Fascinated by frauds

I recently chanced upon an old New Yorker article on Joyce Hatto, a pianist whose husband-- the owner of an obscure classical music label-- apparently released a huge number of CDs recorded by others under her name:

He [Hatto's husband] had not merely pinched or polished a few, mostly marginal, recordings. With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CDs, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world. Since early in his checkered career, he had deftly manipulated musical identities. What he confected on his wife’s behalf, in her twilight, was vastly more audacious than anything he had pulled off during his “super-bargain” years. The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into “Joyce Hatto” was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.

The New Yorker might have a weakness for these kinds of stories-- people who write fake Holocaust memoirs, con men who run cross-country at Princeton, etc.-- but I think we're fascinated by these kinds of elaborate, life-long frauds, if only because they're extreme examples of a process of reinvention that many of us go through Their motives are also usually pretty complicated: these aren't simple cons or self-delusions, much less straightforward cases of mental imbalance. Just as monsters helped define the boundaries of humanity in the Renaissance and early modern period, these elaborate lived fictions help define (or undermine) our understanding of identity.

Or maybe we just like cons.