The Wish-Shaped Fake: A Term and Its Limits

The wish-shaped fake is a term coined by Hoax and Hindsight for a forgery that published studies show was accepted partly because it fit what its audience expected at the time. It is an analytical figure of speech, used to frame one question about a case. It is not a definition of what forgery is, and it does not explain why forgeries succeed in general.

When the term applies

The wish-shaped fake applies only when two conditions are met.

1. The object or document has been shown to be a forgery, by a test or inquiry that the case page names.
2. Historians or other specialists who studied the case have discussed, in print, why it was accepted, and they count its fit with the audience's expectations among the important reasons.

When a case page uses the term, it names the published study it relies on. The audience's expectations are set beside the other reasons a forgery was accepted, such as the skill of the work, the limits of testing at the time, or the standing of the people who vouched for it. Expectation is never presented as the only cause, and the site draws no conclusion about it where no study has made the argument.

When it does not apply

• Fakes exposed quickly. If a forgery was doubted and exposed soon after it appeared, there is little acceptance to explain.
• Fakes with no clear expectation behind them. If the audience had no evident hope or belief that the forgery answered, the term adds nothing.
• Cases where doubt was voiced early. The Mechanical Turk, an eighteenth-century chess-playing machine, is a counterexample: some who watched it in the 1780s suspected that a hidden player worked it, and the suspicion was in print by 1784. Its success cannot simply be put down to an audience that wanted to believe.
• People rather than objects. Impostors who claimed an identity, such as Anna Anderson and the Tichborne Claimant, made claims about themselves; they did not produce a forged object, and the term is not used for them.

Where this site uses the term

Applies, with a stated limit

• Han van Meegeren's forged paintings: Christ at Emmaus fits in the reading of John Godley's 1951 biography, which says the picture was made to fill a gap in Vermeer's career with the kind of religious work experts might believe had been lost. Godley wrote at the request of van Meegeren's family, so the page gives this as his reading and sets beside it the other causes he names for the later sales.

Applies only on a condition

• The Kensington Runestone: if the stone is the hoax that the summary of a 2015 study calls it, that study's account of belief in the stone as part of a local Nordic community's identity meets the second condition. The fit is the page's own reading of the summary. The pull was local, and the specialists consulted in 1899 and 1910 were not persuaded.

Counterexamples

• The Mechanical Turk: in the records read for its page, people who watched the machine in the 1780s suspected a hidden player, and one of them printed the suspicion in 1784.
• Anna Anderson and the Tichborne Claimant: each claimed an identity rather than producing a forged object, so the term is not used for them.

Checked, and not used

• The Vinland Map and the Cottingley fairy photographs: the sources read for these pages include no published study of why the map or the photographs were accepted, so the term is left out.

Why the term exists

The site's view, offered as a stance and not as a law of history, is that what an age was fooled by often shows what it wanted to believe. The wish-shaped fake gives that view a narrow, testable form, case by case. It is meant to direct attention to the audience, not to blame it: the site rejects the idea that the people who were fooled were simply foolish, and the About page explains why.

The site's two other terms are courtroom folklore and the time-stamped wish.