Rereading the Shameless Puffery of Modern Charlatans

Beginning with the work of art critic Kenyon Cox and then turning to the many accusations of fraud levelled against modernism, Chapter 1 gives an account of fraud discourse’s dominance in early twentieth-century culture. Accusations of fraud were commonplace, and unleashed a set of rituals; fraud’s unveiling and fallout is highly stylized, and both narrative and social. These melodramatic moments of modern fraud, for all their lack of nuance, did a lot of work, and are part of a larger category that extends outward, taking on ideas such as insincerity, unclear intent, mimicry, and deception. After presenting a theory of fraud and its enabling conditions, the chapter argues that fraud discourse profoundly shaped the initial response to modernism, the modern canon, and its justifying principles.