FAKE FAKE ART is a book of photographs by Andreas Schmidt and presents 19 portraits of famous artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Gerhard Richter and their paintings. But like with so many other of Schmidt's books, not everything is as it seems.



Schmidt re-photographed a selected number of pages from the book "Real Fake Art", containing a body of photographs about copy artists working in Dafen, China, taken by German photographer Michael Wolf. Andreas Schmidt proceeded to scan the world wide web for images of the painters whose work had been copied and commissioned a Chinese retouching firm via e-mail and at a total cost of £ 76 to combine the images under his supervision and unambiguous directions.

Schmidt’s act of personal intellectual creation, although done by a third person, could be described as reflective recycling. It transformes Wolf’s photographs into surprising, often breathtakingly uncanny possibilities. One big question, however, remains : Is it ART, is it FAKE ART or is it, as the title suggests, FAKE FAKE ART?