries & encased in an old airsoft gun. Basically, it's an incredibly loud speaker - but one that only really works if it's pointed right at you. It takes advantage of an interesting property of ultrasound. While ultrasound frequencies are too high pitched for humans to hear, they can be made to carry a modulated audible soundwave that demodulates when it bounces off a solid object (think two rapidly switching ultrasonic frequencies, which combined [after colliding with a non-air medium] produce the sound you want to hear - whether or not this is because high frequency sounds behave nonlinearly [allowing them to interact] is a little unclear in my research). The actual circuit board that converts audio into the modulated signal was sourced from a Japanese supplier, although I tuned it myself & did the battery/power conversion, and used a Tascam audio recorder for both pre-loaded sounds & an optional mic pass through.

It actually works really well in real-life (for example, in a large room, pointing the device at the far end of the roon gives the illusion that audio is coming from the other side of the room, and not the device), but it records very poorly on my phone. I'm hoping to shoot a better video demonstrating how it works, although I smashed the horn accidentally while shooting photos (which isn't strictly necessary anyway). For better examples, it's based on the "sound from ultrasound" principle used by audio engineers like Woody Norris or Joseph Pompeii, which have many examples online.

#tech #technology #audio #military technology