The Hit Video Game ‘Animal Crossing’ Requires Players to Identify Forged Art Masterpieces—and It Might Stump Even Real-Life Art Experts

Gamers the world over are
beefing up on their art-history knowledge in order to play the
latest edition of Nintendo’s life-simulation video game
“Animal Crossing: New
Horizons,” which has become
a runaway hit since it came out last month.

To the personal island operated
by each player, a shady fox visits each daw with a trawler full of
history’s most famous artworks, and they’re all for sale, letting
you curate your own collection of priceless masterpieces. Only
there’s a catch: most of them are sophisticated forgeries. If you
want to get the works from your collection into the museum—a
sprawling institution run by a discerning owl—it’s your job to
separate the real from the fake.  

And it’s driving the internet
crazy. 

The fox, named Redd, shows up
for each visit with four works of art, any number of which are
counterfeits. Many are instantly recognizable—the Da Vincis, Van
Goghs, and Vermeers of the world; others, less so—like those garden
variety Old Masters that are familiar, but not immediately
identifiable. (The works arrive with silly plays on the original
titles—Twinkling Painting for Starry Night, say,
or Gallant Statue for Michelangelo’s David—until
they’re accepted into the museum, at which point our owl curator
friend mounts a placard with the correct information.)

The best part? The game is
actually hard. Mona Lisa’s eyebrows are slightly raised in the fake
version, for instance; the Girl With the Pearl
Earring’s titular
jewelry is star-shaped in the facsimile. The fake version of
Las Meninas
features a background figure whose
hand is raised roughly 40 degrees higher than it is in the real
version. 

Come on. Not even Velázquez
knows the arm angle of, like, the ninth most important figure in
that painting.

A quick #animalcrossing search
on Twitter or Instagram yields numerous examples of frustrated
players fooled by Redd’s surprisingly adept forgery skills. Guides
for spotting fakes have started popping up online, but before that
users were left to piece together selections with their own blend
of art-historical knowledge and sheer guesswork. (You could Google
the words “moving painting naked figure seashell,” I guess, but who
knows if you’d come up with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.)

The game is so popular that even
real museums have joined the party. Through a tool called
the Animal Crossing Art
Generator, which was
launched earlier this month, the J. Paul Getty Museum lets you
import any artwork from its collection of 70,000 objects into the
user’s own virtual collection. This week, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art followed suit, offering up its own
collection for users.
(Works from these museums are always authentic, but they can’t be
donated to the game’s museum.) 

Meanwhile, other players have
gotten even more creative. Installation artist Shing Yin Khor has
recreated notable contemporary artworks in the game, including Marina Abramoviç’s
performance piece The
Artist Is Present and
Robert Smithson’s land art masterwork Spiral Jetty.

The post The Hit Video Game ‘Animal Crossing’ Requires
Players to Identify Forged Art Masterpieces—and It Might Stump Even
Real-Life Art Experts appeared first on artnet News.