The world of things. Article by Juan José Millás

The director of the National Archaeological Museum said in a recent interview that all museums have fakes.

–The one that doesn’t have them –he concluded– is not a museum.

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It seemed to me that he was referring to known or detected counterfeits, not those that functioned as originals, of course. All museums display authentic forgeries, worth the paradox. There was a famous Hungarian forger, Elmyr de Hory, who painted ‘modiglianis’ like the one who makes sausages. Understand: not that I copied pre-existing pictures of Modigliani, rather, he was able to imitate his style. Who says the style of Modigliani says that of Picasso, Matisse o Fernand Léger. He was a genius performing other people’s works. However, curiously, he lacked his own work, at least an estimable work of his own. People say that many museums of modern art in the world possess works of him with the signature of the greats of the time.There are writers capable of writing poems by Lorca and unable to illuminate a personal verse. I myself consider that I will not make an authentic paella until it comes out like the ones my mother made. Achieving an original voice in the kitchen would pass through perfectly imitating that of my mother. Meanwhile, I am trying other types of rice until the final failure. You have to kill your father to supplant him, to take his place, to become a perfect copy of him. There is no life outside of the replica. Real money, that issued by central banks, is the most fake because there is nothing so fragile as the guarantee of the State. All states collapse, you just have to give them time. When they fall, we find that the currency backed by them was baseless.

But we kill ourselves for the counterfeit money endorsed by the monetary authorities here and there. We kill ourselves for him and they kill us for him. We are, in short, used to fakes. For Plato, the world of things (the one in which we live or survive) is an imperfect replica of the world of ideas. We take for reality what is but a shadow of reality. In all museums there are shadows. A museum in which there are none is not a museum.