What Can We Learn From Fakes?

- The talk today is going to be slightly different probably to some of the many discussions you've heard about fakes, because a lot of what we hear about fakes is actually that they are, it's rubbish and it should almost be dismissed. And what I'm hoping today is that we can talk about fakes and see whether there's anything that we can learn from paying attention to them. What do they actually teach us? And what can we, what can they show us? What blind spots do we have in terms of our learning and understanding? So I'm hoping that you are going to be able to engage with this, and I'm really looking forward to your questions. Okay, so, I'm going to start the talk in a particular location. So, in the basement of a residential building in Vienna directly opposite the Hundertwasser House, which is actually Vienna's most sort of famous example of expressionist architecture, I'll get to that a bit later, is the Fälschermuseum, which translates as the Museum of Art Fakes. I've... This place to me is absolutely fascinating because it is the sole intention of this museum is actually to collect the fake paintings of famous art forgers. So actually we've got Han van Meegeren, the well known Vermeer counterfitter, he's there. And there's also Elmyr de Hory, who's believed to be the most prolific art forger in the world. He has painted Rembrandts, Picassos, Monet's and these, and has sold them to reputable art galleries all around the world. Some of his imitations have gone for millions of dollars. So one of his Picassos went for 50 mil, the equivalent of $50 million in today's money, in the 1960s. And what's really interesting is the vast majority of his work, some estimate around 90% of his work is actually still hanging on the walls of many of the galleries. Every, you know, few years, one of them gets revealed as technology becomes much more precise in detecting fakes. But some of these are still hanging on the walls today. And some would argue that they are sort of known to be fake, but strategically ignored. So one of the things I find really fascinating about the Fälschermuseum is actually it really seeks to sort of celebrate the skill and the expertise of these art forgers and really forces us to really pay attention to what they can teach us. One of the things that they are depict, how they're depicted in the museum as this kind of antiheroes. They're there and they expose the kind of ego and the hubris of these art experts. So what we see is these kinds of antiheroes going up against this very small closed worlds of a handful of experts that get to decide whether a Picasso is a Picasso or a Monet is, in fact, a Monet. And the pieces that are celebrated in the museum are really the, one of the things that they try to do is to really question, who is the expert. And if these paintings are so good that they were able to fool these art experts, what can we learn from them? So one of the things I found... A couple of years ago, I did a podcast called, Explaining the Genuine Fake,"Exploring the Genuine Fake," sorry, and I really enjoyed it. I had 10 different, it was 10 different podcasts. And I invited people to come and speak about this, their ideas about the genuine fake, which are fakes which are both real and fake at the same time. And one of the people who came along was Vernon Rapley and Vernon is actually the Director of the Cultural Heritage Protection and Security at the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was absolutely fascinating, as you can imagine. But what he was saying was that actually these forgers invest more time in fabricating all the documents that they will need to prove that a Picasso is a Picasso, than they do sometimes the actual paintings themselves. And they often forge the documents first. And if they can't have convincing documents, then they often won't pursue the painting. So this is also really fascinating as well, to look at the kind of effort that goes into forging. And one of the things that Vernon was so great at explaining was that fakes don't exist on their own. One fake always leads to another fake, because in order to have really good documents to support a fake painting you need to have access to whole ecosystems of people who can produce fake letterheads, and so they often exist alongside lots of other fakes. But what's really fascinating is that these forgers, they become kind of experts at delivering the kinds of evidence that they think that experts want to see. And I found this really interesting to learn about. So what we know is that some experts might prefer official documents from the University of Oxford. And so forgers will spend a lot of time investing in the right types of paper, the right type of ink, to be able to forge that, even before they even start looking at the painting. So what we start to see is a kind of a way of understanding authority and expertise from the fake. What the art forgers know is that because so much deference is given to the opinion of a really small, closed group of people that if they can convince one of two of those people that their fake is real, they know they have access to art galleries who often unquestionably will accept this opinion of this expert. And then, they're onto the walls of these galleries sometimes indefinitely. So I've found it's really fascinating when we think about the, Museum of Art Fakes is it teaches us to think through the role of expertise and actually sometimes how easily that can be manipulated. It also asks questions of who gets to become an expert and by what means. So seven streets away from the Fälschermuseum, on the corner of Stadtpark, is the meeting point of a walking tour for "The Third Man," which was famously filmed on location in Vienna. I can actually nerdishly confess to having been on this walking tour, directed by Carol Reed and released in 1949."The Third Man" is based on a book by Graham Green and that tells the story of Harry Lime, a racketeer who fakes penicillin in postwar Vienna. I don't know if any of you've seen "The Third Man," some of you have, but for those of you who have seen it, you'll know that Harry Lime is played by Orson Welles and he leads a gang who stole penicillin from a military hospital. They adulterated it, fabricated it, and then sold it on. The authorities are actually onto Lime and so he fakes his death. The film actually centers on the search for Lime, takes us through the sewers and the underground networks of Vienna. The audience starts uncover more about Lime through a close friend of his who is actually visiting Vienna to try and find him. And we meet his Czech girlfriend who he presents this false persona to. But we get to see another side of Lime as somebody who's caring. He gives his girlfriend a fake passport that allows her to stay without, and she's not deported to Russia. So through these characters, the audience is actually ends up being quite endeared to Lime. He's a kind of anti-hero. We don't actually want him to get caught as he's running through all the sewers. We see absolutely no evidence of his crime. We just, only suggestion and rumor. And these are really discounted by his girlfriend and his friend, because they don't know that aspect of him. So what we learn from the kind of fake that's presented is that fakes often exist at a certain moment in time of sort of great social upheaval where the decisions of key institutions seem arbitrary, morally questionable. You know, we get to see the sense of a kind of trust deficit in many of the institutions in post-war Vienna. And also we get to see a kind of different range of fakes. So we get to see the fake passport. We get to see the fake death. We get, you know, lots of different, the fake penicillin. The film is, really, for those of you who haven't seen it, I would recommend it. So while Hundertwasser House is considered one of Vienna's most famous examples of expressionist architecture,"The Third Man" is also regarded as a classic for its use of expressionism as a cinematic tool. The expressionist movement developed in the 20th century, mainly in Germany, as a reaction to the sort of dehumanizing effect of industrialization. I want to talk about it here because it's used so much in "The Third Man" and it's in art in particular, this expressionism is really displays itself as a kind of distorted angles, lighting, and scenes for emotional effects are used and it's often dramatic. And in "The Third Man," the lighting is absolutely crucial. So we see the really atmospheric uses of black and white. We see harsh lighting and significant shadows. The shadows are actually really significant throughout the film as an important tool. And the shadows are really use to sort of challenge our attachment to binary opposites, to visibility and invisibility, to light and to dark, to black and white, and ultimately, to our ideas of real and fake. The film is also fascinating. Sorry, mistake on that one. The film is also really fascinating because in addition to this lighting, it also uses a technique known as a Dutch or Deutsch tilt, where the camera is focused on a skewed angle. This is actually used as a technique to convey kind of moral confusion. You know, what is it about Lime? You know, who is he and why is he on the run? The peculiar placement of the camera in the film is one of the most expressionist aspects of it. And it's used throughout. That is until the camera kind of pans to the evidence of the severity of Lime's crime, the children who consumed his fake penicillin. So not only do we have Lime's girlfriend, who's sort of taken in by his fake persona, we, the audience, are beguiled and then manipulated as well. The movement from kind of confusion to moral clarity is made possible through the lighting. But then we're told the harsh truth about penicillin. There's a famous line in the film that says,"the lucky children died." So no longer is there any kind of ambiguity. The message of the film is really unequivocal. Fakes are immoral and medicines kill, fake medicines kill children. So the take home message about fakes here is that while we could say, okay, fakes are, to my knowledge, never killed anyone, but there is kind of an exception in the realm of health. What we have are different ideas of fakes. So we get introduced to the good fake, the passport, that's done to undermine these sort of really arbitrary and harsh government rules that don't, you know, that really blight people's lives. But then we have the bad fake. And it's bad because it doesn't work, but it's also morally bad cause it harms people. So we get these sort of distinction between fakes and their moral consequences in the film. In 1999, the British Film Institute actually called "The Third Man" one of the most, it was in fact, the number one British film of the 20th century. That was just the kind of accolade. Its star, Orson Welles, continued his kind of lifelong fascination with authenticity and fakes. But while the fake man was kind of unequivocal that fakes were bad, Orson Welles relationship with the fakes was a bit more nuanced. He demonstrated this in his docudrame" F for Fakes," which he starred in and co-wrote, and in fact was the last film that he directed. So it starts off with him doing some magic tricks. And then, as if almost by magic, he, it segues into the story of Elmyr de Hory, the art forger who is at the Fälschermuseum in Vienna, whose paintings are celebrated there. The film actually recounts de Hory's career as a master art forger, a central theme in de Hory's story is a desire to be known as an artist in his own right. And he questions throughout, why can't I be accepted in the art world using my own name? He really wonders, at what point can he move from a fake to a real artist. And reflecting on this in many ways, I feel that de Hory's position really reflects and mirrors some of the work that I've been doing with shadow scholars in Kenya. So the shadow scholars is a term that's used to describe a group of people who, a sizeable group of educated and very sort of technically adept young people in Kenya who write for others. They do so in secret. And they do it in a number of different papers from subjects, from nursing, medicine, science. They write for journal publications, they write essays, they do assignments for other people and dissertations. Normally when I say that, people think, why didn't I find that person when I was doing my dissertation, but... And they mostly write for people in the UK and the US. And they write as part of what's now become this kind of million dollar sort fake essay industry. Nairobi is a kind of epicenter of this global industry. And there are kind of conservative estimates of around 40,000 of these writers actively practicing there. They're described as shadow scholars, but it isn't a term that they would use to describe themselves often. The shadow position that they find themselves in is actually a kind of product of the surplus of highly educated and unemployed young people, the geopolitics that make it really hard for Kenyans actually to take up positions elsewhere, because of visa restrictions and really for the demand coming from the global north. Like I said, these Kenyan writers do not consider themselves to be shadows or fakes and they're producing bespoke, individual pieces of work. And so for they think they're the real thing and that it's their clients who are the shadows. So, just like the moral confusion that's been, that was created and discussed in "The Third Man," we learned that the observer's perspective is really important in determining whether something is real or fake. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan writer and post-colonialist theorist said,"the light source, whether the sun in the day or moon at night or fire inside or outside a house at the time, yes, even the time and the passage through the window or a crack in the wall, determine how the shadow falls on a subject." So Elmyr de Hory's optimism in "F for Fakes" provides hope for the possibility that time changes our relationship with fakes. That, you know, he argues if they hang on museum walls long enough, then they become real. So he's talking about his work. And the film itself actually depicts fakes as a bit of a misdirection. It's a distraction from us actually thinking about some of the more serious things around questions, around authorship, around authenticity and around experts. It's lingering question is who has the authority and actually the power to say that something is real or fake? And who is placed in the shadows and being described as fakes when we do that.'F for Fakes" wasn't well received, it didn't do very well in the Box Office. Its lack of clarity and moral certainty around real or fake was in many ways, I think ahead of its time. And it received, it was in Europe, actually, it was kind of lauded and people thought it was really interesting, but it was really panned in the US and didn't do well at all. And Orson Welles, this sort of explains the fact that it didn't do well by saying that the focus on questioning experts was a problem in the US, because at that time he felt that people were really bought into the idea of the sanctity of experts. And they didn't want to question it. Over time, we've seen , what we've seen is while the 20th century was really focused on individual fakers, such as people like Harry Lyme and Elmyr de Hory, increasingly the 21st century, actually the focus on fakes started to look more at systems, institutions and processes that, and that were the creators of fakes, that it was these things that produced fakes. We also sort of can see that actually in the 20, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century comedy and parody became really important tools in exposing fakery. And so the 2018 film "Dying to Survive" is a really great example of this. So I would really recommend this film if you haven't seen it is being critically okay and won lots of awards. And it's actually a comedy drama. And it is actually a comedy that sometimes people say, something's funny and you think, is it? But actually I was, I did actually laugh at this. I dunno what that says about my humor, but I did actually laugh. So the film tells us the story of a small drugstore owner, a man called Chen. So he's the man in the middle. And he tells a story of how he becomes this kind of exclusive selling agent in China for this Indian medicine, a drug that's used to treat cancer patients. So at the time, the Chinese patients were suffering with these overpriced medications from this particular Swiss pharmaceutical company. And Chen decides to basically, because he can't afford the medication for his father, who's ill. He decides to start smuggling this medicine in. Initially in really small numbers, and then realize there is a huge market for it. He starts by smuggling in what I described as fakes from India. He's initially presented as this kind of real deadbeat, you know, deadbeat, dad, husband, all of his stuff he's selling in his shop aren't very good. Nobody wants it. But then he becomes this kind of savior for the kind of thousands of Chinese patients with cancer who can't afford these medications. So the film really spends a lot of time looking at not only the protests against pharmaceutical companies, but also the fact that the real, the genuine medicine costs about 4,000 yen. But the medicine that he's bringing over from India costs 2000 yen. And yeah, so we really hear about this kind of incredible disparity in prices. And it asks questions around a kind of ethics of that. The film is interesting in lots of different ways, but the personal I found the most interesting was the priest at the end because the priest really acts as our moral barometer throughout the film and provides us with a kind of a sense constantly of right and wrong. So at the beginning, when Chen wants to access the patients in the priest congregation, to sell his medicines to them, and the priest says, no it's illegal. I'm not going to do it. But over time, the priest starts to really change his position because in conversation with Chen, Chen says, well, you know, is it wrong to do something illegal if it's saving lives? And so that's when we really start, the film really starts to explore this kind of moral attention. The priests themselves starts to see that the ways in which the pricing or pharmaceutical products is done is in itself a sin. And he sees this sin as a structural sin, a sin that's essentially organized where the legal system, the healthcare system, governments all act against the poor to keep them poor, but essentially to kill them. And so we start to see the kind of immorality of the real and the morality of the fake. So by that, I mean, immorality of the genuine medicine that the pharmaceutical companies are trying to sell. And the morality of the fake medicine that Chen brings over from India. Like "The Third Man," "Dying to Survive" actually is based on a true story. The film is based on a Chinese leukemia patient called Lu Yong who started smuggling in medicine from India, and then eventually started giving it to other cancer sufferers. So from this film, we really start to ask questions around who does the, who benefits from these ideas of real and fake, and who benefits from these kind of categories. While big pharma is kind of criticized in "Dying to Survive" in the real story behind "The Third Man," big pharma was actually the hero. So this is a newspaper clipping from 1946, which actually gives some insights into the real story that was underlined "The Third Man." So in 1941, the US and the UK government actually really issued a challenge to the pharmaceutical industry to just try to produce cheap, mass produce penicillin. And Pfizer was a company that actually was able to do that because it already had the infrastructure was making other things at the time was able to do that quickly. And this mass production of penicillin was, seemed to be responsible for essentially stamping out the fake penicillin trade, because what it meant was it became really unprofitable to have fake penicillin. There was a good enough supply of the genuine medicines and they were cheap and there was enough to meet demand. So increasing access to genuine penicillin, which needed less money was actually the reason why we saw the decline of fake penicillin. While big pharma companies like Pfizer, once hero was of the 20th century towards the end of that century, they became kind of mired in numerous scandals, accusations of fakery and the focus on of conspiracy theories. So the next couple of films, one is called"Blood and Henna." This is a Nigerian film based on the true story of the 1996 Pfizer clinical test study of new antibiotic Trovan in Kano, Nigeria, which resulted in the deaths of 11 children. This study was actually conducted without informed consent and with fake documents. And according to Ben Goldacre in his book, "Bad Pharma," Pfizer argued actually, he didn't need informed consent for drug trials in Africa. Alongside earlier films, such as " The Constant Gardener," whose plot is also based on this Nigerian case clinical trial. Pharmaceutical companies were really running on a kind of a trust deficit towards the end of the 20th century and into the 20th first century. But in the 21st century, the theme of fake medicines actually continued albeit with kind of greater complexity. We started to see big pharma really ringing the alarm about fake medicines, but at the same time and in particular fake medicines coming from India and China, but these came at time and actually trust in big pharma was shaky. And what we've learned about fakes is that they exist in a trust deficit where confidence in institutions are low and when there's economic and moral uncertainty. So here we are. In the last few years, especially in relation to the COVID 19 pandemic, we've witnessed actually an avalanche of fakes from this and misinformation, everything from fake vaccine passports to the vaccines themselves. And really at the start of the discussion, we had Elmyr de Hory, asking us, you know, can the fake ever move out of the realm of the fake? Can the fake ever become real? More recently, we've actually got the reverse problem. What we've got is a problem where we are witnessing the real being treated as fake. I want to take the case of a colleague of mine, Dr. Elisa Granato. So on the 25 of April, 2020 microbiologist, Dr. Elisa Granato woke up to the news that she had sadly passed away. She read that the cause of her death was unclear, but learned that it had global significance. She was the first person to volunteer in Oxford COVID 19 trial. What she had, she had experienced complications, only hours after receiving the vaccine and sadly died two days later. The news of her death went viral. It went across major social media platforms and was picked up by mainstream media. Her friends and families were said to be shocked and saddened. That morning, Elisa Granato took to Twitter to declare there's nothing quite like waking up to an fake article on your death. I'm doing fine, everyone. Unfortunately, that didn't do enough. She continued to be bombarded with flowers, apologies, sympathies. People started to gather around to mourn her death. She then took up to her Twitter profile, changed it to say, Dr. Elisa Granato 100% alive. But for many, this rebuttal was in fact, just more evidence of a conspiracy that was totally designed to conceal her death from the public. Her tweets declaring herself to be alive and well were read with as a familiar tactic of any cover up. They would say that wouldn't they? It was all part of a big denial. Today for me, I mean, I actually spoke to her last week, so she's very much alive and she's got a really good sense of humor as well. But today, Dr. Granato's death life is really fascinating and it gives a real fascinating insight into the strength of these kind of conspiracies and the strength of feeling about collusions between big pharma, governments and the powerful elites who skew systems, institutions, and processes. They produce fake narratives and what these conspiracies have done and that they've often taken things that we have had a consensus on as real and opened them up to certain types of questions. So they've taken proven theories and medicines that we all agree are safe, and they've opened those up and treated them as fake. What the case study, what Elisa Granato has shown is that it's in fact really difficult once this has been decided, something's been decided has happened to move out of the, to dissuade people that you are real when they think that you've, you are dead. I mean, she has fake book pages with thousands of people who are kind of campaigning to have her made into a martyr. People meet, have been meeting to mourn her death online all over the world. Places she herself has never even been to before people meet regularly to talk about what they can do to get justice for her. And she sent me some of, she showed me some of the paintings that get delivered to her office, life size paintings of her, people trying to commemorate her, and she's walking around alive and well. I also wanted to share this. I just couldn't actually help myself. I found this so funny for a number of reasons. This is an email that was sent to me because I was actually, I was one of the subcommittees of Sage during COVID 19. And there was something so very English about this, I couldn't help it. So this is completely insulting. It tells me, you know, that you can nudge your vaccine passport as far up your back passage as it will go. Perhaps... So then they go on to apologize. But what I really love and what I think is really fascinating about this is how it ends with have a lovely weekend, you know, after this barge of insults, which I just think is such an English thing. But so basically the accusation here is because I was on the committee and I'm funded by Wellcome that I'm somehow part of this cabal. I am funded by Wellcome. And I am on the committee. Those things are true. I can vouch for that. And there other people can vouch for that, but I have never had a conversation with any of the other people who are copied in this email, including included Chris Whitty and Jeremy Farrar about vaccine passports. But how do I prove that to a group of people who have convinced themselves that I am having these kind of clandestine meetings about my work? And so this is what I think is really fascinating is when you find yourself entangled in these kind of conspiracy theories, I mean, I am at the very, very sort of I'm small fry. I mean, no, one's really caring about me too much, but when you know, somebody like Elisa Granato when you find yourself in these sort of entanglements, how do you get yourself out? How do you move from this space into trying to prove that you are real? And this is one of the things that's so difficult. So what we have now is this space I should been described as a kind of hybrid space. So most interestingly, like the painter, like the paintings of the kind of master art forgers that I discussed at the beginning, most of these stories actually contain elements of truth. There's some elements of real in it. Yes. I'm funded by the Wellcome. Yes, I was on this committee, but they have fake things that are intertwined in it. So we no longer have this things where things can be objectively dismissed as rubbish. We have to almost kind of do the work to disentangle the reel from the fake. And so what we have now is a very similar situation where the people producing fake news stories or conspiracy theories become very adept at knowing exactly what their market want and the things that can be easily proved. So somebody Googles me, they can find out that I am, funded by the Wellcome, they can find out that I am based in Oxford, which is where Jeremy Farrar was also based. He is the director of the Wellcome, so you can, those things are true, but everything else is not true. And so that nuance is really difficult to communicate. Just like the picture of Elisa Granato, she was one of the first people to get the COVID vaccine, but she's alive. And how does she prove that to all the thousands of people that meet regularly online? She actually issued a video which went out to people to say, hi, I'm Dr. Elisa Granato just to let you all know I'm actually alive, which must be a sentence. she never thought she'd be ever saying in her life. And no one believed it. They were like, it's a deep fake. So then she was completely, you know, back to square one. So how do we get ourselves from having interesting discussions about fakes, but also not seeing everything as a fake and how do we get ourselves to take seriously people's concerns, but not kind of get mired into conspiracy theories? And so what becomes really clear is that increasingly the fake is really difficult to disentangle from the real, and it really requires trust. And a lot of trust in external organizations, the people who are supposed to be custodians. What's kind of dangerous at the moment is when the real and effect become kind of a matter of opinion and perspective. But at the same time, they do reveal certain opinions and perspectives. And so I think, what they ask us for sometimes is greater trust and greater confidence in institutions. And they actually ask for kind of core to action for those institutions to make themselves more transparent, more trustworthy, and to give us more confidence in them so that we believe in them. I found actually trying to conclude this talk really difficult. Just 'cause actually we are still learning. We're still understanding fakes because technology now plays such a big role in understanding fakery. Not only in producing it, but also the way in which we understand it. But we can see that actually fakes are sometimes indication of kind of access issues, affordable and safe medicines, high quality information, trustworthy experts. And eliminating fakes can be seen to require governments who are really seen to protect the poor against big corporations. And I think what we are seeing now are kind of a time where we're trying to think through some of the sort of different ethical implications of different types of fakes. So we've seen that throughout this discussion, there are different types of fakes and that require us to have almost different types of ethical positions, but what the fake reveals is certain kinds of vantage points and the role of the observer in what we consider to be fake or fakery. We have to justify that now. We can no longer say that's fake or that's real. Increasingly that has to be accompanied by its fake because this has happened. And then those justifications are then also questioned. So it's really, it becomes incredibly difficult now increasingly to speak with any confidence. And what we've learned from looking at art forgeries is the painting we are absolutely certain is a Picasso today, we could find out in a few years because of infrared sort of technologies is in fact a fake . What's what to say. Thank you for listening. And I really want to hear your questions. Thank you.(audience clapping)- If a painting is good enough to be bought by an art gallery, does it matter if it's not by the person it says it is, does its value lie in who it's by rather than how beautiful it is?- That's a good question. And I think that's a question that has really... Well I think it's inspired the Museum of Art Fakes, but it's one of the things that Elmyr de Hory, and lots of other people have really spoken a lot about, which is value is more than financial value. If you have a Picasso and you enjoy it as a Picasso only to find out it wasn't by Picasso, it might change your enjoyment of it. And I think Vernon Rapley speaks about this on the podcast where he talks about, sometimes having to be the person that breaks the news to someone that, that Monet that they've had for all of these years and been handed down as an heirloom isn't in fact worth a great deal. And that some people actually think, well, I don't care. It was my grandmother's and I'm still going to enjoy it. So it isn't necessarily about the factors of Monet, it's about the fact it's been in the family for a long time, or it's the fact that it's been enjoyed. I find these problems so removed from what most of us are thinking about I mean, I will never be in a position to have a real or fake Picasso. So I think it's about having something that you value probably for itself rather than because it's a Picasso because it's a Monet.- [Man] Professor thank you. That was fascinating. As I listened to your talk, I was trying to make my mind up about what made a fake virtuous or non-virtuous? And I started off by thinking that the virtuous fake sort of punctures, the vested interests of the powerful somehow, so if it's a fake Balenciaga or a fake Rolex or a fake Rembrandt, you know, I kind of admire the fact that these vested interests are being challenged. And then I was thinking about the non-virtuous and I was thinking, well, that feels as though it's preying on the vulnerabilities of the powerless. So, you know, Harry Lime's fake medication, but then the last bit, does the idea of the fake reality fit into what I was, you know, beginning to think there? Or is it something completely different or is it challenging the power fall that unless they look after the powerless, then fake realities are going to be created to challenge them.- I mean, you're right. I mean, it's, there's no comfort in this. It's, there's hard to find a home where you feel really kind of certain about, but I actually felt as much as I laughed at that email that I got, that was accusing me of being part of a cabal. It really did force me to think about, okay, so what, how is this viewed by somebody external and what are the kind of conflicts of interest that we need to think about if we are going to really take seriously people's concerns that there are these kind of conspiracies? When you kind of form a committee, you don't think, someone might look at this as a conspiracy. You don't think, oh my God, people going to think, are they all like to hurt us? But actually increasingly I think it does ask for institutions to make more transparent their decision making and to make it much clearer, why certain things happen in the way it does. And I think that is problematic because people with power in certain positions, aren't used to explaining themselves and it's, and proactively explaining themselves. So you're not even sure what you are explaining yourself for, but I think increasingly that's actually what is being asked, not necessarily for people to defend themselves after they've been accused of fakes, but to think in advance, what can we do to make ourselves as trustworthy as possible, as transparent as possible? All of the names of the members of our Sage committee for example, are available online so people can know who they are, but there's always still a sense that, there's other things going on. I think the case with the Elisa Granato was really fascinating in this discussion around plausibility because it does, I think, relate to your point around the harms that the fakes can do. So one of the things that's emerged recently is less of a investment in ideas of real or fake, but much more of an investment in ideas of things being plausible. So in the case of Elisa Granato, is it plausible that someone can be involved in these clinical trials, that some harm can come to them, not necessarily death, but some harm can come to them. And that won't be disclosed that that will be covered up and that we won't never know about it. Now some people are sort of nodding and other people are shaking their heads. And I think that is really about your relationship with trust and how much you trust the institutions, because some people will say, well, actually, yeah, it's plausible. I mean, there's sort of historical examples of these things happening. And other people will say, no, no, no, there are too many checks and balances, social media and technology will make it obvious that this will happen. So I think what we've got now is the space not necessarily about real or fake, but what are the sort of the good fake news disseminators do is actually they play on the plausible. They play not on something that's so obviously fake that no one's going to actually believe it, but they play on this space where could that actually happen? Could all these people, all in this committee will somehow have a vested interest, maybe even investments in these vaccine passports? I mean, how would we know? And who would be checking on those people? I think these are some of the questions that really force institutions to really ask questions around, are we doing enough to be open and transparent? And sometimes even when you feel you are doing enough, it mightn't be enough for some people. But I think that increasingly gone are the days when you can just say, trust me, trust me I'm a doctor. Or trust me, I'm any kind of professional, any kind of professional. I think those days are sort of going. I dunno if that's answered your question.- Well, I've got a very nice segue here into another question from the online audience, which several people want to know the answer to. And it is a very nice fit. The question is, do you feel there is more scope to teach critical/logical thinking as an actual educational subject in order to give people more ability to defend against distorted or fake information?- Yes.(laughing) But I'm guessing they want more than that. So I think it's really difficult actually to teach people to recognize fake news because so much is invested in making it plausible. You know, you're talking about people, who've got lots and lots of time on their hand, but really sort of fixed the agenda. They believe that they're acting on behalf of the underdog. They believe that they're the good fake that they are there to upend these power structures and these conglomerates and these kind of conspiracies. And I think, well, any kind of critical thinking is always a good thing. And anybody that teaches logic and how to argue, I think is always good. But I think it's less about how that applies to fake news.'Cause I think that's really difficult, but I think in general, I dunno how much, it's... Sorry. I'm undecided because I dunno how much it's a generational thing because I find younger generations are much more kind of accepting of the fact that they're going to might be scammed or something might be fake and sort of approach everything with that, through that lens, because this is a generation that's been brought up with the internet. So, you know, it is not. So I think there's definitely a generational thing it's who you're teaching, I think.- Well, thank you very much for a fascinating talk.- Thank you.- I'm not going to impersonate myself by raising questions about the hypothetical monozygotic living twin of Dr. Granato.- Okay. Good.- One of the things you mentioned earlier in your talk, and I appreciate some clarification, you mentioned or said something to the effect that fakes don't come just uniquely, they tend to come in groups. If you could clarify something for me, I thought if there is a fake and there's a very convincing providence for that fake, would it not be risky? In fact, producing more fakes in relating terms the original fake, and perhaps even exposing the supposed providence of the first fake to be false. I was just wondering where that might be more of a risk once you've convinced one, somebody or a number of experts of the providence of the first fake. You don't want to take the risk of producing more fake. So could you clarify that for me please?- I'll try my best. I think I've understood your question correctly. It's really to do with the kind of the first fake and the providence of the first fake, right? And the risk involved in exposing that that providence itself is false. Is that the question?- Yes.- Okay. I find that also a really fascinating question. And I think this is why when people talk about Elmyr de Hory work, they talk about often being sort of strategically ignored because to expose one fake often means you have to expose a whole lot of other fakes and fake documents, people who've turned a blind eye and that's where the problem starts. So it isn't necessarily saying this painting is fake, but so much work has gone into the infrastructure around that fake you then start to ask questions about the expert, about the documents. How did they get that exact paper that they use at Gresham College? Who did they get that paper from? That ink is only made in three place? Where did they get that ink from? So it then starts to unravel all these other questions, which is why often when people talk about Elmyr de Hory, the fact that 90% of his paintings haven't been revealed, they talk about them being kind of strategically ignored, which is that somebody has an inkling, but nobody wants to really pull that thread to reveal the full extent of the problem. So I dunno if that's the question that you were asking.- [Woman] Hi, thank you so much for that talk. I really enjoyed it. I wondered if you could speak a little bit more when you were referencing kind of medicines and the sort of pharmaceutical conglomerates, but also these new kind of maybe not new, but kind of production facilities that are in, India, China, Brazil. And from what I understand, there are kind of differences between sort of counterfeits that do the thing that they're supposed to do, but are not necessarily manufactured by the people who own the patent or what have you versus fakes that in theory, do nothing or worse harm. And I wondered if you could talk a bit about how that relates. And I think this is in a way related to the previous question about power and what, whether it's causing harm.- Yeah.- I just wondered if you could talk a bit more about that.- Yeah. Well thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about that, actually,'cause it's one of the bits on my presentation I skipped through by accident. So there's a whole scene in "Dying to Survive" where basically they're having real problems trying to actually find change. So what they do is that they round up all the patients who've been using his medicines, they take their medicines off them and they arrest them. And there's this one scene with an elderly lady, cancer sufferer who turns around to the police officer and says, these medicines that you say are fake, have saved my life and been saving my life for the past three years. How... Who are you to say they're fake when my experience of them is that they're real. And so this film and the discussion predates the kind of changes in the naming of medicines that have gone from fake to generic. But actually what they're talking about in the film are actually generic medicines. They're not fake. But even still they're this kind of duality that's happening.'Cause on the one hand pharmaceutical companies will say, no, well, no, they're not fakes they're generics, but they're not as good as ours. And so even though they're generics, they're often still categorized as fakes. So I think the discussion by the elderly lady in the film was kind of fascinating for a number of reasons, but it was really again around who gets to describe these things in this way and the power of naming something as a fake. So what... And the location talking, using India, which is the sort of the world's largest producer of all sorts of medical ingredients, but generics in particular and it, India describes itself as the sort of the world, the pharmacy for the poor, it produces generic medicines precisely to allow many poor countries to have access to medicines. So I think that's why this film is also really important,'cause it really takes that on. And it really shows these kind of European organizations charging sort of 40,000 yen for a bottle versus India, which is producing exactly the same medicine with exactly the same efficacy for 2000 yen and asks where is the morality in the way that these things are priced and who sits at the table and these prices are made'Cause it absolutely isn't poor people. So we get to have some of these discussions around the generic and counterfeits and fakes in the film as well. So I haven't really done justice to that point. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about that.- There's a quite an interesting comment here in line. It's not really a question. This is a person who works at a university on a foundation program and they try and teach students how to identify reliable sources of information. However she is considering how best to approach this, given the can we trust the experts idea mentioned earlier and that many valid voices are not always considered reliable. She says we also have a big problem with students buying their essays.- Yes.- Yeah.- Again.- Yeah.- [Moderator] Any other question from the room? Yes, do come back for one more.- [Man] Second question. I thought it was interesting your idea that younger people are more inherently skeptical about what they are told. Is that always a good thing or is the fact that they struggle to find an authoritative trustworthy source, something that makes them skeptical of everything and therefore they've no idea what to do, what to trust?- I don't know the answer. I think, I don't necessarily think that and young people are more inherently skeptical. I think they are skeptical because you know, I mean, okay, maybe now I've said it, you might notice it a bit more, but they're basically barely a week where you turn on the TV and there isn't some program that's got fake in the title and it's, if it's not about sort of dating, it's about consumer goods, it's about some kind of, there's always so that this idea that there's fakes about I think is really important. I think that looking at history has taught us that actually it is important to question power all the time. And so I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but I think your question is really difficult for me to answer because I don't know where this will lead, ultimately. I don't know. I can't look into the future on that one, but I think if we look at some of the scandals that have been on earth in unearthed, in organized religion, in,(indistinct) all of these things, at the heart of it was a lack of questioning essentially of authority. And so some questioning some of these things, isn't a bad thing and talking about concerns, isn't a bad thing and there's always this sense of a kind of slippery slope. So, okay. So they start to question, this would let me question everything, but I don't think it's necessarily bad to question everything. It's just whether you end up dismissing everything is the problem. And so how do we get to a point where we ask people and say, and encourage people to question things and hold people to account without dismissing things that we have all agreed on actually work and all agreed on are actually good things. I think that's the difference.- Well, thank you very much, Professor Kingori we've had a really fascinating stimulating evening and we're all going to be leaving with our heads buzzing with ideas. So can we just thank the professor very much.(audience clapping)