How Josiah Wedgwood will be a Great Contemporary Artist after two centuries of Humiliation through the Secret Schemes of Art ForgersAccording to Joseph Alsop (The Rare Art Tradition, 1981), art is defined, and I believe rightly so, by eight epiphenomenons: collecting, history, market, museum, forgery, re-evaluation of taste, antiquities (old for old's sake), and super-prices. Incidentally, design share with art all of those eight epiphenomenons: there are design collecting, a history of design, a market for design, design museums, design forgery, re-evaluation of taste, antiquities (for instance bakelite telephones or Umbrian majolica), and super-prices. Still, it is evident that design is subsumed under an other discourse than art. Something, then, must be different, the question remains: in what?When the issue is on the relationship between art and design, we imply, consciously or not, that this relationship is asymmetric in such a way that art is more refined, more specialized, and more narrow than design. And in a certain perverse way, we assume that design desires or strives to be like art, if not actually be art. I will here try to test the opposite direction in the relationship: what if art desires or strives to be like design? This is not a new reversal. It was attempted by the constructivists, by the Arts & Crafts movement, and by Bauhaus. But they all failed in this regard. Art and design continued to be separate disciplines and discourses, and maybe even more so after these attempts. I will take another stance, within a more emotional framing on the conflict, in terms of humiliation and revenge, with which I believe it can be shown that the difference stems from a metaphysics of history, resulting in different conceptions of proper name vs trademark, of origin vs periphery, and of the concepts to create (creare ex nihilo) vs to forge (facere de materia).This will be done in five moments:I. The Humiliation of Wedgwood (art-craft-industrial production) ---> a) the humiliation (i.e. the Portland Vase) b) The figures is continuously produced. (i.e. Flaxman Ewers)II. The Bastianini Affair 1864 and South Kensington MuseumIII. The Occult Italian Avantgarde of Forged Primitives (cf. Ruskin, Arts & Crafts)IV. Technical Forensics and reverse engineering in the Han van Meegeren case 1937V. Elaine Sturtevant (reverse engineering). Eleanor Antin (contingent pasts). Hito Steyerl (artistic research). Hilma af Klint (interested interaction)