Britain's master forger
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
That is quite fascinating to me. Until I read that paragraph I was wondering why he wouldn't do originals given his talent. The article also reminds me of a talented American forger. I forget his name but he managed to fool people for a long time. But, if I remember correctly, he was never prosecuted because he never sold any of his paintings. He would donate it to museums as originals. Boy, were they embarrassed when the forgeries came to light.
"It obviously isn't a crime to give a picture to a museum, and they treated me like royalty. One thing led to another, and I kept doing it for 30 years," says Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.
- America's most generous con artist http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31818367
I think this would make a really good film. An artist who is clever, talented, persuasive, calculating, and just want to do some good by donating 'forged' art to museums.
I believe there is a documentary on him.
The fact is that the demand for art (as a Veblen Good) far exceeds the supply, and dealers are not the most scrupulous of people. The last art dealer in a chain of ownership in a forgery is always very angry about the deception and the damage to the art world yadda yadda - because s/he has had to return the money from that sale and suffer the reputational damage of having been fooled, although that is not so bad, as authenticators are contracted in and the dealer will get sympathy from fellow dealers plus some free publicity. So the angst is more about opportunities foregone than a significant loss in most cases. Between the forger and the last dealer in the chain there are usually several others who did very well for themselves, everyone knows this, and nobody talks about it.
Here's how the forgery market works. It may sometimes be a previously unknown painting as in the example of the fake Leonardo from this article, but more often than not forgers produce a 'lost' painting - one that is known to have existed at some time but has since disappeared. It may have been destroyed, it may be owned by someone unaware of its true value who thinks it's just a pretty piece of junk, it may have been stolen (but they're usually hunted for), it may have been forgotten about in an old disused building, or it may have been painted over by the original artist who didn't think it was that great and either hated it or was too broke to buy a fresh canvas, both of which are common occurrences. It's known to have existed from photographs, or from letters, or because it was painted in another painting, like this example: https://www.wikiart.org/en/georges-seurat/the-models-1888 in which Seurat quotes his more famous painting Dimancha a la Grand Jatte.
Every famous artist has a catalogue, which is the record used by historians and dealers to index everything the artist is known to have ever produced, its size, materials, special features (eg if it has a handmade frame or a big wine stain on the back of the canvas or whatever), date of origin, associated paperwork such as a bill of sale, current location and so forth. The catalogue includes available details of lost and missing works and to be entered in the catalogue every work must be authenticated by a professional who knows the artists' work, history etc., and knows all the different things to look for. Think of it as a bit like a blockchain for art. Now, authentication is necessarily subjective, although the technical methods are always improving (spectroscopy of various kinds, cross-references with other pigments known to have been preferred by the same artist, stroke analysis and so on). Once something is authenticated it can be sold, and I'm sure you don't need me to sketch out the various economic incentives in play: if not, consider the sale a few weeks ago of a previously unknown painting by Basquiat that solds to a Japanese collector for $110 million.
A great deal of the value of a painting is not only in the art work itself but in the story of the painting which is what gives it cultural significance. Art dealers are marketers and like all marketers they specialize in finding suppliers, matching them with buyers, and crafting a narrative that will arouse the buyer's desire. I cannot overstress the importance of this. The art value of a piece consists of its aesthetic impact, maybe its representational accuracy (much less important since the invention of the camera, for obvious reasons), and its historical interest as a reflection of the conditions under which it was produced. Articulating these factors is the creative contribution of the dealer.
For example, here is a painting by X - maybe you like it, maybe not. Here is the same painting, painted by X in the last year of her life. Oh, that's sort of interesting and tragic. Here is the same painting by X, painted in the last year of her life before she died of AIDS. Oh, that says something about both X and the times she lived in. Here is the same painting by X, painted in the last year of her life before she died of AIDS, because she could not afford medical treatment for her condition. Oh, very tragic, now you're sort of emotionally involved, aren't you? Here is the last painting by X, painted in the last year of her life before she died of AIDS, for which she could not afford medical treatment because her country was subject to sanctions and only way she could have got treatment was to leave the country, oh my god, that poor woman. Here is the same painting by X - who was so short of money that she used her own AIDS-infected blood as the background color for the image...is it not imbued with tragedy? Does it not somehow breathe with the rapidly diminishing life of the artist herself? Whatever image you had in your head at the beginning of this paragraph, you feel differently now, don't you? Maybe saddened, maybe contemptuous, maybe disgusted, but the act of imagination has changed you.
This is the difference between craft and art: the artist spends themselves in putting gobs of paint on canvas, strikes of chisel on stone, notes in a composition, words on a page, arrangement of detritus on a dais, to evoke some feeling in you that you have have never had before, that you may feel more fully alive.
The dealers, then, are kinds of artists themselves; they take a work, of lesser or greater power, and some facts about it that sketch its provenance, and from these they create a rich tapestry of feeling and cultural significance. And in a world of mass and increasingly automated production (a revolting case in point: https://www.nextrembrandt.com/) it is this uniqueness and the air of historical significance that attaches to it that exemplifies true scarcity rather than the artificially induced kind. Our economic thought is fundamentally erected upon a rapidly eroding foundation of scarcity, and so, paradoxically, it is only through an increase in the supply of scarcity that we can mop up the oversupply of wealth that threatens to drown the system in the signifiers of its own abundance, and wash away the power structures we have erected thereon.
I put it to you, then, that forgers are the greatest artists of all, for they create not merely the canvas but the dream of meaning that surrounds it, and this is why they are decried as wicked and dangerous and put in prison: because if the public were to learn how to dream their own dreams of meaning, what other upheavals might result?
As an artist myself I find that claim almost insulting. A forger might have great technique, but in as far as he copies art rather than creates it from scratch himself, he's just acting as a sophisticated xerox machine or camera. I really don't see what lifts that sort of mechanical act even to the status of art, much less a greater art than that of the artist who created the original.
Also, to suggest that the marketing by art dealers or art's reception by consumers has any bearing on the "greatness" of the art they're buying and selling is less than convincing. Sure, there is more and less popular art, and art that rich people (many of them mere speculators) are willing to pay a lot for (often simply because they calculate they'll make a profit when they sell). But what on earth does that have to do with how great the art is?
If Van Gogh's art had remained as obscure and unappreciated as on the day he died (having only sold a single painting in his life, and that to his brother), would his art have been any less great?
It seems ridiculous to me to claim that the vagaries of the art market determine how great an work of art is.
To me art dealers and other middle-men are parasites and signs of inefficiency and friction in connecting consumers directly to producers (artists), and a necessary evil because so many artists hate business and want to focus on their art. That critics and dealers play a role in determining how popular art gets is symptomatic of the art world's pathology, not something to be praised.
There is enormous skill involved in the latter, and yet you could easily belittle concert pianists as 'nothing more than biological player pianos' by your analogy.
First, that's not the same as the skill in creating the artwork to begin with. For example, an artist make create an original painting from a live model or from his imagination. The copier may have no such ability, or may have a very weak ability at doing that. They might be great at taking an artwork that's already made and copying it, though. Pretty different skills.
Then there's the choice of subject matter, the composition, what of him/herself the artists brings to the art, the artist's own style (not the style of some other artist he/she is copying) are all things that a pure copier does not have and can not bring to the creation of the copy with it ceasing to be a faithful copy.
Now, if the forger is, like the subject of the article in question, creating some of his own works in the style of another artist, without outright copying their work, then they are being more of an artist in their own right rather than just a copying machine. But they're still far removed from making their own art -- something the forger in the article was all too well aware of.
"I view my life as a failure. I went the wrong way. I could have done something useful. If I could have my time again, I’d like to be a teacher at an art college."
"The problem is that I can’t find my own style," he says. "Whenever I think of an idea for a piece, I know who it’s copying. I always see something of someone else in everything I do. I don’t have an original style."
Some non-artists might not be able to understand this distinction, but it's crystal clear to most artists.
If you accept that all the things we call art are very broadly and fundamentally concerned with that (making a convincing statement, not necessarily a likeness of reality) then it's really clear how a class of skilled imitators can exist who can't come up with the "opinions" themselves. Why anyone should care whether a particular work is a product of original thought or not is the big, dangerous issue that forgery raises.
It's an attack using art, an artistic statement of its own, against the use of art as a signifier. It's nicely recursive and ironic.
I thought it was an excellent comment, one of the best this year.
> ...a revolting case in point: https://www.nextrembrandt.com/...
That's fascinating, but why is it objectively revolting? If there are some people who derive pleasure from the technical aspects of a work (color, composition, etc.), then is that pleasure lesser than the pleasure of others who like the background story, motivations, or authenticity, etc.? The art world decrying bowdlerization and mass production of art is not new nor unique to art. Any human effort that requires assiduous craftsmanship is subject to the "in group" despairing at developments they see as the devaluing of their craft. We needn't look very far afield to see that happening.
Programmers are seen weekly here on HN lamenting that members of "out groups" just don't understand our craft, and lamentations of cut-and-paste / cargo cult programming are just as common.
My personal take is sanguine resignation that cursed with an impossibly limited lifespan, we are by necessity boxed into Blub'bing our way through life in areas of human endeavor not core to our existence. I code for a living, and art is not my hobby, so I reluctantly accept I do not have the bandwidth to really take the time to appreciate art at a level that someone like yourself might. So I'm a Blub Art Consumer. The full powerful nuances and appreciation of an authentic Jackson Pollack in my dining room would be lost upon me; however, a photographic print, 3D-printed reproduction or algorithmically-derived Pollack-alike might be "pretty enough" in the "good enough" sense for a Blub like me. If we were all immortal and blessed with Iaian Banks-envisioned cognitive enhancements, then I would be far more open to higher expectations upon our self-realization, but alas, that is not an outcome in our lives' foreseeable future.
It's a documentary about Wolfgang Beltracchi - an artist who made millions forging paintings and eventually went to prison for it. You just have to like the guy.
The flick is currently available on Netflix Germany.
My take is that there's ever only structural and/or decorative differences between two instances of a type and those differences can be measured objectively.