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Forgers unite! You have nothing to lose but your overdrafts In 1888, while living on a budget with Van Gogh in Arles, the former stockbroker Gauguin had a bright idea about selling paintings. Why not float new art like a company on the stock exchange? Apparently he thought it such a wizard wheeze that he swore his friend Schuffenecker to secrecy. (He needn’t have bothered: Schuffenecker preferred to gamble on certainties, going on to develop a profitable sideline in fake Van Goghs.) Now Gauguin’s dream has become a reality with the launch of the first investment funds trading in art. Gauguin was too far ahead of his time. Without the sleek machine that is today’s art market, with dealers, galleries and auction houses rubbing along in well-oiled harmony, his scheme would never have worked. Even today, it’s unlikely to benefit struggling artists. Instead it will only make the rich ones richer, reinforcing the identification between art and money so succinctly expressed in Damien Hirst’s diamond skull. Like it or loathe it, everyone agrees that the diamond skull is the ultimate statement of the 21st century equation, art=money. So it’s entirely appropriate that it should have been bought, if not by an art investment fund, then by a ‘consortium of businessmen’ possibly including the artist himself, forced to dig deep into his own deep pockets to bring the offer within range of the asking price. But while such speculations fuel art world gossip, a more interesting question, conceptually speaking, is whether the diamonds needed to be real. As the Evening Standard’s Nick Cohen pointed out, the same effect could have been achieved with fakes. 'No one apart from the jewellers would have noticed the difference, but then no one would have been interested. The price tag is the art.î Cohen’s right, or course: contemporary art is all about money. The trouble is that however much of it there is sloshing around, the trickle-down effect stops at the barrier dam of the big-name dealers and auction houses. How can ordinary artists get their hands on a share of the ackers? With all legal means exhausted, few options remain. Last month The Jackdaw suggested art theft. There’s also forgery. Last October the artist formerly known as Robert Thwaites became Prisoner XA5833. A wildlife painter who struggled to earn £1,000 a picture, Thwaites decided – being short of cash for his children’s school fees - to, as he put it, add 'a row of noughtsî. He used his naturalist knowledge to mock up The Miser, a fake John Anster Fitzgerald fairy painting so convincing that it fooled gallery owner and Antiques Roadshow pundit Rupert Maas, who gleefully handed over £20,000. Another fake Fitzgerald netted Thwaites £38,000, which he shared with a friend; a third, which remained unsold, was reportedly painted to raise funds for his wheelchair-bound brother. Dickens could not have written a more tear-jerking script; it’s a wonder the judge – who described the defendant as 'remarkably talented' - wasn’t weeping onto his gavel. When the law finally caught up with him the noble Thwaites, currently residing in Ford Open Prison, freely admitted it was a fair cop. 'I deserved it. I wouldn’t do it again, but if I can use the notoriety why not - I love to paint. And I am very good.' So good is he that when the gaff was blown Maas decided to hang onto to the picture, feeling that £20,000 was a price worth paying. Yet, but for the deception, he wouldn’t have paid it. Which raises questions about the integrity of a market where rows of noughts can be so easily added - or subtracted. Last August, at the Flatlake Festival in Ireland, an anonymously auctioned Hirst spin painting sold for £200 and had to be returned to auction with a reserve of £20,000 - and the artist’s name attached - whereupon it went for £70,000. But at least the spin paintings are Hirst’s idea - I think - unlike much of his work, which is openly plagiaristic. In fact, Hirst has the distinction of being the first artist in history to be acclaimed as the author of works in which neither the idea nor the execution are his. At his 2005 sell-out exhibition in New York, he made $20m from paintings of crime scenes copied from other people’s photographs by other hands. Against this background, what constitutes a fake? In the old and modern masters market, where attributions are made by experts employed by the auction houses, a Japanese insurance magnate can pay $40m for a Van Gogh Still Life: Vase with 15 Sunflowers ($2,666,666.666 recurring per flower) attributed by others to Schuffenecker. In the contemporary art market, meanwhile, the busy rich are too time-poor to collect for themselves, so rely on art advisors to do it for them. Thus art created at second-hand is bought at second hand, rendering questions of authenticity still more academic. Buying and selling art is now like trading in dodgy currency – if you can palm it off on the next sucker, you’re laughing. These considerations prompted Cornelia Parker’s contribution to Flowers East’s recent exhibition Says the junk in the yard. Exhaled Cocaine (2006) was a small pile of ash salvaged from HM Customs & Excise’s incinerator, now worthless as drugs but priced £5,000 as art. This piece of conceptual prestidigitation was apparently intended as a comment on contemporary value systems. Thwaites missed a trick; had he been up to speed with his post-modern patter, he could have told that to the judge. One wonders how his Honour would have ruled on the legal difference between the cases of Parker and Thwaites. Thwaites goes down for perpetrating his own deception; Parker colludes in a mass deception perpetrated by the art world and gets away with it. Logically, Thwaites’s deception is the less heinous. Do the math. Take away the John Anster Fitzgerald from Thwaites’s Miser and you still have a painting the deceived collector thinks is worth the £20,000 he paid for it. Take away the Cornelia Parker from the Exhaled Cocaine and it turns to ashes, burning a £5,000 hole in the collector’s wallet. Hirst also likes to pretend that his whole shtick is about exposing the corruption of the art world. But if he’s really out to destroy it, as he claims, he’s making a feebler fist of it than the forgers of his spot paintings. If he had the courage of his convictions he’d have adopted Nick Cohen’s suggestion and made the diamond skull from zirconium fakes. That would have been a far more effective exposure of the flaws in the art world’s value system than charging £50m for something worth less than £20m and failing to get it. Why did the arch-plagiarist draw the line at faking? Because, unlike have-a-go hero Thwaites, he’s too chicken, too conformist and too rich. Not so the rest of you. You have the mettle, the motivation and the skills. What’s stopping you? A concerted campaign to flood the market with forgeries must eventually succeed where Duchamp failed. You owe it to art. This is more than an opportunity; it’s a duty. Forgers unite! You have nothing to lose but your overdrafts. With a rigorous post-modern defence and a good enough sob story, you may even get off. If not, The Jackdaw will visit you in prison. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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