Fraud and Theft

Peter Carey and Ranking the Critics

Who the $#%& Is Jackson Pollock?

The idea of an art world as a unified field and an unstoppable force persists. It enters more than a few sensible critiques of art institutions, including late Modernism's white cubes, global politics, haute bourgeoisie markets, and museums that cannot quite promise an alternative to all these. Call it the last Postmodern myth, and at least one novelist calls it his own as well.

Peter Carey has lived in New York for some time, long enough to have an American son—and, now, a tale about how New Yorkers can really ruin a reputation. Naturally the author of My Life as a Fake can hardly write about fraud in the art world without wondering whether the art world is itself a fraud—as if art by its nature did not already traffic in fictions. Theft: A Love Story indeed turns on authenticity, both of art and of its artist hero. Its very title reminds one that even a critic of fakery has to learn to deal in illusion.

The title cuts more than one way at that: just who or what is worth loving, and what is worth stealing? The painter at the novel's center leaves no doubt where he stands. "To judge a work, you don't read a fucking catalogue. You look as if your life depended on it." The quote runs headlong into what critics do.

Just who, however, is stopping you from looking? Is it the power of critics, of dealers, and museum curators, and is looking enough without their help anyway? Recently art has found its amiable way into mainstream journalism, with a few relevant examples. A survey of critics makes one ask who matters these days and why. Meanwhile, a film about an alleged masterpiece from a thrift shop calls their power a fraud. And if the market rules instead, an economist wants to offer a few tips before I return to Carey's jaded artist.

Top honors

Who counts as a critic, and who can talk like a critic? You might be surprised. In December 2006, Time Out New York rated critics of everything from film to food. If that sounds like a rather narrow range, do not blame the limits entirely on the alphabet.

Once, if asked to name the most influential art critic, one might have looked anywhere but to the newspapers. One would surely have cited Tom Hess at Art in America, not to mention Clement Greenberg in Partisan Review, The Nation, and beyond. Gossip even attributes Elaine de Kooning's affair with Hess to maneuvers on behalf of her husband. I like to think that artists have more than careerism in mind when it comes to extramarital behavior, such as who will play them in the biopic. Still, de Kooning had brains and sex appeal to spare, and she must have demanded both in her lovers as well.

The Time Out survey excludes all those publications, both the intellectual kind and art magazines. That writes off at least one candidate for greatest living critic and philosopher of art, Arthur C. Danto. It also excludes Artforum and October, and it refuses to compensate by looking to start-ups, the underground press, or the Internet either. As a side benefit, it also omits the rearguard actions of Jed Perl and Robert Hughes. The survey happens to exclude me as well, but that goes without saying. I try not to take myself too seriously anyway, even if this site creates an art world all to itself.

Instead, Time Out leans to competition with aims like its own—in particular, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and New York magazine. Influence now means who gets to tell New Yorkers what to do this weekend. Surely not coincidentally, it ranks critics by accessibility, taste, and style, but not depth or insight. If that rules out criticism with greater ambition, it should not sound altogether crass. For one thing, it attests to the conundrum of art in an increasingly commercial scene. No movement, with a theoretical champion, claims to be changing much of anything.

In turn, The Times has come a long way since Hilton Kramer spent years there trying to find off American art since 1940. Interviewed in Art and Auction, Roberta Smith of The Times says that she aims to get people "out of the house." However, that conveys passion, and it does not come at the expense of her many intriguing thoughts along the way. Meanwhile, Art in America looks like an extension of its advertising and reads like a card catalog. Ironically, the magazine then holds periodic debates on whether criticism can do better than description without discretion.

I like the survey, too, because within its limits I agree with it. It gives top honors to Jerry Saltz of The Voice and to Smith, whom it praises for not giving up after Michael Kimmelman, as Times head critic, could well have marginalized her. Both Saltz and Smith write knowledgeably and well, both seek out more than safe galleries, and both try to explain why you and I should, too. Smith loses a few votes for often ending "on the other hand," but that means she is thinking. If it took notice of me, Time Out would surely downgrade me for the same tic, in spades, as well as for a lingering conservatism in my admiration for painting alongside new media, abstraction alongside political art, and dead white males alongside feminism. Yet the survey haunts me most for pointing to a changing scene, in which the arts sit beside top chefs and new fiction, rather than dive bars and semiotics.

No truck with art?

Is "the whole art world a fraud," then? One can always count on that theme to sell a few books or magazines. It appeals to a public unease with art since Modernism, even while people pack the modern museum. It appeals to a phony right-wing populism that still plays politically, directed perversely at artists, scholars, and others on the outside of real wealth and power. It appeals to qualms about soaring prices, even as auctions add to a work's aura and the public's reverence. No wonder it appeals, too, to The New York Times.

Twice in a week, the paper reports on a painting that may or may not pass for the work of a great American artist. Teri Horton, whom I quoted in the preceding paragraph, bought it for five bucks at a thrift shop, and she has been trying to validate it ever since. Her story pits an outspoken woman against art historians, who dismiss it as worthless. It also makes her the star of a new movie, Who the $#%& Is Jackson Pollock? The film neatly aligns her contest with another, between "the connoisseurs, who insist that a refined eye is the ultimate judge of authenticity," and "the scientific side." Thomas Hoving, former director of the Met, stands in for the former, while the forensic evidence comes from fingerprints.

The film's director, Harry Moses, leaves no doubts where his sympathies lie, and The Times clearly shares them. I can see a case for them, too. Sure, the paint looks too flat, dense, close the canvas edge, matte, and simply boring for Jackson Pollock—at least in a newspaper thumbnail. An unsigned drip painting does not yield its secrets easily, however, and fingerprints sound convincing. According to a Canadian investigator, they match those on a Pollock in Berlin and others from Pollock's Long Island studio. Still, while I cannot judge a reproduction, and while one may doubt the whole idea of authenticity after Modernism, I can evaluate journalism, and here alarms should be sounding loud and clear.

As in politics, one should be questioning the populism alone. Hoving made his reputation, as New York parks commissioner and at the Met, by opening Central Park and the museum to a larger public. Meanwhile, The Times would not be covering this twice in about a week unless a bigger business than the art world were promoting a movie. Not surprisingly, then, the film's scenario sounds like a market-tested formula. Both a "feisty" woman and a former truck driver with an eighth-grade education—one who hated the "ugly" mess at first and could not give it away? One can hear audiences cheering already.

Conspiracy theorists may look for hidden motives, but no one else's Pollock drops in price if this one sells. Conversely, the movie depends on buying into the worth of a Pollock, so that this one can gain in stature. Moreover, by denigrating visual examination, the film effectively detaches that worth from anything like, well, meaning. One also wonders who hired the investigator, how he obtained the prints, and whether any museum labs got a look. Real science is open and replicable, and art forgers often start with canvas from the right time and place.

Finally, just who neatly aligned those two conflicts—between insiders and outsiders, connoisseurs and science? Attribution always relies on scientific examination, because inspection, knowledge, and understanding go together: they are about developing an informed eye and a receptive mind. Hoving's museum would test the pigments against Pollock's, using microscopes, radiography, and other tools to compare the density and weave of paint. It would also be researching how a painting worth a fortune could leave Lee Krasner's estate and land in a California thrift store, a narrative called the painting's provenance. And when all that examination does pay off, in what I see and know, it may not have anyone cheering.

Buy low, sell high

"There is no mystery about the causes of the new boom. The rich have done very well over the last decade." So much for the theory that tax cuts and deregulation go to jobs and greater earnings for most Americans. At least wealth has trickled down a little, to auction houses. Am I making fun again of The Times? You bet your life—or your tax-deferred savings.

As you might guess, my quote offers an economist's version of art pricing. It comes from an article that same day about an economics professor at the University of Chicago, long home of the late Milton Friedman and famed for its dedication to free markets. David W. Galenson has a new book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses—and his own theory about just how to stake one's money on art. Which high-end bids have gone out of sight, like the $17.4 million last week for an Andy Warhol well into his celebrity phase? Some names carry a great deal of weight, Galenson argues, but not all their works will hold up equally well. Consider, he says, the stage in the artist's career.

Based on a broad study of sale prices, he divides artists and poets into "young geniuses" and "late bloomers," those who burn out like rock stars and those who become art's aging prophets. The first, like Vincent van Gogh or Pablo Picasso, trust their instincts and break with convention. Others, like Paul Cézanne or Pollock, approach a painting or, indeed, a lifetime as a never complete experiment. Buy older work, he concludes, only by artists who do their most valuable work in old age. If I may add my own handy categories, an economist becomes an authority by crunching data and a cultural guru by making wild generalization, all of which bodes well indeed for Galenson, so buy now. In fact, he has the seal of approval of pop journalism's master of the art, Malcolm Gladwell.

Market models have a way of leaving things out, however, such as the cycle of boom and bust itself. And that cycle has causes that economics alone cannot fully critique. For example, artists have attained new audiences, institutions, and celebrity, while elites invest more readily than before in mass entertainment. Without that perspective, one cannot explain why the rich have put so much of their money into contemporary art—especially into artists as accessible and interested in mass culture as Jeff Koons. Interestingly, Galenson's bimodal sales distribution echoes the very modern myths that have helped change art and, over time, give it its cultural cachet. The struggling genius and the restless experimenter reflect two tales of Modernism's origins.

Do those tales hold up, now that Postmodernism has officially buried the avant-garde? To take just Galenson's examples, van Gogh grew more audacious to the end, while some Pollock fans dislike his last years—with their leaner, more figurative black traces. His mature technique, the drip, also involves both impulse and repeated, conscious self-editing. Neither van Gogh nor Pollock really has an early or late period anyway, except by the sad accident of an early death. Cézanne reached his maturity and his break with the past by abandoning an early expressive style. If I may add an example of my own, William Butler Yeats wrote his finest and most modern poetry in old age, but only by reflecting on his early fame and the steady achievement of "a sixty-year-old smiling public man."

The theory also sounds suspiciously empty, like advice to buy low and sell high, since one still has to classify each artist correctly. Rembrandt looked washed up after an impressive start. John Berger's The Success and Failure of Picasso describes an artist who blew it after Cubism, Alfred Barr asserted a contrary view with his classic Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, and their accounts of Picasso battle it out even today. "The art historians and art critics won't look at my work," Galenson laments. "They just assume I'm an idiot." I doubt it, merely a smart economist.

Love and learn

Fraudulent or not, then, do galleries exist to sell art, and do commercial pressures distort art and its public? Sure, and articles here have looked at some of what goes wrong. Chelsea's shopping mall and endless art fairs even apart from the Armory Show do discourage looking, and that encourages work extroverted enough to grab attention. It leaves in doubt art's ambitions to change the world politically, which depend on its place as "symbolic speech," between ordinary speech and an ordinary commodity. It encourages a culture of insiders, critics as curators, and gossip. It puts in question the continuity between art and the avant-garde.

Do catalogs, too, exist to sell art? They do for galleries, where they generate less independent revenue than for museums. They often twist scholarship and critical theory into not just artspeak but what I call martspeak. However, dealers and their catalog writers also benefit from a working relationship with artists as museums rarely can, and I rely on press releases myself all the time. Moreover, museums, too, have money and careers at stake, and they, too, can bury art in words. They have a legal and financial obligation as nonprofits to educate the public, but the Met often uses wall labels to skew a work's importance and attribution.

Does the only hope, then, lie in sincere, cranky Booker-prize winners, who are just looking? No way, for dealers in Chelsea's "battle for Babylon" fight hard for work in which they believe. In turn, artist collectives and other attempts to take galleries beyond the fringe have motives, too. Worse, those fringes can create an insider culture, much as with private clubs. Most important of all, no amount of sincerity ensures understanding: it takes more than time, determination, and an expletive to look at art.

Art does take words—to inform new habits of looking and to upset crusty, sincere old ones. Art can also upset a trust in unspoiled, authentic beauty. A controversial attribution takes knowledge, experience, ideas, scientific examination, and gut feelings, but the interplay of all these matters whenever art makes one think, feel, and look. In an unnervingly naïve chapter of his book, Galenson asks, "Can an artist change?" He has his doubts, up, because his young geniuses do not back down, while late bloomers come upon complexity full blown. Not only artists, however, but viewers do change, as talent and understanding meet experience.

One should never confuse a novel's genuine insights with its characters' grudges and hard knocks. Carey sets his tale in the Reagan era, which today's inflated prices and egos have left far behind. And his subtitle, A Love Story, suggests that art may have a happier handing than his hero. Last, Australians have a culture wracked by change themselves. A traditional elite, certified by art schools and university entrance examinations, faces pressure from home for diversity—and pressure from abroad to accept a half century of European and American art. No wonder Robert Hughes plays the embattled elitist, even as he writes for popular publications, shuns critical theory, and dumps on emerging art that once served as the mark of an intellectual elite.

Still, a look back to the Reagan era has a point. A reactionary decade led to Chelsea just a few years later. Then, too, a president who despised New York had a good lesson for understanding it: as he said of the former Soviet Union, trust but verify. If you allow yourself to trust and to verify, you may come to love art. If you accept neither what you see or what you read, you may end up a bitter, failed artist in a novel.

Postscript: on seeing the movie

I often thought that this site would have even more readers if it covered the culture scene and all the arts. Then, however, I would have to see, write, and code even more. A possible solution? Cover movies I have not seen. Oddly enough, in this article I did just that, and to my dismay it has turned out rather well.

To sum up the plot again, a California trucker bought an ugly painting for a few bucks. Teri Horton meant it as a gift, which already says something about her truculent personality. Who the $#%& Is Jackson Pollock? celebrates that spirit, as a healthy antidote to a conspiratorial art world. Hearing who may have painted the thing, she responds with film's title. From that moment on, however, she will not give it up until she considers herself and, secondarily, the painting "vindicated."

My having leapt in myself before the movie's release, based solely on two articles in The Times, seems only right. After all, the film is all about judging without looking. In fact, it comes down hardest on those who bother to look. Its chief villain, Hoving, sticks his nose in the purported Pollock, backs off, turns his head at every possible angle, and otherwise does his best to subject himself to ridicule from a quick series of jump cuts. The Met's former director even wears a slim, well-tailored suit. In this film, that alone puts him under suspicion.

The story already set off alarms. Who painted what truly does matter, not just to art's inner circle, but because understanding art takes words. And one has every right to take into account such minor details as what the work looks like to someone who knows Pollock's style. In the movie, those mean old experts keep asking, too, about the work's provenance, or history, especially when a painting by the most celebrated artist of his time somehow vanishes for fifty years, crosses the country, and lands in a thrift store. The resemblance to a ready-made plot, the gutsy lady against the world, said something as well. Two articles in a major newspaper did not come by aggressive reporting or by accident, but as part of a studio marketing campaign, for a product it hoped would not end up in a thrift store.

Horton did not suddenly cause the producer, Don Hewitt of Sixty Minutes, to see the light either. His program sneered at those who dare admire Jean-Michel Basquiat as far back as 1993. And he still looks on hard questions about art as akin to passwords for a secret society. That may explain why the movie speaks with a former museum director rather than a Pollock scholar. The director, Harry Moses, works in television, with such sterling credits as The Guiding Light. And it shows, right down to the feel-good and thoroughly annoying ending, when Horton and her friends enjoy a good old buy (oops, I meant boy) on country guitar.

But then I probably said all this much better before I finally caught the DVD recently, which again says something about a shallow, conventional film. It takes on faith the credentials of the fingerprint expert she hired. It never asks other labs to confirm his efforts, and never pursues questions about the reliability of fingerprint evidence—including the clarity of the print or the frequency of a pattern within the population. I hope I do not go to jail on grounds like these.

The film pretends that art attributions ignore such scientific methods. Yet it shrugs off chemical analysis that finds acrylic paints. Acrylics did exist, but until reformulation in the 1960s only as runny, expensive stuff Pollock could not have used and might never have seen. He had good reason anyway for preferring the layered translucency of oil, the glow and cheapness of enamel, and their associations with art traditions and household materials. Even Horton's demand for vindication makes no sense, since it implies that someone who never heard of the painter and hated the painting had all the answers from the start.

The idea that contemporary art is all a hoax for insiders dies hard, even as audiences for artists like Pollock and Basquiat soar. If I am looking for a secret society to help me make real money, though, I am banking on the Hewitt group.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story was published in 2006 by Knopf. Those two articles appeared in The New York Times on November 15, 2006, but an earlier article on the proposed Pollock had appeared one week previously, and an article based on an interview with the fingerprint expert appeared December 31. The Time Out New York rankings, "Critiquing the Critics," appeared in the issue of December 7-13. David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses was published in 2006 by Princeton University Press.