Hoax Museum Blog: Art

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.

The Carlisle Cursing Stone — In 2001 artist Gordon Young placed a block of sculpted granite in Carlisle's Tullie House Museum. The granite is inscribed with an ancient curse against local highwaymen and robbers. But some people in the city feel that ever since the 'cursing stone' was placed there, bad luck has plagued the city. "Livestock herds around the city on the border with Scotland were wiped out by foot-and-mouth disease, there has been a devastating flood, factories have closed, a boy was murdered in a local bakery and Carlisle United soccer team dropped a league." So now a local politician has introduced a bill to remove the Cursing Stone and have it destroyed, in the belief that this will bring good luck back to Carlisle. The suggestion has sparked quite a bit of controversy, as well as an angry response from the artist. Personally I think that if Carlisle wants to get rid of its bad luck it should stop fooling around with removing stones and go ahead and burn a witch. After all, that seemed to work for Salem. Didn't it?

Batman’s Greatest Boner — A series of scans has appeared on the scans_daily LiveJournal blog, apparently from an early Batman comic (Batman #66). It details a 'boner' made by the Joker, and his subsequent efforts to force Batman 'into a boner'. The word boner is repeated so often that it seems like it has to be a joke, especially when you read lines such as "Gotham City will rue the day it mentioned the word Boner!" Perhaps someone photoshopped the word 'boner' into an issue of Batman. But I don't think so. I think it's real, although I can't be sure since I don't have a copy of that particular Batman comic (in fact, I don't have any Batman comics). The cover of that issue can be seen here. It's titled 'The Joker's Comedy of Errors!' So the issue itself is real, and 'boner' can mean an error. I think that it's only in recent decades that boner has come to predominantly refer to something else.

Another thing... in one of the panels a newspaper headline reads "Wrong-Way Batman! Lawman Aims For California, Winds Up In England!" This is a reference to Wrong-Way Corrigan, an aviator who wanted to fly solo from New York to Dublin but wasn't given permission to do so. So on July 17, 1938 he took off for California and 'accidentally' went the wrong-way and ended up in Ireland.

Child Art Prodigy, Part 2 — Four months ago I posted an entry about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old child art prodigy whose paintings are selling for thousands of dollars. Tonight I watched a 60 Minutes piece about her, and I've got to say that it was very sad. There seems to be no evidence that Marla is painting these pieces on her own. Her parents claim that she's shy and is unable to paint with anyone but them around (no one but her parents has ever seen her do a painting from start to finish), nor is she able to paint in front of cameras. A hidden camera was installed and what this showed her producing (as her father screamed directions at her from off-camera) was a far cry from the other paintings attributed to her. It seems very likely that her father is the one either entirely creating these paintings, or finishing up what Marla starts. Just watching the father talk, you could tell that he was concealing something by his body language. It's sad that the girl has to be put through this. It'll be interesting to see if people will continue to buy 'her' paintings in light of what 60 Minutes revealed.

Ban On Anime — An email has been going around urging people to sign this petition:

To:  George Bush
Some people are signing against anime and are calling is to be a "perverse, evil, insiduous form of animation from the dark land of Japan, and is corrupting America's youth at unprecedented rates." Anime is NOT corrupting the youth of America, and since when has America become a country of Christians? Isn't there a SEPARATION of Church and State? Isn't this a ban on our Freedom of Speech? And Freedom of Press? What does anime have to do with brainwashing our youth?

Even though I'm not sure what 'signing against anime' is supposed to mean, I do know that there is no movement underfoot by any politician to ban anime. But it's worth scrolling through the messages left by the 4129 people who signed the petition. Some of them are quite amusing.

Duke of Wellington Cone Prank — For almost twenty years Glaswegians have enthusiastically upheld a tradition of placing traffic cones on top of a statue of the Duke of Wellington that stands in the city center. You can even buy postcards and t-shirts displaying a cone-wearing Wellington. But now the fun might come to an end on account of art historian Gary Nisbet who claims that the cone prank threatens to seriously damage the 160-year-old statue. He's campaigning to get people who climb up on the statue charged with vandalism. Unfortunately this would make a number of the city councillors vandals. Nisbet's proposal doesn't seem to be going over well at all with the residents of Glasgow, most of whom seem to think the cone is the best thing about the statue.

Face of Christ in Painting — I received this email yesterday from an artist requesting my opinion. Feel free to leave your own opinion in the comments:

Being an artist, in August of 1996 I painted a picture.
It was supposed to be a simple picture of a large cross on a white background.
The picture is 24 x 30. The two axis of the cross are 11.5 inches wide.
Roughly 28 x 22.5. The cross was made by taking a pallet of mixed colors of paint and with one vertical and one horizontal swipe nothing more.

When the paint dried you could "I would say" clearly see the face of Christ on the cross. I was so afraid I put the picture away and in the last 8 years have only showed it to several of my friends. Please give me your honest input on what you see in and think about my picture.
You can either call or email me back.

This is no joke.

Warmest Regards,
DiMarcia (Dee) Ancrum

(Click on the image to enlarge it. I had to trim it down significantly because the image file was huge... 3.3MB)

Butt Art — Stan Murmur has a good thing going. He smears paint on his buttocks, smacks his fanny on a piece of paper, and sells the resulting product for hundreds of dollars. Is it really art? Well, no. It's Butt Art. I think this probably qualifies as something that started out as a bit of a joke, but then somehow turned into a real thing for him.

Abstract Expressionism as CIA Plot — I realize some people feel that Abstract Expressionism needs some kind of an excuse for its existence, but the following purported connection between Abstract Expressionism and the CIA seems just bizarre. It comes from a review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders

One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.

Art museum directors on the front lines of the Cold War? That sounds like the plot of a Thomas Pynchon novel to me. It also sounds just crazy enough to be true. (via Early Days of a Better Nation)

Turner Nudes Survived — According to legend all the erotic paintings of the artist JMW Turner were burned in the mid-nineteenth century by the prudish critic John Ruskin. The source of this legend was Ruskin himself, who often boasted that he had burned them to conceal the evidence of Turner's "failure of mind". It turns out Ruskin lied. He couldn't bring himself to burn them. Instead, as researcher Ian Warrell discovered, Ruskin simply misfiled most of the nudes, thereby effectively concealing their existence. Through diligent archival work Warrell realized that "Almost all the hundreds of allegedly missing drawings, which range from close-up detail to blurry colour washes and clearly held a powerful erotic charge for Turner, appear to be safely in the Tate collection."

Cremaster Fanatic — The artwork of Matthew Barney is highly abstract and conceptual. Even for modern art, it pushes the envelope of weird. For instance, his series of films titled The Cremaster Cycle involves, among other things, "a half-vegetable, half-man creature with a fleet of Jacobin pigeons attached to his gonads." Not exactly the kind of stuff to appeal to a mass audience. And yet he has a fan page, Cremaster Fanatic, similar to the kind of fan pages you find devoted to teen stars such as Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff. But as an article in yesterday's NY Times reveals, the fan site is actually an elaborate deadpan-style joke: Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it's a parallel work of art. "I'm pretending to be a fan," said its creator, the New York artist Eric Doeringer. If you were casually perusing the site, you would probably never guess that it was a spoof, but it does get funnier once you learn that it's not for real.

Rock Balancing — Bill Dan balances rocks. His balanced rocks look very cool, but I have a hard time believing that they're all just balancing naturally without a little extra help. Actually, he seems quite legitimate... and they're supposed to look like they're defying gravity. That's the whole point. But still. Some of the rocks on his site I look at and say to myself 'there's no way that would possibly stand.' (via j-walk)

Child Art Prodigy — Once upon a time a popular art hoax involved getting critics to praise a work of art, and then revealing that the work was really created by a monkey or a child, thereby proving what poor judgement the critics had. For instance, in the 1960s critics were embarrassed by the cases of Pierre Brassau, the monkey artist, as well as Willie the Painting Worm. But I don't think that kind of hoax would work today because critics seem to be voluntarily lining up to heap praise on works by animals and infants. Paintings by asian elephants are fetching thousands of dollars, and now a 4-year-old girl in New York, Marla Olmstead, is creating a buzz in the art world, having just had her own gallery show. That's one of her paintings to the right. The owner of the gallery said it was his most successful show ever. The NY Times reports that "Marla has sold 24 paintings totaling nearly $40,000, with the prices going up. Her latest paintings are selling for $6,000. Some customers are on a waiting list." I guess this proves that art is whatever critics say is art. It also proves that I'm definitely in the wrong line of work. Maybe I should branch out as the art manager for my 6-year-old niece, Astrid. She's done some very good work, if I may say so myself. For instance, her work shown below (titled: 'butterfly wings painted on a face') not only daringly uses her own face as a canvas, but also clearly evokes echoes of Picasso and Gauguin.

Naomi V. Jelish and other Nonexistent Artists — A major new talent can be added to the rollcall of nonexistent artists: Naomi V. Jelish. Naomi is a 13-year-old prodigy. She has a collection of sketches currently on exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery in London. But Naomi doesn't actually exist. Naomi and her work are the fictional creation of 25-year-old artist Jamie Shovlin (Naomi V. Jelish is an anagram of Jamie Shovlin). Visitors to the exhibit are given no clue that Naomi is fictitious. Other nonexistent artists that I'm aware of are Johann Dieter Wassmann and Pavel Jerdanowitch. (thanks to hollydog in the Hoax Forum for the link)

Rogue Art at the Met — The Met has been displaying the work of a major new artist. Hanging on the wall of its modern art gallery has been a cartoon-style painting of President Bush against a background of shredded dollar bills. A label next to the painting describes it as made out of "acrylic, legal tender and the artist's semen." Charming. Of course, the Met didn't realize it was displaying this work (someone surreptitiously stuck it up on the wall with double-sided tape), but it took them a few days to notice that the rogue painting was hanging there. Three other museums were also unwilling hosts of work by this unknown artist. What I find amusing is the idea of museum visitors standing and nodding as they try to appreciate these odd paintings, thinking they must be the work of some modern master.

Fake Vermeer was the Real Thing — Once thought to be a fake Vermeer, this painting of a young woman sitting before a keyboard has now been officially reclassified as a real Vermeer. It's going up for sale (the first time a Vermeer has been sold since 1921), so if you've got a couple of million lying around, feel free to make a bid.