We had a fireplace that had always bothered me. In the grander scheme of things this fireplace, black, iron, its mouth sucking the eye towards it as soon as you enter the room, was not a huge problem, but still, it bothered me.
I worked through a series of solutions (including ripping it out, installing another off eBay, painting it in jolly colours as if we were louche Bloomsbury sex artists, or simply “getting over it”), but it took many years before I invited a decorative artist to crouch in our front room for a week and marble the thing.
She started by painting it white. Then, over the next couple of days, using brushes and sponges, she added red and black and 50 variations on brown, until one evening I came home and it appeared suddenly majestic and ancient and made of marble. The fireplace no longer bothers me. Now, instead, it is a monument to something I hold very dear – the art of fakery. It’s an art that has got me through the year.
Every night at around 9pm my daughter calls from her room that she can’t get to sleep and every night I must remind her that, in order to sleep, you first have to pretend to sleep. Who are we tricking, I wonder sometimes, and think briefly about consciousness, breath and idiocy. Like so many difficult or confusing parts of life, faking it is an essential step not just towards sleep, but also towards success and understanding.
I write this as a person who loves both things that are fake, like, say, the trompe l’oeil sweater I am currently typing in which, at a distance, looks like it has a cheeky little collar (gotcha!), and also things that are natural but look like they’re fake, like those mad waxy flowers or the northern lights. Partly, I like these things because often with their theatricality they defy taste and partly because their surreal permanence speaks to something deeper. An article in Apartment Therapy about the rise in popularity of artificial fruit in the early 2000s suggests, “America was still recovering from the horror of 9/11… Is it a stretch to say fake fruit let us forget about the inevitability of death?”
It gets a bad rep, fakery. Authenticity is seen as something holy and aspirational. But not only is faking it an often essential step towards discovering your own “real” voice or talent, it looks prettier, too. People talk about impostor syndrome, but rarely does anyone admit that the only way to stop feeling like you’re not supposed to be there is to pretend, violently, that you absolutely are. This works at work and for parties, too, when you arrive alone, and parenting, and the beginnings of relationships when you want to show only your very best self. This year I’ve also learned the benefits of faking it when someone asks how you are.
In the past, perhaps quite madly, I have tried to answer honestly. My conversations darkened and I tried to describe the various hells of being alive, or got lost in some swampy metaphor. Now instead, I brightly say, “Fine!” And somehow it helps. I am able to move more cleanly through the day, I use words like “nice”, and I smile, and I wait until the appropriate time or person before I relax, heavily, into reality.
A series of lucky accidents meant that around my birthday I was in Paris, and stumbled upon an exhibition by the conceptual artist Sophie Calle – upstairs was a room containing the entire contents of her house. She was thinking about faking her own death, so had invited auctioneers to go through her estate, installing around 500 items (including drawings, clothes, her taxidermied giraffe and, pleasingly, a collection of artificial foods) as if displayed posthumously at the auction house’s salesroom. The death was fake, the auction was fake, but the objects were real, their basic function complicated by what they meant to her and, then, their value to us. It was a project of projection – the fakery of death revealed truths about a life.
I returned home and walked through my house, my many glittering possessions, with fakeness in mind. It had been a year of misinformation and propaganda, and counterfeit goods, and people faking their Spotify Wrapped lists to skim off proof of their embarrassing tastes. An author was dropped by their publisher for posting fake reviews of peers, artificial intelligence threatened to overwhelm the genuine kind, “fake meat” substitutes reached tipping point, Lidl was forced to rename its bread when shoppers called it “sourfaux” and in October, researchers discovered that female European common frogs fake their own deaths to avoid male attention. It all sort of… keeps us on our toes, doesn’t it? Makes us look twice and marvel at the creativity, the plates spinning, the art. Like it or not, fakery is the future. And while I may not always appreciate the lies and frauds, the way it can threaten to send the world off its axis, I can’t help but admire the gall.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
