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Nuclear Explosions Key To Spotting Fake Art
Socguy writes "A Russian art curator, Elena Basner, is claiming to have a foolproof method for determining whether or not particular paintings have been created since 1945. She claims that isotopes released into the environment by man-made nuclear explosions have found their way into types of the natural oils used to make paints."
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
Heh, I have a lot of Ikea furniture I would sell as antiques, then.
For no-name talent, perhaps that's true. What you're suggesting is a bit like visiting the television studio mockup of a well-known landmark, vs visiting the actual landmark. The intangible connection comes from knowing that it WAS Davinci or Picasso or Monet who applied their skills personally, it WAS on this hallowed ground that a truce was signed, it WAS this flag that stood upon the hill, it WAS this laboratory in which the first light bulb burned brightly through nothing more than harnessed lightning. The image itself is only half the appeal, and for the other half, they accept the degradation of the media. Today, if we saw the Mona Lisa with all her eyebrows and eye lashes that have faded to obscurity in the intervening centuries, it would just seem wrong and out of place.
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So what's the big deal with it being original? There's no actual original anyway, since each painting is an imperfect execution of what the artist had in mind in the first place.
Furthermore, where is the value of a painting? Is it in that say, Louis Wain might have sneezed on it and embedded a bit of his bodily fluids and bacteria into the picture? Or is it that the picture is actually nice to look at?
If the value of a picture is in the image, then we should reproduce it as widely as possible, not get obsessed about the "original".
The way I see it, the value of an "original" is like the value of things like some famous singer's underwear, tulips, and diamonds: irrational, and way above the actual value they would have if evaluated based on the actual usefulness.
It's the difference between owning a piece of history or just wanting something to look at. If you do not understand why someone may want to own a piece of history; why it matters so much that the one you have is the one the artist himself made with his own hands, then there's probably not much point trying to explain it.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
The only exception I can see is for the people actually interested in doing chemical analysis of the painting. But that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound.
I think a lot of the "value" of these art pieces is in their scarcity; people don't want them because they're nice to look at, people want them because nobody else has them. Or in other cases, people (most likely, people with an interest in history) want them because of the "story" that comes with them, and of course the story is only any good if the item that it came with really was a witness to the events it tells about.
ok, so if I built a scale model of the Egyptian pyramids in Kansas you would find it more valuable than the existing ruins of the originals in Egypt? All this regardless of the feat of engineering it took for them to accomplish all of this without cad programs, lasers(they had to use just sharks) etc?
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas:
Yes, these are not terribly practical, but if someone could get millions of dollars for a few high-quality fakes, this would just be the cost of doing business.
So, in summary, her assertion "ironclad - that couldn't be disputed" seems overstated. I'll grant that it IS an additional hurdle to overcome, but sufficiently motivated people WILL find a way.
The article doesn't explicitly say that there is a working method based on this concept, nor does it give any concrete statistics regarding how reliable it is, how many fakes have been found, etc. Consider it vaporware until somebody proves that they've done it.
Maybe it's time for you to read about the several repairs of the Parthenon.
How much of history would be lost because we tore down and incorrectly rebuilt some of it?
You might want to use a well make replica instead of a well made fake. A fake is typically thought of as passing itself off as the original. So regardless of where you stand on original artwork, fraud is almost always considered bad.
Are you an art critic?
You sure sound like one. You know... a stuck-up snob.
You don't have to be an art critic to know that Jackson Pollock's true art form was not painting, but rather convincing people that he was an artist. Polock's "art" was typical of the stupid abstract expressionist movement--- intentionally devoid of representational content. This is the sort of bullcrap that proves that wealthy New York morons will buy anything if you tell them it's cool. Art with all the representational elements removed can be interesting, but Pollock's crap doesn't even have that. As one artist/critic commented, "[I am] astonished that decorative 'wallpaper', essentially brainless, could gain such a position in art history alongside Giotto, Titian, and VelÃzquez."
Seriously, look at an example. I think even "wallpaper" is a bit generous. I worked at a hardware store once, and the drop cloth by the paint mixing station was more interesting than that.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The surface of the painting can tell you a lot about how a piece was made: you can look at the shapes of the strokes, the trails left by the brush's bristles, and tell something about how the artist's hand moved. You can learn technique from this. I have looked at original art and been able to see things i could never see in a reproduction, and taken something back to my own artwork.
Would you rather pick up technique from Michaelangelo's marks - or from someone who did a copy of them? The copyist may be miming the original's technique, but he's not going to show the same thought processes on the canvas, as he has a finished piece to work from. You'll never be able to look at layered paint and get an idea of where the original artist had to struggle.
Looking at a copy, even a good one, is like looking at source code with all the comments stripped out and all the variable names obscured.
Plus, of course, issues of scarcity: there is only one of these. It is thus very rare, and potentially worth a hell of a lot if it's been deemed Fine Art.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Indeed. Once you tear something down and replace it with a copy, you've permanently lost all information about the original that you didn't manage to get in the copy.
Like many modern artists, Pollock's work is not something you can really appreciate from a photo. I used to see pictures of works by Mondrian, Pollock, even some by Miro and Picaso, and wonder at how they could be so famous, so influential. But once I *saw* a Mondrian, in person, saw Dali's canvasas, saw Pollock's, I got it. Pollock's works are NOT simple drop cloths with spatterings. Mondira's work has depth and subtlty to it, the technique and brushwork are part of the experience of viewing one of these. I won't convince anyone with my poor writting skills, and so I simply say: Go SEE this stuff, as photos do not convey the size, depth, material or techniques.
You don't have to be an art critic to know that Jackson Pollock's true art form was not painting, but rather convincing people that he was an artist.
What separates stuck-up snobs from intelligent people is that the latter group understands there's no such thing as a work that doesn't qualify as art. The latest hollywood dick and fart movie is an artform, in that it tells you quite a lot about what (some) people find funny in today's society. Such things change more often than people realize. For example, the average person this generation isn't likely to laugh even once during an entire charlie chaplin movie. The example picture in the link you gave is quite impressive for a manual painting (with computers, it's easier to do something like it, but manually, that takes a lot of skill).
In addition, thanks to our great pattern-matching brains, nothing is devoid of meaning. Even if the artist was somehow capable of creating something with no intended meaning, people will derive meaning from it. And unlike what your high school teachers might have told you (because you certainly wouldn't have heard that type of bullshit in an university), what the artist meant when he created his work is nowhere near as important as what people interpret when they witness the result. If the artist is trying to make a statement, these two events will likely match, but sometimes there's much more value in the unintended interpretations of a work.
Granted pocket watch chains wear out slowly but, shall we say that you replace a few links in the chain over time. Would the pocketwatch chain still not be your grandfathers? What if, over a period of centuries your progeny continue to care for the pocket watch chain and over that time continue to replace links, would the chain not continue to be your grandfathers pocketwatch chain? How about after every single link were to have been replaced each individually, perhaps without the knowledge that all the other links had previously been changed?
The watch chain remains authentic, even though with wear, it has been slowly renewed. Most of the cells in your body are imperfect copies of the originals, but the whole remains the same whole. Authenticity is a funny thing.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.