The nineteenth-century forger emerged as an unlikely model of middle-class selfhood, embodying the bourgeois ideals of industriousness, education and thrift. More than this, he offered an example for living in a capitalistic society without being contaminated by it. Although his artistic productions supplied a market demand, he escaped the charge of base materialism. Representations of the forger were rigorously gendered; he was always male. The forger embodied a set of prized masculine values that had to be guarded from female intrusion. Contemporary literary, artistic, and journalistic texts constructed the figure of the female copyist to guard the parameters of faking. The depicted the copyist as the forger’s imperfect double; while their work methods were often the same, they were separated by a world of difference.

"As ARCA's new CEO I hope to raise awareness at the grass roots level of another type of art crime: public apathy: public apathy and destruction to our collective cultural patrimony. I want to encourage cultural stewardship and promote public awareness at the individual level as well as the professional one, to facilitate greater community awareness that each of us has a social responsibility for the protection and care of the art, places, and material culture that define us as not only a civilization but as human beings."