Counterfeiting is a practice with broad and devious implications, from the merest of fake objects to entire histories shaped as facsimile. Jesse Lerner's provocative Ruins takes the forger's art and applies it to the appropriation of culture, in this case, Mexican. The prologue to this wizardly jumble of newsreel snippets, travelogia, and stagy rants collates early colonial misconceptions of Mexico's populace, a stewpot of ethnographic and political distortions. From there, Lerner charts the rarefaction of this process that recontextualizes archaeological objects as art. In this cultural valuation, Mayan and Aztec objects are severed from their origins and further rarefied within the confines of museums. At the center of Ruins is Brigido Lara, a master forger whose pre-Columbian objects have been exhibited in major (and unwitting) museums throughout the U.S. and Europe. Is this the final subterfuge of the colonial project-the real and the fake, indistinguishable? Ruins builds a diverting argument from the (imitation) detritus of culture.-Steve Seid