Someone has tried to sell a fake Grayson Perry. I suppose it is a kind of dubious honour for me.

My wife subscribes to a service offered by the auctioneer Christie’s whereby she is alerted if any of my works come up for sale. I like this. First, it enables me to prop up my delicate artistic ego by tracking my worth against the empirical measure of sale prices; second, a lot of my early work was sold undocumented so I have no pictures of it or knowledge of its whereabouts. It’s nice to be reacquainted with a work I made 20 years ago. Third, I like the fact that collectors who had faith in me early on and bought works for £100 or £200 can put pieces up for auction with an estimate healthily into the thousands.

The misattributed work in question is called The Children’s Bore and had an estimate of £4,000-£6,000. It is a ceramic sculpture of a boar with text inscribed on the side on the theme of a nagging parent saying such things as “sit still, keep quiet” and “take the hair out of your eyes”. I can understand how it could pass as an early piece by me what with the material, the text and the socio-psychological theme. I don’t know if the work was submitted with intent to deceive and I don’t blame Christie’s for thinking it was mine. Early work by an artist is often untypical of his later, better-known output. They could have rung me up and checked, I suppose.

When I first saw The Children’s Bore, I thought maybe I had made it and blanked it from my memory. Then I realised that it was too well made for an early work of mine and sculpted by someone who, I suspect, was more conventionally trained in ceramics. My early works are lively but technically inept.

What intrigued me particularly is that I did indeed make a ceramic sculpture of a boar in evening classes in 1983. Is this an extreme coincidence or did the maker know of my early oeuvre? My boar was on the theme of King James I. Our history teacher had read us this rather racy account of the monarch who on hunting trips liked to strip off his trousers and wallow barelegged in the spilt intestines of the slain animal. This appealed to me. I included a small figure of the King inside the body of my sculpture in the style of a primitive piece of commemorative ware.

I sold the piece to a friend who was my very first collector. Rather sweetly, a few years ago he gave the piece back to me as he was a little ashamed of how badly he had looked after it. Very few people would have seen this artwork, and I have rarely shown an image of it in a lecture, so I am wondering: was it made by a fellow evening-class student or a potter who had come to hear me speak? I don’t know who the faker is and I have no desire to know.

Fakes have long been part of art. I think the template around authenticity, like much of the way we view art, comes from religion. If galleries and museums are the churches and cathedrals, then artists are the holy fools, hermits and saints. The works operate in some ways like relics. Relics are something that has long fascinated me but most must be fakes. Crispy bits of skin claiming to be the prepuce or foreskin of Christ are dotted all over Europe, and there are enough fragments of the true cross to build an ark.

Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Met in New York, in his book The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes reckoned that 40 per cent of the artworks that he evaluated were forgeries. The question is: if we are unaware that something is a fake, does our belief that it is by a great master skew our judgment of the aesthetic merits of the piece?

I naively like to believe that art offers more than the opportunity of being in the presence of something made by a cultural celebrity, ie, beauty. Evan H. Turner, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said of a painting of St Catherine by the 16th-century German artist Matthias Grönewald that “as a matter of fact when one passes that painting again and again it gets increasingly shallow”. This was after he had found out that his museum had paid £1 million in 1974 for a fake made a few years previously by Christian Goller.

The faker, John Myatt, said that many of his pretend Chagalls, Giacomettis and Nicholsons were awful, painted with household emulsion mixed with KY Jelly. Yet because his co-conspirator, John Drewe, had planted false provenance in the form of forged catalogues and card index entries in the archives of the Tate and V&A, dealers and collectors were happy to pay tens of thousands of pounds for them.

The huge celebrity memorabilia market is proof that people are willing to pay for unremarkable junk as long as it is associated with someone famous. Artists are brands and our mark is worth cold cash. Myatt estimates that more than a hundred of his fakes are still out there.

I rang Christie’s and informed them that The Children’s Bore was nothing to do with me. I think the work instantaneously became uglier in their eyes. First it was recatalogued euphemistically as “English School” and given an estimate of £100 to £150. I thought, having made it a little bit more famous, it would do better. But then Christie’s announced it had been withdrawn from auction — they “will not offer for sale any object that we know or have reason to believe is inauthentic or counterfeit” — so perhaps we’ll never know.

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