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For ffff fakes sake
Why...
Care about a fake? I note with interest a puff piece in The London Times about the Hollywood nouveau riche hiring Art Consultants. The need is because these well coiffed beings can shuffle their A list clients to the heads of the queue to get a chance to gobble up a piece of art before anyone else. It also makes A listers feel less insecure having someone there to praise or confirm their good taste or have the expert lend Hollywood Royalty some of their own. Really? I agree if you made a few zillion dollars parading around in Spandex with the superpower to create a hurricane by blowing through your nose, you don’t really have much credibility as a Serious Actor; but in the art world, like any other, money is money. If the Hulk is prepared to pay more than a Titan of Wall Street for a scribble and dots by Cy Twombly, let the richest man win. I would lend more credibility to all these art experts were it not for the unfeasibly large amount of fakes or overbid artwork that has been sold to our brave Hollywood friends! As long ago as 1989 Sylvester Stallone sued his art consultant for $5m.(Brave person. I would have been more worried about a jab and a hook rather than a law suit). Steve Martin bought a fake Heinrich Campendonk (crazy name crazy guy) as have hoards of others. It appears these consultants no more protect you from a painting by Pinocchio rather than Pollock as anyone else
...and another thing
The problem with fakes, especially from modern art, is that it’s pretty easy to do. The more ‘ naive’ the art the easier to copy. I mean I struggle drawing the logo of TV’s The Saint, let alone trying to reproduce a Constable or a Cezanne but even I might pull off a Rothko or a Keith Haring!
It’s the same with booze. Endless wine snobs as I described in a recent blog HERE waffle on about bouquets and noses yet still get fooled that a pre-phylloxera Château Ausone, is in fact a mix of Bulgarian bulls blood and Ribena, plonked into a bottle with a fake label.
...and another thing
At the end of the day it’s all about insecurity. You are really being told that your eye or your taste does not match your wallet…. which of course is nonsense. If you prefer ginger nuts to caviar or chocolate truffles to white ones, good on you. If we all stayed true to what we liked rather than what we are told by people who intimidate us, what we should like, the world would be a happier place!
As for me, I’ll take a GTO engineering copy of a Ferrari 250 SWB over a real one for two reasons. 1) it’s identical down to the last nut and b) it’s only £1m as opposed to £7m. That means I only have to play Superman once and I’ll have change left over if I buy the GTO car as opposed to have to debase myself in a couple of sequels to buy the real one.
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A good friend of ours was in Hong Kong on a business trip. He decided that he would like to purchase a Rolex watch and eventually found shop that would sell him the model he wanted at a very reasonable price. He asked if there was a guarantee. The vendor came back with the words Only guarantee is that it’s not a Rolex !! He bought it anyway I’m impressed many with a watch on his wrist.