What the piece is actually saying
You can tell a machine-made temple necklace from a hand-worked one by the back. The front is easy to fake, the goddess's face, the lotus border, the kirtimukha at the crown. Turn it over and the hand-worked piece shows you the ghost of every tool that touched it: small dents in the gold where the repoussé hammer pressed the design out from behind, the slight irregularity of a wire border that was twisted by hand, not extruded through a machine. The machine-made back is perfectly flat. It has nothing to say.
