Hoax Museum Blog: Art

Huge Sculptures — Tamakia Gant asks: "Are these real? They look so amazing!!!"

Yeah, they are pretty cool. And they are real (real sculptures, not real people!) They're the work of Australian hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck. According to the Wikipedia entry about him, "Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images."

Fake Konrad Kujau Fakes — Konrad Kujau was the forger responsible for creating the Hitler Diaries. After he served his prison sentence, he became something of a minor celebrity in Germany, and his "authentic fakes" of famous paintings became sought after in their own right by collectors. Kujau died in 2000, but now his great-niece, Petra, has been charged with selling hundreds of fakes of his fakes. The Times reports that:

Petra Kujau, 47, faces fraud charges for selling at least 500 fake Kujaus to clients worldwide through an internet auction site for more than €550,000 (£381,000). Some of the oil paintings, bought from art schools in Asia for as little as €10 apiece, fetched up to €3,500 because the Kujau signature inflated their value.

I wonder if these fake Kujau forgeries will now also become collector's items? I wouldn't mind having one to hang in my office, but only if I can get it for €10, not €3,500.

Painted Room Illusions — These photos show rooms painted in such a way that, if you stand in the correct place, a pattern will appear. Despite looking photoshopped, they are real. The painted rooms are the creations of artist Felice Varini. On his website you can find more examples of his art if you search around long enough (and struggle through the incredibly bad navigation). Varini writes:

The painted form achieves its coherence when the viewer stands at the vantage point. When he* moves out of it, the work meets with space generating infinite vantage points on the form. It is not therefore through this original vantage point that I see the work achieved; it takes place in the set of vantage points the viewer can have on it. If I establish a particular relation to architectural features that influence the installation shape, my work still preserves its independence whatever architectural spaces I encounter. I start from an actual situation to construct my painting. Reality is never altered, erased or modified, it interests and seduces me in all its complexity. I work "here and now".

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but the illusions are pretty cool. (Thanks to Eric Kimlinger for sending me a link to the photos.)

Hoax Cartoons — Here's a couple of hoax-related cartoons. The first one was found by my wife in yesterday's paper:


This next one was found by Big Gary on Yahoo. (It refers to Sony's fake graffiti.)

Extra Virgin Mary — I'm about five days late posting this, but better late than never. An advertisement for an "Extra Virgin Mary Statue" slipped by the editors of the conservative Catholic magazine, America. The advertisement offered "a stunning ... statue of the Virgin Mary standing atop a serpent wearing a delicate veil of latex." The "delicate veil of latex" was a blue condom. America's editors didn't examine the accompanying photo closely enough to realize this. And so the ad ran in the December 5 edition. People who contacted the seller were told the ad was meant "as an assault on Catholic faith and devotion." I don't know who the artist was who created the ad. Maybe it was Banksy.

Fantastic Eggs — Alejandro from Colombia sent in these pictures that are circulating via email with the subject "Huevos Fantasticos" (or "Fantastic Eggs" in English). He asks, "Are these things real?" Well, I'm pretty sure they are real. I think they're examples of carved ostrich eggs. Do a google image search for "carved ostrich egg" and you'll come up with plenty of other examples. However, I don't know who the artist is responsible for these specific carvings.

Monkey Art Fools Expert — Dr. Katja Schneider, director of the State Art Museum in Moritzburg, has been embarrassed by mistaking a painting done by Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp, for a work by the late Ernst Wilhelm Nay:

The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. "It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour," Dr Schneider confidently asserted. The canvas was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. While Banghi likes to paint, she is not able to build up much of a body of work as her mate Satscho generally destroys her paintings before they can get to the gallery. But this one survived long enough to give Dr Schneider a red face. "I did think it looked a bit rushed," she told Bild newspaper.

Of course, this isn't the first time monkey art has fooled an expert. The classic case occurred in 1964 when newsmen from Sweden's Göteborgs-Tidningen obtained some paintings by Peter, a four-year-old chimp at the Boras zoo. They hung the paintings in a gallery, claiming they were the work of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. And soon the works were drawing critical acclaim. One critic wrote: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find examples posted online of the art of either Banghi or Pierre Brassau.

Cooling Down With David — Maybe some city really did sponsor the urban art project depicted below. But I doubt it. It definitely looks photoshopped to me. There must be an original David-free version of this picture floating around somewhere.
Update: The fountain is real. It's the Crown Fountain designed by artist Jaume Plensa in Chicago's Millennium Park. But the image of David is fake. The Millennium Park website explains:

The fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water, a symbol of life, to flow out. Plensa adapted this practice by having faces of Chicago citizens projected on LED screens and having water flow through a water outlet in the screen to give the illusion of water spouting from their mouths. The collection of faces, Plensa's tribute to Chicagoans, was taken from a cross-section of 1,000 residents.

In other words, it would be possible to project an image of Michelangelo's David onto the tower, but it doesn't sound as if this has ever been done.

Update: This image comes from a Fark photoshop contest. It was created by a Farker named gigglechick.

The Grafton Portrait of Shakespeare — The National Portrait Gallery has reported that the Grafton portrait, long thought to depict Shakespeare as a young man, doesn't depict him at all. They don't know who the guy in the painting is. The portrait apparently served as the inspiration for the portrayal of Shakespeare in the movie Shakespeare in Love.

So the Grafton portrait will now join the Flower portrait (revealed to be a nineteenth-century fake earlier this year) in the category of "portraits of Shakespeare that don't actually show Shakespeare." My hunch is that all the depictions of Shakespeare are unreliable. We'll never know what he looked like.

MIDI or Virtuoso? — Reverent.org has an interesting quiz that challenges you to tell the difference between music played by a computer and music played by a human virtuoso. Most people will probably find it pretty easy. I, however, scored only 63%. I mistook Rachmaninov for a computer (among other errors).

Holy Grail Found in Da Vinci’s Last Supper — Here's a bit of a mystery. I received an email from someone called Prastil who wrote, "Check this hoax out: DaVinciGrail.com." The site he directed me to claims that the holy grail has finally been discovered in Da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. For centuries people have wondered why Da Vinci omitted the grail from his painting, given that the grail is one of the central elements of the Last Supper story. Its absence has spawned a variety of theories, such as the one elaborated in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, that the holy grail was Mary Magdalene's uterus (and that the figure to the left of Jesus in the painting is Mary Magdalene). But DaVinciGrail.com claims that Da Vinci actually did include the grail in his painting, if you look hard enough. He concealed it as a symbol on the wall above the head of St. Bartholomew, the disciple at the extreme left. (I highlighted the cup in the image below).

It may seem a bit farfetched that after centuries someone discovered a detail in the Last Supper that no one had ever seen before, but as far as I can tell, that's the case. The man who noticed the grail in the painting was Gary Phillips, a Michigan computer programmer (and cryptologist). He was aided in his discovery by the fact that the painting was recently cleaned, revealing details previously concealed by dirt and grime. Of course, Phillips could be seeing a shape that was not intentionally placed there by Da Vinci, but once you see the cup, it seems so obvious that it's hard to believe it wasn't placed there on purpose. The legitimacy of Phillips's claim to have discovered this hidden detail is noted on a number of sites, such as About.com's Art History blog.

Now here's where things get strange. Phillips has nothing to do with DaVinciGrail.com. Instead, Phillips maintains a separate site called Realm of Twelve. DaVinciGrail.com is registered to (drumroll, please) Prastil, the same guy who emailed me telling me that the site was a hoax. Why did Prastil claim his site was a hoax? Was he trying to get me to write about his site, not thinking that I would check the domain registration? I have no idea (and I wrote about it anyway). But Phillips's discovery of the grail hidden as a symbol on the wall in The Last Supper seems real enough to me... unless there's some part of the story that I'm not clued in to. (Very possible.)

Thieves Steal Fake Paintings — A couple of days ago thieves stole three Edvard Munch paintings from the Hotel Continental in Oslo. But unfortunately for the thieves, all the paintings they stole were fakes. The hotel had the real paintings in a vault. This confirms a pet theory of mine: that most of the time, when you see a famous painting hanging in a museum or gallery, it's a fake. It's simply too risky to hang the priceless originals out in public, either because they could get stolen or damaged. For instance, I'm convinced that the Mona Lisa hanging on display at the Louvre is a fake. Which means that all those tourists who crowd around it are basically wasting their time. They could see a better version of it on a poster in the gift shop. (But having said this I have to admit that when I was in Paris last year I became one of those tourists who trekked through the Louvre just to see the Mona Lisa).

Senior Ceiling Mural Prank — This is pretty cool. Instead of doing a typical obnoxious prank, a senior class in Vermont painted a celestial mural on the ceiling of the main lobby of the school. Normally the rule with pranks is that, to be judged successful, they should annoy, shock, irritate, or poke fun at someone. But I think that surprising people is just as valid a reaction. And what's more surprising than a random act of art?

The class of 2005 painted a large celestial mural on a ceiling in the main lobby of the school during the holiday weekend, Principal Peter Evans said.
Evans said when he returned to school on Tuesday, he looked up at the mural and thought it was an art class project. He soon learned that it was the senior prank, a tradition that usually has a more troublesome impact on the school. About 170 ceiling tiles were painted, he said.
...
"It's beautiful, I think everyone agrees that it's beautiful. We're enjoying it right now, and we don't plan on removing it or eliminating it," Evans said.

Art Cats — Artists work in all different kinds of mediums. Some work in oil. Others in stone. Dave Powell's medium is cats. He breeds cats and then displays them as art in plastic containers. He tries to breed for mutations such as polydactylism. He seems a little sensitive that people won't think his cat-in-a-box displays qualify as art, but he argues that they are since anything created with 'artistic intent' is art. I actually disagree. I think that art is whatever art critics define as art. In other words, it's up to the audience to decide what qualifies as art, not the artist. But as a cat lover, I'm perfectly to happy to regard cats as art.

Cave Art: Banksy Strikes Again — The self-proclaimed 'art terrorist' Banksy made headlines back in March for sneaking his own work into various New York art galleries. Now he's done it again. He managed to sneak some faux prehistoric rock art into the British Museum. The rock art depicted a caveman pushing a shopping trolley. It hung in the British Museum for two days before being detected. The British Museum has now loaned the rock art back to Banksy who is displaying it at his own show in London. But they expect to get it back eventually.

Trompe l’oeil Murals — Some photos of the mural paintings of Eric Grohe have been doing the rounds. The coolest ones, I think, are the ones where people are standing and looking at the paintings, and you can't quite tell if the people are part of the painting or not.

High Heels — More strange images from my inbox. These shoes look like some kind of art project. I don't think it would be possible to walk in them.

Key Scratch Artist — Mark McGowan is an artist, and his canvas is other people's cars. His paintbrush is a key. He goes around town scratching his 'artwork' on random people's cars. At least, that's what he claimed. Now he's admitted the whole thing is a hoax:

An artist who claimed to have vandalised nearly 50 cars in the name of art has admitted it was a stunt. Mark McGowan, 37, said he had taken pictures of himself scratching vehicles' paintwork in Glasgow and London as part of a project. But the London performance artist has since admitted the cars were already "keyed" and the photos were "staged". He said it had been an art project that had gone "horribly wrong" and said he was "very, very sorry".
"I never keyed any cars...the whole thing has just been a nightmare," he added.

I actually think it's a pretty clever idea for a hoax. It's so outrageous, and yet at the same time easy to believe an artist might actually do this. Some of McGowan's other stunts also sound, um, interesting:

In 2003, he used his nose to push a monkey nut seven miles to 10 Downing Street in protest against student debt. He also rolled on pavements for four miles across London singing Christmas carols to highlight the work of office cleaners.

(Thanks to Andrew for the link)

Michelangelo’s Laocoon — It's already well known that Michelangelo dabbled in art forgery. That's not disputed. For instance, there's his famous forgery of the Sleeping Cupid. However, Lynn Catterson of Columbia University thinks that a much more high-profile forgery should be attributed to him. She believes that Michelangelo forged The Laocoon, which has long been regarded as one of the most important pieces of ancient Greek sculpture in existence. She points out that Michelangelo was present when The Laocoon was unearthed in 1506. She has promised to provide further proof to back up her allegation at a lecture today, as well as in a book she's submitted for publication. (thanks to Jelena for the link)

Adventure Art — Some guy (I can't find his name) has put together a huge and fascinating collection of examples of 'adventure art'. Many of the examples he describes are basically elaborate pranks. Some of the stuff is completely insane. Many of the stunts seem to end with the artist's arrest. I haven't had the time to read all of it, but here are a few samples that caught my eye:

• The Austrian artist group produced "Nellanutella" as part of their contribution for the Venice Biennale. The artists threw themselves repeatedly into Venice's canals from café tables, bridges and boats.
• Gordon Matta Clark cut large holes into the walls of Pier 52 on the Hudson River. The work "day's end" resulted in a warrant issued for the artist's arrest and his eventual flight to Europe.
• Doug Fishbone installed a gigantic mountain of bananas - well over a ton of them - in the historic town square in Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland. The work, which was eaten by the crowd in minutes, was meant as a commentary on greed, globalization, consumerism and violence.

That last guy, Doug Fishbone (the banana artist), actually went to Amherst College with me. We were both in the same year but never hung out together. I haven't seen him since Amherst.