How to Get Rid of Fake Art In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Did you pay Redd a small fortune for a painting that turned out to be a forgery? Here's how to get rid of it.
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Have you been duped by Redd in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? It’s easy to buy “art” from him that turned out to be an intricate but flawed forgery, so now you’re stuck with a beautiful but fake painting or statue.

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Now that you’ve got it, what are you supposed to do with it? Here’s how to declutter your island and simplify your life by ditching Redd’s art lies.

How to Get Rid of Fake Art In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

To get Redd to make an appearance on your island, you have to have built the Museum and donated a total of at least 60 fish, bugs, and/or fossils to it. When Blathers mentions to you that he’s now accepting donations of artwork, you can find Redd on your island the next day and start the event chain that leads to him opening up shop.

The goal behind buying art from Redd in the first place is to donate the real stuff to Blathers at the museum. However, much of what Redd sells is actually fake, and the forgeries are often just close enough to the genuine article that it’s easy to buy one of them by mistake. Blathers can always spot the fakes, though, and if you bought a forgery off of Redd, he won’t take it off your hands.

Unlike past Animal Crossing games, you can’t get rid of forged art by selling it at Nook’s Cranny. You’re just stuck with it until you do something with it.

This can include making it a regular part of your island’s decor. After all, if you didn’t spot the missing detail that indicated your new painting was a forgery, how likely is it that anyone else will? Pretend you’re a cultured sort by lining your home with just slightly off-brand classic art pieces.

On the other hand, some of those forged paintings appear to be haunted, so maybe don’t do that after all. I think we’ve all seen this movie at least once, right? That probably won’t end well for anyone.

If you’d prefer to permanently ditch one of Redd’s forgeries, you have three options. The first two, and the most logical, are to drop them into a trash can or the recycling bin at Resident Services. In the former case, the forgery is destroyed on the spot; in the latter, the forgery will eventually be discarded permanently once the recycling bin fills up with other items.

You can also bring your inconvenient fakes with you on your next mystery tour. Since you can only visit any mystery island once, anything you happen to leave there is effectively gone forever as soon as you go back home. It’s fun to imagine what some future archeologist will think, when they happen across a just-slightly-off-brand version of Michelangelo’s David on an otherwise-inhabited desert island.

There’s a lot to do in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and there’s more content for it coming regularly every month. Check out our game hub for news, guides, and other articles, such as:

You know, if everyone in Animal Crossing: New Horizons knows Redd will happily sell you fake art, then sooner or later, you’d think he’d run into problems with it. Then again, I suppose if the world of Animal Crossing had a Better Business Bureau in the first place, that’d torpedo Tom Nook’s entire sales model. Feel free to complain about being comedically extorted by a cartoon trash panda on our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.

 


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Thomas Wilde
Thomas has been writing about video games in one capacity or another since 2002. He likes survival horror, Marvel Comics, and 2D fighters, so that one part of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite where Spider-Man teams up with Frank West and Chris Redfield was basically his fanboy apotheosis. He has won World War II 49 separate times.