by Jon Lackman | 4 March 2006 | Crime
Does successful art forgery show up art history’s connoisseurship as arbitrary? “Never was there such a load of rubbish talked about anything as has been, and will be, talked about art … that a Van Gogh can go for, what is it, $75 million? That’s disgusting,” says former art forger John Myatt in today’s New York Times. Myatt passed off hundreds of fakes (Giacomettis, Klees, Chagalls) before serving four months in jail. He now lectures on art forgery and creates new paintings he calls “genuine fakes.”
Just as forgery’s lucrativeness depends on the work of art historians, so too does art theft’s. A new documentary by the nonprofit Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE) examines scholarly complicity in the illicit antiquities trade, which has lately seen remarkable developments such as the indictment by an Italian court of Getty curator Marion True. The film interviews former Met director Thomas Hoving among others.
International cooperation is key to curbing the black market, but cultural barriers sometimes get in the way. The March W profiles FBI art-crime agent Robert Wittman, who reports he once had to drop “to the floor of a Madrid hotel room while clutching a $4 million Brueghel and trying to figure out how to say ‘I’m a good guy’ in Spanish to a team of machine gun-wielding cops.”
