Visitors Embrace Fake Masterpieces at Peculiar Japanese Art Museum

Image via YouTube

Most travelers expect a certain amount of authenticity when visiting a museum. For those stopping by the Otsuka Museum of Art in Naruto Park, Tokishima, the expectation is that the brilliant and vivid masterpieces hanging from the walls are in fact fake.

It’s an archive of the forged. Though to call it a library of lies would be going too far. Quartz’s Lily Kuo recently profiled the unique museum, bringing our attention to a place that is keen on showing off the world’s treasures without demanding so much as a plane ticket.

Kuo writes, “Besides giving Japanese visitors a chance to see masterpieces too delicate to be transported abroad—like Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ which never leaves the Museo Nacional in Madrid—Otsuka offers a certain kind of preservation. The paintings are reproduced, in original size and color, on ceramic panels that don’t fade over time.”

A quick YouTube scour uncovered a gem produced by Thomas Nordanstad who documented the Otsuka Museum of Art back in 2011.

The video, while seven minutes in length, goes into great depth on the innovative methods and reasoning behind the library’s fake paintings:

As the narrator explains: “Mr. Otsuka himself had a dream about doing something useful for the arts. He had traveled through Europe after the Second World War and seen how art had been destroyed by the bombings.”

Tucked away safely in Japan lay replicas of the world’s masterpieces, safe from mayhem and, well, smudges.

The video offers an innovative “enamel technique” that allows visitors to actually touch the fabrications, something forbidden at most museums.

As offered in the video, seeing so many pieces around the world would take immense time and equally massive amounts of money. Consider this a one-stop shop for an immersive art history lesson, giving the curious an idea as to the size and scope of various paintings.

Getting a glimpse of such imagination will cost you. Kuo writes, “While most museums in Japan are either free or cost around 700 yen (about $6), admission into the Otsuka fee is a steep 3,100 yen, which visitors say is the most expensive admission ticket for any museum in Japan.”

The museum’s website states the price can be as high as 3,240 yen, or slightly over $27. While nothing beats seeing the real thing, there is something to be said about preservation. We rather like the idea of Otsuka taking out the figurative sketchbook and tracing over the world’s creativity, if only to condense a lifetime’s journey into a day at the museum.

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