Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist?
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When I started making surreal artwork as a teenager, I got a lot of compliments about being inspired by Salvador Dali, I had never heard of Salvador Dali, I played Japanese video games and watched anime. I'm sure its possible there is crossdrift, where those influences could have some inspiration from Dali, but I find that too far removed to matter.
I eventually saw the melting clocks in my high school classes. I'm sure I looked it up on the internet before hand.
The key takeaway is that people associate "surreal" with "Dali", no other name is recognized so I can see how one could be compelled to actually do work inspired by Dali or just say its a Dali because that's the only name the viewers and market recognizes
Many young people start off doing work that fits the 'surrealist' label without even realizing it, because the goal of "expressing your unconscious thoughts" is simply more mainstream now than it was 100 years ago. So you are 100% correct that people relating your work to Dali are probably noting the surrealist aspects of your work without knowing who else to compare it to.
Also, even back in its heydey, the Surrealists adopted other artists who knew nothing about the movement and declared them to be Surrealists because their artwork looked like it.
you learn language as a child by being exposed to adults and peers using it, and in a similar way you soak up your culture. Then in adolescence, rebel against it, whatever it is... All small children go through a phase when drawing where they put arms and legs coming out of a head with drawing a body. But all children do not draw melting clocks. These connections between things are all there is, to me so close and unremoved it is all that matters.
And like a colossal game of telephone over the centuries, changes crept in until there are quite a few distinct prints purporting to be the most original.
Here's a wonderful discussion by an investigator specializing in the print: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/great-wave-spot-differenc...
But there's no true "original" since it was always a series of wood block prints.
This isn't quite correct. There was an original painting on a special Japanese paper called "gampi". That original artwork is glued to the first wood block, so it gets destroyed in the process of carving.
Early forms of the art stopped there and produced simple monochrome images. Later developments included hand painting certain sections of the image, and eventually the use of multiple blocks for multiple colors, often with gradients and even embossing and texturing.
Sounds like it is a Great Wave in more than one sense. The medium is the message. :)
Dalí wanted to be the highest-paid actor in history, so he asked for a salary of $100,000 / hour:
”Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the "wee", the other to receive the "excrement". Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the "wee" and the "excrement".
”It is said to him that I will need him for seven days... Dalí answers that God made the universe in seven days and that Dalí, while not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100,000 dollars an hour. Perhaps that while arriving at the set he will decide to film each day more than one hour for the same price.
”The only condition is to have the Emperor on the throne scatologic. He does not want to read script: "My ideas are better than yours". He wants to choose his court among his friends, wants to say what he wants and moreover, at the time to sign the contract, will condescend to make me gift of three ideas that I will have the right to use or not.”
https://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/
The story of this unmade movie is very interesting on the whole. It led indirectly to “Alien” and other sci-fi classics by introducing European artists like Moebius and Giger to Hollywood.
Like most artists that sell their work in expensive galleries. Their art is not so special but their skill to sell their personal brand is.
> Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them.
A reasonable description of every successful artist, or at least those who saw success during their lifetimes.
He pioneered the multimedia empire with Tarzan -- books, comic books, radio, movies... he was happy to make money off of any way he could.
Ie: Selling counterfeit goods at the full cost of the actual product in question.
> “(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,”
> The artist’s appetite for money ... made him a black sheep to many colleagues.
His greediness is the main reason the market of the fake lithographs exists in the first place.
Also might as well sign all them together, before mass production, rather than waiting for them to be differentiated into different prints: that way they are printed on demand from a central source rather than signed on demand from many different sources.
I suspect it might be misleading to say he signed them "before he knew what would be printed on them". They were authorized with a specific set of prints (his work), it wasn't like they could just draw anything and sell it.
Not to say he wasn't greedy. I would say the more direct point was
> "(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,” said Noah Charney, an art historian and author of The Art of Forgery.
but I'm not really sure being good at logistics makes you greedy.
If you are doing say an edition of 100 prints, you will maybe print 130-150 of them, and then choose the 100 best ones to actually publish. This gives leeway for misprints and imperfections.
Prints are ususally numbered by the artist when signed, so presumably Dali would either have not been numbering these and having the printmaker number them once the final prints in the edition are determined. That, or he was numbering them and they just didn't have the same quality-control that a typical edition would have.
That's not a novel idea. It was claimed contemporaneously by other artists, if I recall correctly.
Subject can be real or not (2 options) and painting can be realistic or not (2 options). That gives us 4 possible combinations:
Real subject painted realistically - just use photographs, they are better.
Real subject painted unrealistically, most modern art, as useful as blurry photos of UFOs or yeti.
Unreal subject painted unrealistically. This is most useless, painter have novel vision or idea but is not good enough to convey it, in gamedev they call them "idea guy".
And finally, unreal things painted realistically. Painter have novel vision or idea, and is skilled enough that you can see his vision, this is the only valuable art. And that's what Salvador Dali was.
> Because many of Dalí’s original and legitimate prints were turned into limited-edition series (sometimes with a vague number of authorized prints) and he had been sloppy with his signature throughout his life, it was hard to tell the difference between a real print and a fake print that had been copied an unlimited number of times.
If only they had issued some sort of nonfungible token that the owners could point to to attest to the true provenance of their limited edition prints.
There was a good interview with Jeff Koons on 60 Minutes last night. Koons mentions how he met Dali and was instantly inspired. The two share a lot in common - mainly hyper-capitalism meets the art world. Humans are very good at creating near worthless (debatable) objects we covet and pay millions of dollars for.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
I mean I just suspect the people who don't like Seinfeld probably still didn't like it when it was new, and "being done before" sure never was the problem for me.
Makes this trope feel a bit of a misnomer IMO
https://www.thedaliuniverse.com/sites/default/files/images/s...