Eight million dollars is a lot to pay for a fake. But it is still the same canvas that was once loved when it was purchased years ago.
Sometimes our apparent devotion to a specific thing gets betrayed by our deeper and occasionally unmasked love for its ostensible caché. We may like the idea of owning something more than the object itself. For example, many of us have hundreds of books that we may never read again. But they stay nearby, proudly displayed as representations of an identity we are willing to share. These books are doing most of their work as unopened artifacts, their spines neatly lined up and visible for the world to see.
Our misplaced love for assumed attributions of good taste suggests values that have perhaps become inverted. To use the language of the art world, can the provenance of an object mean more than the object? Sometimes– a fact well represented in Director Barry Avrich’s documentary, Made You Looknow available on Netflix. It’s drama means that it will surely be a feature film in the near future. In it, Avrich takes us back to the early 2000s and to New York’s Knoedler Gallery and its Director, Ann Freedman. Over a full decade, 80 million dollars changed hands at the gallery as what were supposedly “unknown” paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were sold to Manhattan’s money-to-burn elites. Even the President of the Board at Sotheby’s and his wife couldn’t resist.
You know where this is heading. All of the newly discovered works of abstract impressionism were fakes. They were sold to Freeman, who found it convenient to accept the story of a Queens New York woman who claimed that she was simply helping a friend, a South American art collector who wished to sell off works that he no longer wanted. The mysterious woman sold them to the gallery for modest sums, and then the gallery sold them to their well-healed clients.
In fact, there was no collector. Instead, a very good Chinese artist then living on Long Island had mastered the common cultural practice of making nearly perfect paintings in the styles of the artists. It was an effective con involving scores of “new” canvasses that had supposedly been purchased directly from leading painters of mid-Twentieth Century American art.
The problem is what to make of copies of a famous work at a time when we have almost perfect tools of reproduction.
Interestingly, if we buy a copy of a musical performance—perhaps a CD, DVD or download—we know we are getting a copy, and that is exactly what we want. We want the performance that is brought back to life in bytes or pixels. With music, everyone can be a collector of music. But the modern art world has a distorted set of values. The assumption is that each painting is unique and monetizes the celebrity of a famous artist. All of this presumably increases the size of the numbers on price tags. A long-running BBC series, Fake or Fortune, made the same point for years. Sleuthing the origins of someone’s inheritance of a possible Constable or Gainsborough became the most popular arts program in Britain.
Avrich talks to some of the people who were duped, including Dominico and Eleanore De Soles. They thought they were buying the rather striking painting at the top of this piece, supposedly by Mark Rothko. Even though Mr. De Soles was an auction house executive, he was fooled like almost everyone else who viewed it. When the con was revealed, suddenly the picture that had hung on the wall of their home was, in his word, “worthless.”
The problem of what to make of copies in an age of instant reproduction is actually not a new quandary. Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), raises the question of what to make of convincing copies of the real thing. After making a pitch for cherishing “authenticity,” he reaches the mostly unsatisfying conclusion that an original as an “aura” that is missing in a copy. But there is at least some logic here. In simpler terms, perhaps the De Soles and others were buying a vaunted reputation that comes with an established artist, something both less and more than the material object itself.
One indicator of this inverted state of affairs is the recent observation of writer and critic Fran Lebowitz, who has noted how strange it is that auctions of stunningly high-priced works follow a pattern where the painting is shown to a packed but silent room, followed by a burst of applause only when a final high bid is finally accepted. Similarly, for many news organizations the story of a famous painting is not about the art, but the astronomical price paid for it.
The Alleged fake Renoir owned by Donald Trump
Donald Trump apparently owns an attractive but fake Renoir. It may be easier to sell a fake to someone who so eagerly trades in appearances. Even so, it probably still hangs on a wall in one of his homes. And it should. Ditto for the Chinese copy that the De Soles bought. Eight million dollars is a lot to pay for a fake. But it’s worth remembering that it is the same canvas they bought and loved years ago.
For most of us who have gained richness in our lives through direct access to music, live performance, and academic study, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total and devastating.
Though there can be no single measure of the negative effects of the pandemic on our social and intellectual intelligence, the mind reels at what the final tally will be. We are mostly missing what was once the vast array of classroom opportunities, plays, concerts, and travel that survive only in the form of video facsimiles. Of course, the first task through this pandemic is to save lives and keep individuals healthy. Even against the myopia of many slow thinkers in government, that remains true. But for those Americans whose lives were on track to be given greater meaning through live performance, academic study, and direct mentoring, the inadvertent theft of these forms of engagement has been nearly total.
The humanities—fields of inquiry ranging from history to languages to literature and the arts—thrive when open and eager minds can share the same space. It’s our birthright to be with others. For students this means being in the presence of a wonderful instructor in any field that creates insight about what is possible and what’s at stake within human communities. The humanities remind us where we have been and where aspirations made visible can still take us.
For an educator, the pinnacle of this form is perhaps the seminar: a small room shared by 10 or 12 students and an instructor, all beginning the voyage of a shared conversation about the work of a groundbreaking creator of ideas. We may never be more connected to thoughts that matter than as a participant discussing a writer or creative force bursting with revelatory insights. There may be ways to electronically approximate a meeting of minds. But most are often more performative than enlightening. Communication works better when folks share the same space and time.
It is especially heartbreaking to imagine all of the events, meetings, lectures and performances that have not happened in the last year. In the United States alone this list would surely be in the millions. Scale down to one organization like a modest-sized college, and it would be in the thousands.
The effects of this cultural shutdown are beginning to be evident and especially costly for the humanities. Enrollments in the nation’s community colleges has dropped at the very moment when non-college adults are at risk for chronic unemployment. More disturbingly, stretched parents are having second thoughts about spending money on any undergraduate curriculum that offers a palette of experiences larger than is required to do a single job. Their concerns are abetted by nearsighted reporting in our media, with headlines like “College Majors With The Lowest Unemployment” or “College Majors With The Worst Return On Investment.”
The pandemic-hastened conversion of a student’s education into vocational training for an employment category is now fully underway, as schools and universities close programs in writing, philosophy, performance studies, history, foreign languages, music, dance, theater, journalism and rhetoric. Never mind that they have missed the more subtle point that a degree in history or philosophy may cultivate wonderful skills needed for innovative work. Writer Julie Schumacher reminds us what her English students can accomplish: “Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express.”
I doubt if any of us who have spent time discussing Aristotle’s pragmatism or Suzanne Langer’s insights on presentational art thought that we were wasting our student’s time. Indeed, for reasons I have mentioned before, reading Langer—a philosopher writing in the 1950s—would make any contemporary television journalist a little bit smarter. And Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s suspicions about public opinion still gives us a clear rationale for striving to protect democratic norms. In these times, with electoral losers brooding over dark ways to return to power, this should be a primary concern. Indeed, we can’t afford to not have the humanities, which collectively help us imagine what a great society can ethically achieve.
