I listened to part of an NPR piece earlier today on the subject of art forgery and the economics of it. Part of the discussion revolved around a case where a museum had a special display of “art” produced, supposedly, by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 80’s. If you’ve never heard of Basquiat, there are two things to keep in mind:
1) His paintings have sold for over one Hundred MILLION dollars.
2) His paintings look like this:
Yeah. That’s really what passes for “fine art” these days.
As it turns out, this museum exhibition was populated by *forged* Basquiat paintings, which caused headaches all around.
Anyway, the thing that made me laugh out loud was one of the admissions by one of the forgers: the paintings took less than half an hour to create. According to THIS ARTICLE, some of them as little as five minutes. If you can forge “art” that passes *any* sort of muster in a matter of minutes, I gotta question whether said “art” is worthy of any real mention.
In the NPR piece, the expert they talked to yammered on about how “important” Basquiat was, along with Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. There’s yer problem: you think *that* is art worthy of remembrance. But where is your reverence for Chesley Bonestell? Norman Rockwell? Robert McCall? You know, artists with actual skill and talent, producers of art that inspired and uplifted… and demonstrated craftsmanship and ᚠᚢcᚲᛁᚾᚷ effort? Artists you couldn’t create “previously unseen” art from in the time it takes to listen to a mediocre podcast?
This is just a part of the uglification of the world, the exaltation of the mediocre, the banal, the bland.