Art Articles


1. Anthony Gormley
2. 15 Second Films
3. Mystery Pigment
4. Aviary
5. Charles Saatchi
6. David Hockney
7. Wealth of Damien Hirst
8. Comic Books
9. Jeff Koons and Popeye
10. Popeye and Copyright
11. More On Damien Hirst
12. Women In Art
13. Invisible Art
14. Video Before YouTube
15. Andy Warhol and Food
16. Art Theft
17. Abstract Art and The Mind
18. Authentic Movie Stars
19. Seth Godin on Art
20. Jack Vettriano
21. How to create instant 3D animations
22. Banksy - Art Outside The Frame
23. Grayson Perry on Art
24. Creative Advertising
25. Fakes
26. Comic Book Museum
27. Vermeer's Camera
28. Wartime Loot
29. Wolfgang Beltracchi
30. The Critic (A.A.Gill)
31. Close Copies
32. The Art of Perfume
33. The Forger They Couldn't Prosecute
34. A Future For Movies
35. What Makes It A Masterpiece?
36. Digital Art
37. Constable vs Turner
38. Slow TV
39. Investment
40. Luxembourg
41. Artist Royalties On Resale
42. Richard Prince and Copying Art
43. Managing Collectors
44. Banksy's Dismaland
45. Problems of Living In A Comic Book Superhero World
46. Copying Art - The Bean and the Bubble
47. Pop culture
48. Alexander Calder
49. Prince Charles
50. Outsourced Art
51. Paint It Black
52. The Art UK Project
53. The Bust of Queen Nefertiti
54. The Secret Life of the Real Banksy, Robin Gunningham
55. Guerilla Drama and Music
56. Painted By Computer
57. Damien Hirst and Copyright
58. Secret Knowledge Part 2
59. LA The Liquid Shard
60. Roy Lichtenstein's Sources
61. Guardian Long Read on Art Forgery
62. AI art
63. Paul Gauguin










Anthony Gormley

  • In a dusty room a young woman wearing a protective mask is filing down Antony Gormley's buttocks. The Gormley she is working on is one of dozens that are piled rather disturbingly throughout the vast studio, like casualties in an android war. Some are curled, foetus-like, others with arms spread like a crucifix, a few have limbs contorted at unfeasible angles. Near by a man is welding together tessellated panels that will form one giant abstract metal Gormley.

    Then in comes Gormley himself to oversee his latest production line of clones. The buttock-filer is rubbing down the very newest model, made two days earlier when the artist went through the routine he has done some thousand times in the past 30 years. Naked but for a covering of clingfilm - to stop the plaster ripping out his pubic hair - he lays down to be bandaged and covered in goo until several hours later he is sawn free.

    Do you ever get fed up with his naked body, I ask the woman. She laughs and before she can answer Gormley says: It's not sexual, you know. In fact, he insists it is a form of meditation - he's a Buddhist, so should know - although to me it resembles a rather extreme spa treatment. It is the only time, he says, when I'm not expected to do anything.

    And now the army of Gormleys - the 100 who line up looking out to sea in Crosby, Liverpool, in Another Place, and perched along the Thames skyline in Event Horizon, whose gargantuan big brother, with added wings, forms the Angel of the North - are set for world domination. Already in New York, 31 Gormleys have been positioned around Madison Square Park, whose conservancy commissioned the project: the figures are meant to be seen from the park, the cast iron men at ground level and fibreglass Gormleys high up on skyscrapers, including on the Gridiron Building and on the 25th floor of the Empire State itself.

    Gormley has long wanted to bring a large public art work to New York, the city that, he says, kept him alive during his years of penury, raising his three children (two boys and a girl, now adults, by his wife, the painter Vicken Parsons) and working in Peckham, South London. My first collectors were all from there. New York singlehandedly kept me going for ten years. In the 1980s a gallery here was the only one I had in the whole world. I think it is an amazing place. It could be rarefied and snooty. But it is intensely practical, about getting on and doing stuff. You always feel you are plugging into some huge force of energy.

    Officially opening on March 26, Event Horizon, New York, has already stirred the city. As in London, the naked Gormleys have been mistaken by worried citizens for would-be suicides, forcing the NYPD to issue a statement calling for calm. And several commentators have remarked that it is in poor taste, since a body exposed at height has tragic associations after 9/11.

    Gormley disdains any comparison: But they were all falling, weren't they. It was all about desperation and having nowhere else to go, he says. This asks the big question: what it is to be a human animal. Once you displace a body, all sorts of questions naturally follow. I've no idea what will happen. I just hope that people will be stopped in their tracks and look again at where they are and maybe themselves and maybe at the world around them.

    As he approaches his 60th birthday, Gormley is more prolific than ever. A major installation, Flare II, a mighty steel and wire sculpture, is in situ in St Pauls Cathedral. He has collaborated with the choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui on two ballets, Sutraand Babel, designing sets that are more than background furniture but intrinsic to the works, which play at Sadlers Wells this year. Meanwhile he is completing the book chronicling One and Other, the art sensation of last summer in which members of the public were given an hour each atop the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

    Gormley's studio is in the desolate badlands behind Kings Cross, but when the gate swishes open, it reveals a bright white modernist building in which some of the 20 young artists who work with him bask in a sun trap. A model of Angel of the North, which has come in to be repaired, stands in the courtyard.

    Ask Gormley a question and he will pontificate in careful, modulated sentences filled with abstractions until you are forced to interject. This inclination, plus his height and upper-class accent - his father was a rich businessman who first marketed penicillin - gives him a patrician bearing. Yet, with his long ears, large nose and tendency to peer at you curiously through his spectacles, he reminds me of Roald Dahl's BFG.

    The body that he has replicated so often is well-made, with a solid muscle mass around the shoulders rare for his age. You wonder if a portly, pigeon-chested artist would ever have created these works. When I remark that he's in good shape, his eyes flash with delight. Well, that is very, very kind of you, but I'm not particularly proud of my body, he says disingenuously.

    Does he work out? I go swimming three times a week and Julian comes and we do wondrous exercises. A personal trainer? He's a dancer. I do stretching and pilates type things on the floor. I like to think maybe that is self-delusion that all I am interested in is maintaining a degree of proprioceptive body-consciousness. I would like to feel that I am aware and in touch, fully present physically.

    Though since he is forced to examine younger versions of his body, a bit thinner, less low hanging, he is unusually aware of ageing. I am f***ing old, he says plaintively about his impending 60th birthday and notes that he has staff already working upon his archive just in case he drops dead tomorrow.

    Undoubtedly what he will be most remembered for is celebrating the heroism of Everyman: whether naked and vulnerable against the cityscape or atop a lonely plinth, the human figure stands stoic and timeless. I don't know about heroic, he demurs. I like the idea that everyone has a story to tell, that each of us is contributing to a made world for others. Every person is one pixel in a bigger picture.

    As with the London Event Horizon, which inspired Facebook campaigns to have the Gormleys kept up on London rooftops for posterity, it has been suggested that One and Other should be an annual event. Yes, it quickly became one of those summer things, like Henley or Ascot, Gormley says. A bit of potty Englishness. But, God, it was hard enough to organise once . . .

    He is rumoured to have been disappointed with some of the lamer plinth people, but this he denies. I feel unable to criticise. They made it their own. I had no expectations. We needed in a way those who were happy to sit up there with their cup of Earl Grey tea and collapsible garden chair and ring Mum. It was an exercise in our freedoms and a nicer way than the Bulger case for Britain to take stock of itself. Usually it's some awful social services disaster that causes people to think, who are we?

    Gormley applied to the plinth lottery for a place, but didn't win. He'd planned to take up a bag of clay or to make a structure with sticks: something Blue Peter-ish.

    Success came to Gormley relatively late: he did not win the Turner Prize until he was 44. That he is not hugely wealthy like YBAs such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, a generation younger, doesn't bother him. Growing up in a wealthy, if strict Roman Catholic family, with chauffeurs and a grand London house, immunised him against materialism. I'm aware, he says, that I don't need very much. But it has helped him to leave Peckham for a home in Camden and paid for his mighty studio, purpose-built by the celebrated architect David Chipperfield, in which he has been able to increase and diversify his output.

    Neither is he dismayed by critics who are disdainful of his popularity, calling him repetitive and shallow. For me the big question is where art fits in people's lives. Is it a place that people go to know and to extend themselves? Or is it a pursuit of the few? Art critics are more concerned with the making of art.

    When I ask if he can imagine a time when he won't cast his own body, he sighs and says he looks forward to that day. But it never happens because I can't think of another way. I wish I could think of a better way of making the work. But to me it is going back to the basic condition, which is: I am here now, I am an animal living in time, dependent on air, food and having a place. For me this is the first principle.

    To Gormley the body is not only the place we inhabit, but the source of all knowledge about the Universe. I think that my final interest is the abstract body, which is a recognition that we don't own our own bodies. They are part of a system that we barely understand. The atoms in our body come from chemical reactions that happened in galactic activity at the beginning of space-time. And it's very extraordinary that consciousness is part of the mix.

    The body is the closest that we come to the realisation that we don't control anything.

15 Second Films

    While obscure auteurs such as Isabel Coixet and Brillante Mendoza are feted and fawned over, a British film-maker whose work has been seen by over a million people in the last fortnight is wandering the Cannes Film Festival with no entourage, no publicity team and nowhere to sleep.

    Peter Johnston wants to alert the world to what he believes is the antidote to the bloated, self-indulgent arthouse movie: the 15 second film.

    He has commissioned or made 62 of these nano-films for his online gallery, The 15 Second Film Festival.

    To qualify films must be 15 seconds in length, with ten seconds for opening and closing credits. Typically each takes two weeks of leisurely preparation, about half a day to film and three days to edit - rather less than the four years it took to make Up, the festival's opening night film.

    Prevailing trends are against him. Half the films gunning for the Palme d'Or this year are more than two hours long. The early favourite, A Prophet, is an epic two-and-a-half hour French prison drama.

    Critics are grumbling about the running time for Quentin Tarantino's new offering Inglorious Basterds: you could fit 592 of Mr Johnston's mini-films into its 2 hours and 28 minutes.

    But Mr Johnston, 43, is undaunted. 15 second film is an art form in itself, not a stepping stone to making longer movies, he said. It's like a filmic haiku or a three panel cartoon strip.

    All the same creative cogs are engaged as when you make a full length film. You have to think about the sound design, the timing and economy of shot.

    We've made documentaries, comedies and two spaghetti westerns.

    Not all of them are successful but film-makers love it because it's so immediate.

    Mr Johnston's films are not showing at the Cannes festival but he has been invited to exhibit at others, including Robert Redford's Sundance Festival. Roddy Doyle, the writer, has completed a film for him and he claims that Neil Jordan, the director of The Crying Game and Wayne Coyne, the frontman of the band The Flaming Lips have both agreed to have a go. Now he is hunting for Tarantino.

    Mr Johnston, from Belfast, came to Cannes with nowhere to sleep and just 200 euros, roughly the price of one night in a cheap room in the centre of town.

    A large man with a broad red face beneath a shock of grey curls, mirror-lensed Aviator shades and a handlebar moustache, he sports a tweed jacket with a cigar tucked in the top pocket and carries a large inflatable pig and a battered suitcase. The pig is supposed to be an attention-grabbing swine flu joke. The suitcase is his office and his luggage. It contains hair spray, a pair of fresh sports socks, a stack of demo DVDs and a camera.

    He is extremely serious about his vision. He sees the future of the cinema screened in bite-sized snatches on iPhones, Blackberries and eReaders.

    What I'm doing with the 15 second film project is the birth and rebirth of cinema, he said. All the innovation now is coming in short films where you have complete artistic freedom. The kids on You Tube are accidentally evolving a new cinematic language.

    His latest effort, iSnort has become a hit on YouTube, with more than 1.2 million hits in the last week. It shows him snorting three lines of cocaine off his mobile phone. The white powder is really a 15 second animation on the phone's screen.

    It is a gimmick but he also sees it as proof of the appeal of his medium.

    I'm an action artist and a film maker. What did Warhol say? Art is what you can get away with.

Mystery Pigment

    ScienceDaily (May 18, 2010) A team of researchers from the University of Barcelona (UB) has discovered remains of Egyptian blue in a Romanesque altarpiece in the church of Sant Pere de Terrassa (Barcelona). This blue pigment was used from the days of ancient Egypt until the end of the Roman Empire, but was not made after this time. So how could it turn up in a 12th Century church?

    Egyptian blue or Pompeian blue was a pigment frequently used by the ancient Egyptians and Romans to decorate objects and murals. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD), this pigment fell out of use and was no longer made. But a team of Catalan scientists has now found it in the altarpiece of the 12th Century Romanesque church of Sant Pere de Terrassa (Barcelona). The results of this research have just been published in the journal Archaeometry.

    "We carried out a systematic study of the pigments used in the altarpiece during restoration work on the church, and we could show that most of them were fairly local and 'poor' -- earth, whites from lime, blacks from smoke -- and we were completely unprepared for Egyptian blue to turn up," Mario Vendrell, co-author of the study and a geologist from the UB's Grup Patrimoni research group, said.

    The researcher says the preliminary chemical and microscopic study made them suspect that the samples taken were of Egyptian blue. To confirm their suspicions, they analysed them at the Daresbury SRS Laboratory in the United Kingdom, where they used X-ray diffraction techniques with synchrotron radiation. It will be possible to carry out these tests in Spain once the ALBA Synchrotron Light Facility at Cerdanyola del Valles (Barcelona) comes into operation.

    "The results show without any shadow of a doubt that the pigment is Egyptian blue," says Vendrell, who says it could not be any other kind of blue pigment used in Romanesque murals, such as azurite, lapis lazuli or aerinite, "which in any case came from far-off lands and were difficult to get hold of for a frontier economy, as the Kingdom Aragon was between the 11th and 15th Centuries."

    A possible solution to the mystery

    The geologist also says there is no evidence that people in Medieval times had knowledge of how to manufacture this pigment, which is made of copper silicate and calcium: "In fact it has never been found in any mural from the era."

    "The most likely hypothesis is that the builders of the church happened upon a 'ball' of Egyptian blue from the Roman period and decided to use it in the paintings on the stone altarpiece," Vendrell explains.

    The set of monuments made up by the churches of Sant Pere, Sant Miquel and Santa Maria de Terrassa are built upon ancient Iberian and Roman settlements, and the much-prized blue pigment could have remained hidden underground for many centuries. "But only a little of it, because this substance couldn't be replaced -- once the ball was all used up the blue was gone," concludes Vendrell.

Aviary

    By reducing development costs and making new features possible, cloud computing promises to create opportunities for software developers. A New York-based startup called Aviary is hoping to cash in on that promise by offering graphics programs that compete with far more expensive software.

    Aviary's software allows anybody with a Web browser to draw illustrations or edit photographs. Founded in 2007, Aviary uses Adobe's Flex, a general-purpose platform for developing Internet-based applications, to make software that lets people modify photos, create illustrations, and share the results. Aviary's applications run in Flash, through the Web browser on a user's computer. Images are saved to the company's private servers rather to a local disk drive--the conventional way of storing files. The private servers are continuously backed up to Amazon's S3, a service that provides bulk online storage. If Aviary's servers become overwhelmed because of, say, a glut of users, the system stays afloat by transferring files from S3 to users instead.

    Aviary's software development process has been the work of just a dozen or so programmers, and it has afforded a quick return on their effort. Because they can update the software as often as they like without requiring users to install patches or upgrades, a working version of an application can be rolled out the door as soon as it's complete, with refinements made later. Matt Wenger, president and CEO of the software company GroupSystems, says that cloud applications can be cheaper to develop than other types of applications, especially because it removes the need to worry about how and where users install software. "You write one version of the application and you install it in your own controlled environment [on your servers]," he says, "and any changes are tested and rolled out in that environment. The net of it is that you spend hundreds of hours less in support over the life of a product for a group of customers."

    But while cloud computing can make product development and marketing more efficient, it has its own quirks. For example, Aviary needed a way to save huge image files quickly across a network. "An artist's work flow generally requires frequent saving," says Avi Muchnik, Aviary's founder. "This means that we'd theoretically need the capability to send huge files multiple times in the span of a few minutes." But constantly sending large image files back and forth over the Internet would strain Aviary's servers and frustrate users with slow connections. The company's solution is to detect incremental changes and transfer only those small pieces of the file that have changed.

    Cloud computing provides more than just convenient storage. When artists allow people to use and modify their work through other media-sharing websites, the result can be a free-for-all. But Aviary tracks changes in images, so there is a record of how the work has been used. Artists can even levy royalties, which Aviary's software enforces automatically. If a person creates an image and assigns it a royalty of 50 cents, and another artist incorporates it into a composite work and wants to sell it, the second artist would have to sell the composite image for at least 50 cents, with that money going back to the original creator. This easy royalty-sharing scheme creates a business model for artists that would have been impossible without cloud computing.

    Aviary's software offers fewer features than Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator, the gold standard among graphic designers and artists. But converts like Shawn Rider, manager of technology solutions at PBS, say they like it because they can access files from any Internet-connected computer and collaborate easily with other users, all for a very low price. Aviary offers access to a free version of its software with basic design tools. For $9.99 a month, users get more features as well as access to the royalty-sharing system.

    Aviary also provides an application programming interface (API), which allows other businesses to integrate its image-editing tools into their websites. The New Yorker has used the tools for a cartoon contest, and the New York Daily News recently held a photo-editing contest to alter the image of Air Force One's embarrassing flyover of New York City in April.

    As for the future, Aviary is looking beyond image editing. In March, the startup acquired Digimix, a small company that makes Web software for audio editing; it may also start developing software for inexpensive online video editing, which should have a ready market among the hordes of YouTube contributors.

Charles Saatchi

    Charles Saatchi has been one of the most influential forces of the contemporary art scene. Founder of global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and the most influential art collector of our time, he has vigorously shaped the contemporary art scene while contradictorily remaining an elusive, even reclusive figure.

    Though he famously refuses to be interviewed, you can now read his brutally frank responses to a battery of questions put to him by leading journalists and critics as well as members of the public. If you have a question you would like to ask Charles Saatchi please email editorial@thedailybeast.com. This is the first in a continuing series of new questions and answers from Saatchi. Check back soon for the next installment.

    In your estimation, how much of the last decade's art explosion is due to the fact that the art market functions as an unregulated stock-market? (As in, no rules re: insider trading, gaming the system, pumping & dumping...)

    When you say insider trading, do you mean museum board members getting early notice of artists about to be given wide exposure in a touring high profile exhibition, and laying down a few works in advance? And do you also mean people who buy an artists' work in bulk, and then put up one of their works in a major auction, and quietly bid up the price, to raise the value of all their others?

    All very cynical I'm sure. But the only people who get hurt are other speculators, who overpay, and end up with a lot of artwork of a transitory value that is unsustainable. My view is that anything that is done to promote art and artists, everything that broadens the number of collectors and visitors to museums, and increases the visibility and interest in contemporary art - that's fine and dandy. Some people in the art world bemoan the hedge fund millionaires spending freely to acquire ostentatious displays of wealth and coolth for their giddily chic designer duplexes. Others bemoan art being treated as a commodity.

    But most of the bemoaning is because the art world is stuffed full of bemoaners, bemoaning about everything.

    Art collectors were spivvy and profiteering even during the Renaissance.

    You shall not covet your neighbour's wife, nor his car.Do you believe in the 10 Commandments?

    An overrated lifestyle guide, unsustainable and largely ineffective, only succeeding in making people confused and guilty. For example: You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his house, nor his servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's. This was always obviously a no-hoper of a Commandment. Coveting is all everyone does, all the time, everyday. It's what drives the world economy, pushes people to make a go of their lives, so that they can afford the Executive model of their Ford Mondeo to park next to their neighbor's Standard model.

    And would you want to be married to someone who nobody coveted?

    What is mankind's greatest unsolved mystery that particularily puzzles you?

    Why kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
    Why do you hang clothes on a washing line and not on a drying line?
    Why does a fat chance and a slim chance mean the same thing?
    Why is it called a TV set when you only get one?
    What would you call a burger made of ham?
    If man evolved from monkeys and apes why do we still have monkeys and apes?
    How can you hear yourself think?
    Is there art on other planets?

    When I first encountered Minimal Art in New York in the late 1960's, Sol Lewitt's conceptual structures, Carl Andre's metal floor plates, Donald Judd's galvanized steel boxes, I remember having the romantic notion that this is what art would look like on a highly advanced distant galaxy.

    The work appeared so far removed from all previous earthly art, it was easy to fantasize about cerebral Venusians floating ethereally above a work by Judd, and enjoying its rigorous beauty much as we would admire a Michelangelo.

    Do you read your reviews, and take it personally if they're negative? I have an idiosyncratic relationship with reviews. If they're approving, I fear that the exhibition must be pedestrian. If they're disobliging, I feel for the critic, who is clearly unenlightened about contemporary art, insecure about a lack of visual perceptiveness, a crabby soul, for whom it would be a kindness to cut short a morose, sour life.

    A perfectly balanced perspective, as you can see.

David Hockney

    "Come in quick, before he gets out," says David Hockney, opening the door of his Kensington studio while restraining a biggish dog. Hockney is in London for the opening of a show called Drawing in a Printing Machine, which charts his latest co-opting of high technology. Only three days earlier, I had seen him feted with an hour of speeches at what was described on the invitation as the solemn opening of a show of his landscapes, Nur Natur (Just Nature), in the exquisitely unspoilt little medieval town of Schwabisch Hall, in southern Germany. He was looking relaxed and fit, having previously spent some time in his favourite spa, Baden-Baden, with his partner, John Fitzherbert.

    In that itinerary, you can begin to grasp the many sides of the 71-year-old artist's current life. It seems a good idea, therefore, to start by asking him where he now lives primarily - Los Angeles, London or Bridlington, in Yorkshire? Lots of people still think you live mainly in Los Angeles, David, I hazard. Because I don't make announcements, he replies, with his usual drollness.

    It was as though I had suggested some sort of Times Court Circular should be available. When people ask me where I live, I always say I live wherever I happen to be, he adds.

    In any case, he continues, I was never away from Yorkshire very long. My family was there, so I was always going back. What I realise now is that Bridlington is a sheltered place; London is not a sheltered place for me. There are loads of people wanting my time, which I am not willing to give now. So Bridlington is a perfect place, a little isolated town. The nearest big town, Beverley, is 20-odd miles away; York is 35 miles. It is quite physically isolated, which I like about it. He's not cut off from the LA side of his operation, however, as he is quick to point out. Of course, nobody is electronically isolated now. My sister, Margaret, has a computer, and it was she who turned me on to one of its uses. I do sketches. She would say, if I came in at about six o'clock, What did you do today?, and so I would show her the sketchbook and she would scan it onto this computer. Then we realised we could send it to [Hockney's assistant] Gregory in California. Six o'clock in Bridlington is 10am in LA. So I would send him two or three drawings. Suddenly there is a connection, a very direct connection. Everything, including paintings, goes back to LA because it's my actual physical base. That is where all the archive material is. I can't move it. There's a hell of a lot of stuff there.

    Bridlington, where he now has a big studio, is perfect for him at his age, he says. Every day, I work. And when I stop work, I am still thinking about it.

    It's there he has found the trees that dominate his oil paintings now. In the Just Nature exhibition in Germany, the large, naturalistic paintings magically transport visitors straight into the Yorkshire woods. Hockney found the local German landscape a little bit like East Yorkshire... not too many people, very small roads without white lines in them, little rolling hills and individual trees that you could see. In one room, you can look at some sketchbooks in showcases, and on the wall his sketchbooks are flicked through for you on video.

    Much of Hockney's early work was urban, and full of ideas and different styles. I wondered whether the Yorkshire landscape was making him a realist painter who is ruled by nature. He has talked of freestanding trees being the best physical manifestation we see of the life force.

    But he stresses the continuity of his inspiration as an artist. If you have lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, you do know the power of nature there.

    People here might call it La-La land and stuff like that, but I will point out that they are very aware of the power of nature, simply because the earth can tremble. They have earthquakes. They never forget that nature is a very powerful force. I read in a paper that after earthquakes in LA, most of the damage to people has been from broken windows and people treading on glass with bare feet. So I always have slippers by the bed there.

    And, as you know, I have a rather lovely garden in LA. It has taken 20 to 25 years to get to what it is. I am surrounded by nature. LA isn't the concrete city a lot of people think. It is actually full of green, with a lot of wild animals. I could not let my little dogs out at night, because there are coyotes out there.

    It seems a long way from coyotes to Drawing in a Printing Machine, his show at the Annely Juda gallery, although it does contain landscapes as well as portraits. The prints are made by drawing and collage, then printed out on inkjet colour printers, Hockney explains in the catalogue. They exist either in the computer or on a piece of paper; they were made for printing, and so will be printed. They are not photographic reproductions. The strongly coloured portraits feature many of the usual suspects among Hockney's family, friends and assistants, but also less familiar faces: his Yorkshire neighbour Sir Tatton Sykes, for example, and Francis Russell, a Christie's expert. The strong colours are echoed in the landscapes - in a piece entitled Summer Sky, swirling skies over fields so vivid that they seem to be in motion; in Rainy Night on Bridlington Promenade, shimmering puddles of cerulean blue where you can almost hear the raindrops plopping down.

    Hockney is quick to ridicule the misconception that this work was some sort of computer art, in which the computer rather than the artist dominates. Most people thought they knew what computer art looked like, but of course that is like saying they know what brush art looks like. It is daft. What did Leonardo use to paint the Mona Lisa? Well, he used brushes; so if I get a brush I can do that, can't I? No! A brush, like a computer, is merely a tool.

    For a variety of reasons the art world, together with the media, is sharpening its focus on Hockney. A recent headline in a London evening newspaper jokingly dubbed him iPriest of Art, thanks to his current passion for using an Apple iPhone to make little coloured drawings, which he may then send to a friend.

    Furthermore, an auction record is expected next Wednesday for an iconic painting that belongs to Hockney's famous series of Los Angeles masterpieces. Beverly Hills Housewife (1966-67) is estimated to fetch between $7m and $10m at Christie's New York. It immortalises Hockney's great friend Betty Freeman, a discriminating patron of the arts, who is captured standing near the pool outside her immaculate modern house, in a long purplish dress.

    One aspect of LA he probably doesn't miss, however, is the smoke-free lifestyle imposed on him there. He's had similar problems in a Liverpool taxi, where he counted six separate signs telling him not to light up - he had been to a concert there, and the vehemence of his attack on the local powers-that-be for producing so many antismoking notices almost threatened to revive the Wars of the Roses. It's a freedom issue for him. How Hockney hates bossiness and the nanny state. I've never forgotten the time when he said that Tony Blair reminded him of a school prefect.

    Hockney greatly values the right to be in charge of his own life, and he remains sceptical about saving the planet by not using plastic bags. We are puny little creatures scratching around on earth, he muses philosophically. Some humans are less puny than others, however, and when you think of Hockney's unstoppable creativity over the past 50 years - not to mention the generosity of his gift last year to the nation, via the Tate, of the magnificent 40ft-wide picture Bigger Trees Near Warter, 2007 - he increasingly seems nothing less than a giant among artists.

Wealth of Damien Hirst

    There are artists who follow their muse and starve in a garret en route.

    That wouldn't be 43-year-old Hirst, though. Once an enfant terrible, he is the most powerful person in the contemporary art world, according to the magazine ArtReview. His position is the result of original and distinctive art (which famously includes animal carcasses in formaldehyde) and, of course, the money he makes.

    Hirst is now so well known, he can sell straight from the auction house rather than through galleries, which traditionally demand 50% commission. A two-day auction at Sotheby's last September, entitled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, featured 223 lots and fetched £111m - a record for a sale dominated by one artist. His success came while stock markets plummeted and investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

    Hirst said at the time: "A lot of people believe artists should be poor, that you're not a real artist unless you are covered in paint with holes in your jeans. I think I have helped change that perception, me and Andy Warhol and Picasso and all the guys who took the commercial aspects on board."

    Hirst certainly isn't scared of investing in the brand. He ploughed £15m into his For the Love of God project in 2006: a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds. The skull, thought to have belonged to a 35-year-old European man who lived between 1720 and 1810, was bought by a group of anonymous investors the following year for £50m.

    Hirst has a vast studio and £3m country pile in Gloucestershire. He also owns studio and exhibition space in Lambeth and Peckham in London.

    While there is little money in his main firm, Murderme, which made £719,000 profit on £1m-plus sales in 2006-07, his wealth is substantial. Indeed, his manager now believes he is worth a billion dollars. We take a more cautious view, however, putting Hirst at £235m this year, allowing for tax and the recent collapse in the value of modern art.

Comic Books

    We are continually reminded that we are living in a convergence culture, with meetings between old and new media creating new possibilities.

    It would appear that an early example of this was the emergence of comics in the late 19th century, with the old worlds of art and literature meeting through the development in printing processes and the technology of mass publication. In truth the appearance of comics was a re-convergence, because in the early days of communication art and writing were one, with symbols, icons and pictographs telling complex stories about myths, laws and religion.

    Comic stories often draw on the mythological apparatus of the hero, the lawgiver and the god to retell ancient stories. The emerging field of comic studies explores the power and potential of this form of communication.

    From the comics that children read, to adventure stories aimed at older readers, to erotic comics and art comics, this intersection of words and pictures is generating an enormous amount of critical commentary, shown by the increasing number of comics modules offered at universities.

    This comes at a time when, after centuries of distrust of images as seductive and easy and the veneration of the Word as the gateway of knowledge, Western culture find itself becoming more and more dominated by images.

    Those who conclude that culture must be 'dumbing down' rarely consider that the images dominating our attention are more highly coded that ever, and more laden with meanings. There's nothing simple about images, and the simplest of them generates a sea of words. It is no surprise then that comics, once regarded as trash culture, now attract attention from academics. And just as Pop Artists drew on comics, today we find writers such as Jodi Picoult and Ian Rankin embracing the medium.

Jeff Koons and Popeye

    Popeye by Koons has contemporary relevance because the character was conceived during the Depression

    Depending on whom you ask, Jeff Koons is either one of the most brilliant artists alive or one of the most irritating. Either way, he has been among the most influential figures in the art world for three decades. But the facts cannot be denied: he is record-breakingly expensive at auction, an inspiration to Damien Hirst, the subject of important solo exhibitions in Europe and America and a particular hero in France, where he was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur in 2007.

    All of which makes it something of a surprise that there has never been a show dedicated to his work at a British public gallery until now.

    The Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park has announced details of an exhibition focusing on Koons's Popeye series. It opens in July and is pitched partly as a cultural comment on the economic crisis because the spinach-guzzling cartoon character was conceived during the Depression.

    Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the gallery, said: It does seem absolutely extraordinary that an artist of Jeff Koons's distinction should not have had a show in a public space in the UK before. Hans Ulrich Obrist, her co-director of exhibitions, said: This show is incredibly urgent. But it would have been urgent 10 or 20 years ago. There have been Jeff Koons shows all over Europe and the United States but not in England.

    Like Andy Warhol before him and Hirst a decade later, Koons cultivated a distinctive public persona. Early on, he hired an an image consultant and placed adverts in glossy art magazines with photographs of him surrounded by the trappings of success.

    In 1991 he unveiled Made in Heaven, a series of paintings and glass sculptures depicting him in explicit sexual poses with his then wife Ilona Staller. Ms Staller, better known as La Cicciolina, was a porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament in 1987. They split up in 1992, leading to a vicious custody battle over their son Ludwig.

    Since then Koons has made a giant puppy out of flowers to stand guard outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao and, most recently, announced that he is working on the world's most expensive artwork.

    Train will be a working reproduction of a steam train (it will make its own steam and move its wheels), hanging from a 161ft (49 metre) sculpture of a crane. The estimated cost to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be $25 million

    None of these works will be at the Serpentine, which will concentrate on the Popeye series, begun in 2002. Familiar Koons formats will be represented, such as his cast reproductions of children's inflatables and collages made with images from popular culture and snippets of bare female flesh.

    The work explores his characteristic themes of consumerism, taste, art history, mundanity, childhood and sexuality and like most of his output, it will be almost all be made by his team of assistants rather than by him.

    A former Wall Street banker from Pennsylvania, Koons made his name in the early 1980s when he presented vacuum cleaners in neon-lit glass cabinets and basketballs floating in salt water to an entranced Manhattan art world

    The art factory

    Jeff Koons set up in SoHo, New York, and hired more than 30 staff to make his increasingly kitsch output.

    Early conceptual pieces included Rabbit, an inflatable bunny rendered in stainless steel.

    His series, Banality, culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a life-size, gold leaf-plated statue of the singer and his pet chimp. It sold for $5.6 million.

Popeye and Copyright

    I yam what I yam, declared Popeye. And just what that is is likely to become less clear as the copyright expires on the character who generates about £1.5 billion in annual sales.

    From January 1, the iconic sailor falls into the public domain in Britain under an EU law that restricts the rights of authors to 70 years after their death. Elzie Segar, the Illinois artist who created Popeye, his love interest Olive Oyl and nemesis Bluto, died in 1938.

    The Popeye industry stretches from books, toys and action figures to computer games, a fast-food chain and the inevitable canned spinach.

    The copyright expiry means that, from Thursday, anyone can print and sell Popeye posters, T-shirts and even create new comic strips, without the need for authorisation or to make royalty payments.

    Popeye became a Depression-era hero soon after he first appeared in the 1929 comic strip, Thimble Theatre. Segar drew Popeye as a working-class Joe who suffered torment from Bluto - sometimes known as Brutus - until he can't stands it no more. Wolfing down spinach turned Popeye into a pumped-up everyman hero, making the case for good over evil.

    Popeye the Sailor made his screen debut in 1933. According to a poll of cinema managers, he was more popular than Mickey Mouse by the end of the Thirties.

    During wartime, the Popeye tattoo was etched on thousands of soldiers and sailors, who aligned themselves with his good-hearted belligerence.

    The question of whether any enterprising food company can now attach Popeye's famous face to their spinach cans will have to be tested in court.

    While the copyright is about to expire inside the EU, the character is protected in the US until 2024. US law protects a work for 95 years after its initial copyright.

    The Popeye trademark, a separate entity to Segar's authorial copyright, is owned by King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation - the US entertainment giant - which is expected to protect its brand aggressively.

    Mark Owen, an intellectual property specialist at the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, said: The Segar drawings are out of copyright, so anyone could put those on T-shirts, posters and cards and create a thriving business. If you sold a Popeye toy or Popeye spinach can, you could be infringing the trademark.

    Mr Owen added: Popeye is one of the first of the famous 20th-century cartoon characters to fall out of copyright. Betty Boop and ultimately Mickey Mouse will follow.

    Segar's premature death, aged 43, means that Popeye is an early test case for cartoon characters. The earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons will not fall into the US public domain until at least 2023 after the Disney corporation successfully lobbied Congress for a copyright extension.

    Sailor and spinach

    — Popeye was added to the Thimble Theatre Olive Oyl strip in January 1929

    — Elzie Segar was told to tone down Popeye's aggression as it was a bad influence on children

    — Though it is a myth that he was coopted to promote spinach by the US Government, spinach sales in America rose by a third in the decade after his appearance. A tie-in Popeye Spinach brand is one of the most popular in the US

    — Popeye was the first cartoon character commemorated by a statue, in 1937 in Crystal City, Texas, the self-proclaimed Spinach Capital of the World

    — Popeye animations, cartoon strips and merchandising generated $150 million a year by the 1970s

    — The Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits chain was named after Popeye Doyle from The French Connection film. It now endorses the cartoon character

    — The burger-loving J. Wellington Wimpy character gave his name to the Wimpy restaurant chain

More On Damien Hirst

    On the eve of Tate Modern's retrospective, the economist Don Thompson argues that the artist has changed the art market for ever.

    Damien Hirst, at 46, is the richest artist the world has known. Estimates of his wealth range from £215 million up - way up. Certainly, he is worth more than Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali combined at the same age, and those three are at the top of any list of artists who measured success in monetary terms. Hirst is the art world's 1 per cent, or perhaps the 0.001 per cent. Next month Tate Modern will recognise his work with the longest-running retrospective it has ever offered a living artist.

    Whatever you think of the fact that Hirst's work is made by a production line of technicians, or his impact on the direction of contemporary art, many identify him as the most important contemporary artist of the past 20 years. His skills as a marketer of conceptual art are legendary and have eclipsed his skills as an artist. Many of the important developments in how contemporary art is perceived, or how it can be marketed, have come from Damien Hirst.

    Among the works at Tate Modern are some of Hirst's most significant pieces, those on which he made his reputation in the early 1990s. A Thousand Years (1990), in which flies and maggots are hatched inside a vitrine and migrate over a glass partition towards a cow's rotting head, only to be electrocuted by a bug zapper; and Mother and Child Divided (1993), Hirst's Turner Prize-winning sculpture comprising four glass cases, two holding one half of a cow, split lengthways from nose to tail and two holding a calf similarly split, are two of the best examples. But many of the show's works tell us as much about Hirst as a businessman, and his impact on the curious economics of the art world, as they do about him as an artist.

    In 2008 I wrote a book entitled The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, about the economics of contemporary art. The title was derived from Hirst's work, The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living (1991), a preserved tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde. It was sold twice, in 1991 to Charles Saatchi for £50,000, and in 2005 to New York hedge-fund operator Steven A. Cohen, for a reported $12 million (£7 million). For each sale, the shark was the second most expensive work of that time by any living artist. Though since superseded, it is Hirst whose name comes up first in any discussion of the astronomical prices reached by contemporary art.

    In 2007 he trumped himself, almost. For the Love of God (said to be the words uttered by Hirst's mother on hearing of his latest project), is a diamond-encrusted platinum cast of a human skull, fabricated by the Bond Street jeweller Bentley & Skinner: it will go on display in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, surrounded by uniformed guards. Before completion, the skull had an extraordinary level of publicity for a work in progress, more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles preparing the art world for its theatrical first showing at White Cube gallery.

    White Cube offered the work for £50 million, which would have outstripped by far the highest price achieved by a living artist. The skull sold. But it later emerged that the buyer was an investment consortium composed of Hirst, Jay Jopling, owner of White Cube (the gallery that represented Hirst), Frank Dunphy, Hirst's business manager at the time, and an outside investor, thought to be the Ukrainian industrialist Victor Pinchuk. It is now on offer for £100 million. A diamond expert estimated the worth of the stones at £7 million to £10 million. But the skull's real value is uncertain, even irrelevant. Several critics have argued that the price tag, sale and media coverage are part of the artwork.

    For the Love of God is a one-off, but Hirst has cleverly managed to retain the value of his more ubiquitous works. His spot paintings are among the most recognisable contemporary artworks: grid arrangements of coloured spots on a white background. Hirst admits that 1,400 spot paintings have been sold worldwide; art insiders think the number may be closer to 2,200. And yet the spot paintings quickly became iconic - in ways no other artist could have got away with. In May 2003 a Hirst spot painting became the first work of art to be launched into space. It was incorporated as a colour calibration chart on the British Beagle 2 Mars lander, which crashed on the planet on or around Christmas Eve 2003. Another Hirst spot painting appeared in the Meg Ryan time-travel movie Kate & Leopold, representing the art of the 20th century. Spots have sold at auction for between £80,000 and £1.2 million To the victor, the spoils: Hirst's success enabled him to negotiate his dealer's commission at White Cube and Gagosian down from the standard 50 per cent to a reported 20 per cent on exhibitions and 30 per cent on sales from inventory. Making this arrangement public caused a few other artists to renegotiate. Others, trying to emulate Hirst, have probably undertaken acrimonious but failed negotiations with their dealers.

    In September 2008 Hirst decided to bypass White Cube and Gagosian entirely to offer art from his workshops at Sotheby's in London. This unprecedented move circumvented the dealer system altogether. The auction included 223 works - dead sharks, zebras and a 'unicorn' (actually a foal). There were spot paintings, spin paintings, pinned-butterfly compositions and cabinets filled with drugs. The star lot was The Golden Calf, a bull preserved in formaldehyde, with 18-carat gold hooves and horns, a gold Egyptian solar disk on its head and outsized reproductive organs. It was sold on the phone, reportedly to a representative of Sheikha al-Mayassa, for £10.3 million. The very top end of the contemporary art world is small; she is chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority, which is funding the Tate exhibition.

    Sotheby's waived its consignor's commission for the auction but retained the buyer's premium, so Hirst took home 100 per cent of the hammer price from each sale. Of the 223 lots offered, 218 were sold - for £111 million. In a coincidence that could not have served Hirst's marketing machine better, it began on the day that Lehman Brothers announced it was bankrupt.

    The auction made a bold and, for the dealers, rather terrifying statement - that Hirst did not need the support of two of the art world's most important branded intermediaries. Other dealers described Hirst going directly to auction as 'the sum of all fears'; their concern was that other 'branded' artists, such as Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, might follow suit. So far no one has, but dealers are still wary. Media reports claimed that, over the following two weeks, 25 per cent of the buyers defaulted - by far the highest number in any Sotheby's or Christie's auction.

    And yet Hirst continues at the top. In January Larry Gagosian's 11 galleries in seven countries held the first "worldwide one-artist exhibition" for Hirst, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011. One can only speculate on the motivation, given Hirst's auction experiment. Probably Gagosian was responding to clients who had found no market for their Hirst paintings during the recession. Only 120 of the 331 paintings on display were nominally on sale; the others were said to be on loan from collections in 20 countries. No gallery official would tell visitors the prices, which were for sale, nor how many had sold.

    In a typically Hirstian move, just before the opening of the show, Gagosian announced a "Spot Challenge", where anyone who visited all 11 galleries during the duration of the exhibition and had their card stamped at each, received a limited-edition personally dedicated Hirst print (the recipient got to choose the dedication). The value would be about $2,500, depending on how many were given out; 700 people signed up online for the challenge.

    The Reuters blogger Felix Salmon estimated the cost, with business-class travel and good hotels, at $108,572. A columnist for The Art Newspaper, Cristina Ruiz, did it on an extreme budget and spent $3,250.75. The New York Times quoted one collector as saying: "I would only do it if I had no life, no job, someone else was paying my way and Scarlett Johansson came with me." The challenge was completed by 114 people (though none with Ms Johansson). I cannot imagine any other contemporary artist producing that result. And where Hirst leads, others follow: White Cube this month launched its own 'global' exhibition of 292 Gilbert & George pictures in its three London spaces and its new Hong Kong gallery.

    Hirst understands diversification. He has evolved into a successful retail brand, with two branches of Other Criteria, a London store offering his limited editions and multiples, along with jewellery, clothing, towels and books. He is to become a property developer, having applied to build 500 eco-homes near his house in north Devon. He is a restaurateur: after his Pharmacy restaurant closed in 2003 (he sold its artwork for more than £11 million) Hirst opened 11 The Quay in Devon. And in 2014 he will open 'my Saatchi gallery': a London building to display 2,000 pieces from his personal collection, by him and artists including Francis Bacon and Banksy.

    "Damien is totally fearless," says Oliver Barker, Sotheby's deputy chairman for Europe. "He's not just an outstanding artist, he's a cultural phenomenon."

    Charles Saatchi says that Hirst is one of only four artists from the last half of the 20th century (with Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd) who will not be consigned to the footnotes of art history 20 years hence. He is right. Regardless of whether you find Hirst's work rich and satisfying or shallow and irritating, he has an unparalleled commercial killer instinct. He not only understands the art market, he has single-handedly altered its axis.

Women In Art

    MUCH fanfare greeted the $388m made by Christie's post-war and contemporary evening sale in New York earlier this month - its highest total ever. Few seemed to notice that the auction was unprecedented in another way: it had ten lots by eight women artists, amounting to a male-to-female ratio of five-to-one. (Sotheby's evening sale offered a more typical display of male-domination with an 11-to-one ratio.) Yet proceeds on all the works by women artists in the Christie's sale tallied up to a mere $17m - less than 5% of the total and not even half the price achieved that night by a single picture of two naked women by Yves Klein. Indeed, depictions of women often command the highest prices, whereas works by them do not.

    An analysis of data provided by artnet, however, suggests that the prospects for women are slowly improving. Compare, for example, the top ten most expensive male and female artists. Admittedly $86.9m, the highest price for a work by a post-war male artist (set by "Orange, Red, Yellow" by Mark Rothko) dwarfs the highest price paid for a work made by a woman - $10.7m for Louise Bourgeois's large-scale bronze "Spider". However, of the top-ten men, only two are living, whereas among the top-ten women, five are still working.

    "Attitudes are changing generationally," says Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of post-war and contemporary art development at Christie's. "It wasn't long ago that it was hard to be taken seriously as a woman artist. There will be some remedial catch up before women artists have parity on prices."

    Compared to the top-ten post-war men, which includes a lot of American Pop and British figurative painters, the work of the top-ten women, particularly the deceased ones, leans heavily towards abstraction. Joan Mitchell, an abstract-expressionist painter who spent most of her adult life in France, is the sales turnover queen. Her work has accrued $199m at auction since the mid-1980s, when artnet records began. Mitchell's stature in the market results from an international collector base, which includes Russian, Korean, French and American buyers. Abstraction always aspired to being a universal language; perhaps the new global elite will make it so.

    By contrast, the living women in the top ten are exceedingly diverse. Cady Noland, for example, who holds the record for the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living woman ($6.6m), is a reclusive figurative sculptor whose work explores the sordid underbelly of the American dream. It has been over a decade since she has publicly exhibited her work, leading some to wonder whether she has stopped making art. Yayoi Kusama, however, an 83-year-old Japanese artist, has an oeuvre that spans five decades and a love of the media. Her work has the highest turnover of any living woman. Her monochrome "Infinity Net" paintings command the highest prices, but her colourful prints contribute to her high volume at auction. In July her profile will receive a boost due to her collaboration with Louis Vuitton on a ready-to-wear and accessories line. The exposure is likely to have a positive impact on her prices.

    Cindy Sherman, a New York-based photographer, is a different style of artist again - one whose work is often interpreted as feminist. Last year an image from her 1981 "Centerfold" series set a record for the highest price ever paid for a photograph ($3.9m). Although a work by Andreas Gursky, a German photographer, has since displaced Ms Sherman's picture from the top spot, she is still one of the few women artists whose auction prices are in the same ballpark as her male peers. It is probably no accident that Ms Sherman works in a medium that has only recently been elevated to the status of art and is not overwhelmed by a legacy of male geniuses.

    Intriguingly, the auction records for all three women - Mlles Noland, Kusama and Sherman - were the result of winning bids by Philippe Segalot, an art consultant who was then working for Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, the Western-educated 29-year-old daughter of the emir of Qatar. It is probable that women feel a sense of affinity for art made by women. But perhaps more importantly, younger buyers and advisors find it weird to not include women's perspectives in their collections. It appears the future will be more female. And as Iwan Wirth, a dealer with galleries in New York, London and Zurich, puts it, "Women artists are the bargains of our time."

    Almost 50 years ago, contemporary art dispensed with modernist myths that associated originality with heterosexual male virility. Openly gay men - such as Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon - fought that battle and won. Now three of the top-ten most expensive male artists are gay. In the 1960s most women artists shied away from trying to compete for sales, opting instead to focus on garnering intellectual credibility, which led them to rigorous abstract and conceptual-art practices. In the 1980s they started to branch out and diversify. Although increasingly celebrated by museums, women are still emerging when it comes to the art market.

    An auction evening sale affords superlative marketing. Oftentimes the simple act of including a young artist, or an unknown older one, results in a high price. Whether their works move from being cultish lots to international trophies depends on collectors, but it's good to see the auction houses finally giving more women a chance. For money is a powerful symbol of cultural worth.

Invisible Art

    There are two good things about the Hayward Gallery's celebration of invisible art, and one bad thing. Since the positives outnumber the negatives, it is right to start with them. I'll get to the problems later.

    Good thing number one is that the subject is being tackled at all. Plenty of observers will dismiss the whole idea as a gimmick. The Hayward, alas, has lots of previous when it comes to artistic nonsensicality, and the current director, Ralph Rugoff, is renowned for the high scores he regularly achieves on the bullshit meter. But the fact is that many artists, across many artistic generations, have used nothingness in various ways to say various things. Ever since 1918, when the great Russian suprematist Kazimir Malevich painted his pioneering White on White - in which a white square was set against a white background - nothingness has been regularly reinvented.

    One of the reasons I stopped attending student shows at Goldsmiths College is that I could not face seeing another blank wall presented as a radical exhibit by yet another copycat conceptualist. The worst winner of all time of the Turner prize was the tedious Martin Creed, in 2001, who showed us an empty room in which a light bulb went on and off, and that was all. It wasn't just the non-spectacle that was so irritating. Just as annoying was the thought that Creed had so many predecessors.

    So invisible art has a busy history. And, had it been an easier subject to explore in an exhibition, it would have been explored before now. The difficulties involved in arranging a display of nothingness are obvious. The Hayward, in a very Rugoff gesture, has actually upped the ante by making the captions all but invisible, and by really going to town on the empty gallery look. The show only makes any sense if you look carefully, read carefully and think carefully as you stroll through the snowdrift.

    Thus, Jeppe Hein's Invisible Labyrinth, from 2005, looks initially like a big empty room. Only when you read the instructions on the wall do you realise that the point here is to put one of the contraptions available at the back of the gallery on your head and wander out into the emptiness, with your headphones buzzing every time you choose the wrong path through an unseen maze. Sure to be an audience favourite, Invisible Labyrinth offers clear proof that authentic creatives will always find a new use for the empty room. It also illustrates how rapidly the divide is shrinking these days between the modern artwork and the funfair ride. (This is no place to expand on the need to entertain at any costs that is afflicting our cultural institutions, from Tate Modern to the BBC, but since that tendency is the direct result of putting audience numbers before principles, we should at least acknowledge that the Hayward has found an inventive way to dumb us down.)

    If the first reason to admire the show is that it tackles a genuinely pertinent subject, the second is that it tackles that subject well, with verve and variety. Anyone who imagines that there is only one kind of white, or who expects all empty rooms to have the same effect, will have those views challenged by a display that leaps nimbly from blank to blank. Nothingness turns out to be a quality with many faces.

    Yves Klein, who began exhibiting empty rooms in 1957, and who is the earliest creative nihilist examined here, appears to have had wacky religious reasons for his obsession with 'the void'. Even from the tiny fragments of archival evidence presented to us here, it is clear nothingness had a profound and cosmic presence for Klein. His empty rooms set out to confront, rather than avoid. The visitor to one of his 'architecture of air' displays was plonked in an expanse of Buddhistic whiteness that appeared to nurse ambitions to say it all.

    The show only makes sense if you look, read and think carefully as you stroll through the snowdrift That is a very different effect from the cheeky consumer blankness created by Andy Warhol when he exhibited his Invisible Sculpture in 1985. By showing an empty plinth onto which he had once stepped, Warhol seemed to be celebrating his own vacant celebrity. We now know that the devious so-and-so was actually questioning the final value of celebrity per se: a work that appeared to be about him was actually about us.

    Another form of absence explored by this surprisingly fertile event is what we might call memorial absence. It begins with Claes Oldenburg's proposal for a monument to John F Kennedy, consisting of a huge statue buried underground, so you cannot see it: a disappeared president is being commemorated by a disappeared artwork.

    In the same spirit, the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles shows a white room into which two noisy air-conditioning units are pumping moist air. Only when you read the caption do you realise that the water cooling this air was originally used to wash the dead bodies of anonymous victims of Mexico's drug wars.

    Just as all the empty rooms in the show have a different kind of presence, so the actual whiteness arrived at by a wide range of strategies is also varied. Bruno Jakob, who has apparently spent 25 years devising different means of making invisible paintings, gives us a crumpled white in which he once wrapped some potatoes, a blank white across which a snail has wandered and a glowing white created by a horse projecting its psychic energy onto the empty picture.

    Under Rugoff, the Hayward has displayed a recurrent weakness for this kind of tricksy conceptual games-playing; and while the dreaded Martin Creed has been avoided, the show is not entirely devoid of silly ideas seeking to pass themselves off as deep ones. Jay Chung went as far as to shoot an entire movie with a full complement of crew and actors, but with no film in the camera. He has never told the cast or crew that their efforts were not recorded.

    Most of this journey is set in the spectator's imagination. A typical exhibit describes a situation in a caption, then encourages you to think about it. As soon as you get it, off you go to the next puzzle. Thus, the problem with this event is, predictably, the shortage of interesting things here to look at. Rugoff has explained that the reason he wanted to do the show in the first place was that this is the summer of spectacles in Britain, and the situation appeared to him to cry out for a non-spectacle. Which he achieves too often.

    Pasted on the wall outside the installation created by the art co-operative Art & Language is a long and complex description of their ambitions for the piece you are about to enter. When you walk into the room, however, you see immediately that it is empty. It only takes a moment for the point to be made. Five seconds of looking and you're off.

    There is simply not enough here to savour. Not enough to watch at length. Not enough that pleases the eye. In a show devoted to various kinds of invisible art, the only really crushing sense of nothingness is the feeling left behind by the bad conceptual art.

Video Before YouTube

    IT was the video that went viral before there was such a thing as viral video. Todd Haynes's "Superstar," released in 1987, was a darkly campy and experimental biopic about Karen Carpenter, who rose to fame with her brother, Richard, in the '70s pop group the Carpenters, and who fought a protracted battle with anorexia nervosa before her death at 32 in 1983. In the film characters were portrayed by plastic dolls, including Barbies, that looked as if they'd been plucked from a garage-sale free bin. Running 43 minutes, "Superstar" was a phenomenon, but not at the multiplex. It was shown primarily in galleries, museums and clubs, though it had a theatrical life at some repertory houses. Eventually it was copied and widely traded on bootleg VHS tapes, available for rent at alternative video stores across the country.

    As filmmakers, distributors and exhibitors wrestle with the rise of digital platforms that let us watch movies on laptops and cellphones, it's worth remembering another time when advances in technology gave viewers the power to decide where and when they got their entertainment. VHS - short for Video Home System - set off a revolution in consumer entertainment when it was first introduced by JVC in 1976. It came down to convenience: Who needs a theater when a VCR turned every home into a cineplex? The era is explored in a retrospective, simply called "VHS," running through Aug. 19 at the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle. Far from an exhaustive survey, the series mostly consists of screenings of low-budget works like "Superstar" that demonstrate how VHS upended the system of making, sharing and consuming moving pictures.

    That a museum is devoting attention to VHS is a nostalgic delight for fans like Nick Prueher, the author, with Joe Pickett, of the book "VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics From the Videotape Era" (2011).

    "There are organizations dedicated to preserving the great films," Mr. Prueher said. "But there's no temperature-controlled vault with the Angela Lansbury exercise video. Those kinds of things will be lost forever if there aren't people hanging onto them." (As part of the retrospective, this month, the performance artist Jeffrey Marsh will host "Sweating to the Oldies," honest-to-god workout classes using original exercise tapes from home-fitness stars like Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda, and lesser-known Lycra fans like Elvira and Traci Lords.)

    Buzz is high among VHS enthusiasts for the museum's July 6 screening of "Tales From the Quadead Zone," a 1987 horror anthology featuring a woman reading macabre stories to her phantom son. Poorly shot, badly acted and directed by Chester Novell Turner, a little-known filmmaker whose work also includes "Black Devil Doll From Hell," "Tales From the Quadead Zone" is a holy grail for VHS collectors.

    "Copies of it surfaced all over, from California to New York, even though it doesn't look like it was made on this planet," said Matthew Desiderio, producer of the coming documentary "Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector." Mr. Desiderio is also an organizer of "VHS" with Jake Yuzna, the museum's manager of public programs, and Rebecca Cleman.

    Just as the DVR replaced the VCR, digital advances have also meant that films like "Quadead Zone" and "Superstar" are no longer clandestine favorites but are freely available on YouTube, probably uploaded from pirated VHS tapes. But bootleg copies still circulate. "I don't know anyone who has seen "Superstar" on anything but VHS or online," Mr. Yuzna said. It wasn't just major studios who, after a cautious start, embraced the format at the time. Regular people began experimenting, said Mr. Prueher, who with Mr. Pickett runs the Found Footage Festival, a traveling show of oddball VHS clips. "It was like a gold rush," he added. "People for the first time could try out new things and be able to control movies in their home. Because the format was so cheap and readily available by the late '80s, you had people who would have had no business in front of or behind the camera making videos."

    That wouldn't include Mr. Haynes, of course, who is now better known for helping establish the New Queer Cinema of the early '90s with "Poison" and for work like "Far From Heaven," which earned him an Oscar nomination. But it was "Superstar" that put him on Hollywood's radar.

    Standing at the intersection of free speech, artistic appropriation and copyright law, "Superstar" exemplified how the VHS tape created what the film scholar Lucas Hilderbrand calls "new modes and expectations of access." As word about the Barbie-Karen Carpenter movie spread beyond the artistic underground and into the mainstream - slowly, this being the pre-digital age - its demise was sealed. Mr. Haynes got in legal hot water with the Carpenter family and A&M Records, the duo's label, for, among other things, using Carpenters' music without permission. Mattel, the maker of Barbie, wasn't happy either.

    "It sounded much more meanspirited and cynical, to tell the story of Karen Carpenter with Barbie dolls, than the actual experience of watching the film," Mr. Haynes recalled. "I could see that would never be something they were comfortable with."

    A settlement reached in 1990 prohibits "Superstar" from being sold, distributed or receiving any authorized exhibition, although Mr. Haynes said he retained some rights to show the film in the context of his other work. He said he was not aware of the Museum of Arts and Design screening. "The less I know probably the better," he added. Mr. Yuzna said he had 'reached out' to the Carpenters' estate and was "not told that there would be issues" with showing it.

    Despite efforts to stifle "Superstar," it never really died. "In a way it's out of my hands," Mr. Haynes said. "The film has had its own life. It's something that no one can totally control and suppress."

Andy Warhol and Food

    What do you get when you put a chocolate bar between two pieces of white bread? Andy Warhol called it cake.

    Warhol's relationship to food is manifest not only in his art but also in the frugality and deprivation of his childhood, the time he was from - America in the 1930s, '40s and '50s - and in his flip philosophy and deadpan sense of humor.

    Anyone with a slight interest in his work is aware of how prominently Campbell's Soup and Coca-Cola figure into his art. Some may own, or have at least seen, the first Velvet Underground album, which has a Warhol cover featuring a bright yellow banana. (You could actually peel the banana open on the original copies back in 1967.)

    Dedicated fans of the pop artist might be familiar with his Kellogg's Corn Flakes Boxes and his Tunafish Disaster painting of 1963, which is based on a newspaper story about two older women who died from eating a can of tainted tuna. There's even a later Warhol series of works based on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

    The frequency of Warhol's food references declines in his '60s films. (It's possible that the actors in many of Warhol's movies don't eat because they were fueled by amphetamines, and speed freaks are notoriously indifferent to food.) Warhol's film Eating Too Fast, which is also known as Blow Job #2, is a sound version of BLOW-JOB, and is obviously not about food. Still, there are Eat (1964), starring Robert Indiana; Restaurant (1965), with Edie Sedgwick and Bibbe Hansen (future mom of Beck); and The Nude Restaurant (1967), filmed at the Mad Hatter on West Fourth Street, which had been a lesbian bar in the '50s called the Pony Stable Inn and is now the Washington Square Diner.

    Among these films, Eat is the only one in which the activity of eating is primarily depicted. For the entire duration of its 45 minutes, Indiana silently and glacially consumes a single mushroom, and not of the psychoactive variety. When Warhol was asked why the movie was so long, he matter-of-factly said that was how long it took Robert Indiana to consume the mushroom. Warhol was probably the only director in the history of film who never said the word 'cut.'

    And then there is the very curious Schrafft's Commercial (1969), described thusly by critic Harold H. Brayman: The screen fills with a magenta blob, which a viewer suddenly realizes is the cherry atop a chocolate sundae. Shimmering first in puce, then fluttering in chartreuse, the colors of the background and the sundae evolve through many colors of the rainbow. Studio noises can be heard. The sundae vibrates to coughs on the soundtrack. 'Andy Warhol for a SCHRAFFT'S?' asks the off-screen voice of a lady. Answers an announcer: 'A little change is good for everybody.'

    Commissioning Warhol to come up with an ad for their restaurants was an attempt by Schrafft's to attract a hipper audience. Their image in the late '60s wasn't vastly different from how they had presented themselves in the late '50s. Tied in with the Warhol commercial was a new product, advertised on their menu as the Underground Sundae: "Yummy Schrafft's vanilla ice cream in two groovy heaps, with three ounces of mind-blowing chocolate sauce undulating within a mountain of pure whipped cream topped with a pulsating maraschino cherry served in a bowl as big as a boat." Priced at about a dollar, it was a pretty good deal.

    What isn't seen in that 60-second spot is what Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro recalls from the day it was filmed. He and Viva were in the studio, both topless, she spread out on a table, with Dallesandro smoking and standing behind her, his muscled arms modestly but provocatively covering her bare breasts. They were, of course, removed from the final cut of the commercial, but it's clear that Warhol originally wanted the sundae to have more than a cherry on top, and instinctively knew that sex helps to sell even the most dubious product.

    Given that he was surrounded by all sorts of drugs and freaks throughout this period, it's surprising that Warhol's most psychedelic filmed moment is reserved for a sugary trip down memory lane - an ice cream sundae with all the extras. There's even an all-American take on the image to be found in an illustration of Warhol's from the '50s of a triple-scoop sundae whose glass boat is festooned with a little American flag on either side: a patriotic Fourth of July dessert.

    Despite having plenty of assistants around the Factory, which was what his studio was called, Warhol thought that he was the only one who really worked hard, that it was somehow up to him to support everyone in his employ. Success hadn't diminished his work ethic. If anything, the opposite was true. Warhol liked to say, "I've got a lot of mouths to feed." When asked why he kept himself running more or less nonstop, his favorite response was, "Someone has to bring home the bacon." Although it's been 25 years since Warhol died, he's still bringing home the bacon. At a November 2010 auction at Sotheby's, his 1962 painting of a single Coca-Cola bottle sold for a whopping $35.36 million. That's one very expensive bottle of pop.

    Pop Art may not have been a purely American phenomenon, but, with the strongest postwar economy, America gave birth to an art form that would comment on and critique a consumer society that was especially well-fed. After the war, years of food shortages, and rationing, the horn of plenty for many was, of course, the supermarket. And yet the artists whose images reflected American popular culture - cars and gas stations, the flag and comic-book superheroes, hot dogs and apple pie - were all children of the Great Depression: Wayne Thiebaud (born 1920), Roy Lichtenstein (1923), Robert Indiana (1928), Claes Oldenburg (1929), Jasper Johns (1930), Tom Wesselmann (1931), James Rosenquist (1933), and, to a lesser extent, the youngest among them, Ed Ruscha (1937).

    Warhol, whose first birthday was celebrated fewer than three months before the stock market crash of 1929, came from very humble means, his childhood marked by the hardship of the times. His parents were immigrants from what is now Slovakia who settled in Pittsburgh. His father, unable to speak or write much English, worked there in construction and as a laborer, and as a miner in West Virginia, and died when Warhol was only 14. His mother and two older brothers had to provide for the family as best they could. As a wealthy, successful artist in 1975, Warhol sat down to write his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. In it he made a number of confessions about how the privation of his early years had affected him later in life. Despite the breeziness of his style, when he admits that he can't tolerate eating leftovers, his admissions are accompanied by guilt:

    Food is my great extravagance. I really spoil myself, but then I try to compensate by scrupulously saving all of my food leftovers and bringing them into the office or leaving them in the street and recycling them there. My conscience won't let me throw anything out, even when I don't want it for myself. As I said, I really spoil myself in the food area, so my leftovers are often grand - my hairdresser's cat eats pate at least twice a week. The leftovers usually turn out to be meat because I'll buy a huge piece of meat, cook it up for dinner, and then right before it's done I'll break down and have what I wanted for dinner in the first place - bread and jam. I'm only kidding myself when I go through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever really want is sugar. The rest is strictly for appearances ... . Strictly for appearances? What about all the beluga caviar he spooned onto toast when he attended dinners at the Iranian embassy in New York in the late '70s?

    In The Andy Warhol Diaries, he mentioned that he knew things weren't going well for the shah. Not from the number of protesters out in front of the embassy, but because the once enormous bowls of caviar had gotten progressively smaller. The more they shrank, he realized, the more the Pahlavis' hold on power in Iran was slipping away. And why was Warhol there in the first place? His real meal ticket in those days was a very lucrative portrait business, and being able to land commissioned portraits of the shah and his wife, Empress Farah, was foremost in his mind.

    Unfortunately for Warhol, by the time the paint was dry and the portraits were ready to ship to Tehran, the shah had been overthrown. As much as Warhol lusted after the fame and money - and preyed on the vanity - of the rich so that he could keep painting portraits and 'bring home the bacon,' he probably didn't even like caviar that much. He was drawn to what it represented (the riches of royalty rather than the grim reality of authoritarian rule), but its saltiness was something else. If no one had been looking, he might well have washed it down with a sugary, syrupy soda. Because no matter how much money Warhol made, nor how many wigs he owned, he could never really deny his proletarian roots or his own contradictions. The same man who could order anything he wanted from the menu at La Grenouille would volunteer to serve meals to the homeless at churches on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The son of working-class immigrants who achieved wealth and fame through hard work and the sheer force of his ambition, Warhol had a much better grasp of potentiality than the average Pilgrim blue blood. He understood the democracy of mass production, whether in terms of the fluidity of images or of soft drinks.

    As he mused in The Philosophy: What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

    Of course, Warhol loved the Automat. You put your nickel in the slot, opened the little windowed door (just as if you had a private box at the post office), and there was a piece of pie on a plate, ready and waiting. Instant gratification, and more or less the same every time.

    And don't forget that Warhol was an unrepentant voyeur. With the windowed doors at the Automat and the post office, there was a whole world on the other side, and these little portals, once open, allowed one to spy, if only momentarily, on the people and goings-on behind them. There is clearly a libidinal aspect to the situation, and it could not have been lost on Warhol - a private peepshow, a quickie, for a nickel a pop. And to what extent was there a sexual charge of possibility in the dining room itself? Was the Automat a pickup place in the '50s? Horn & Hardart may have been a family-oriented business, but in cities like New York and Philadelphia, where they first opened, almost any public place was a cruising area, especially in the buttoned-up and more naive '40s and '50s. When you add in the fact that food and sex have always had a rather amorous relationship, suddenly the banana split doesn't seem so innocent anymore.

    Warhol in the '60s, looking back to a decade earlier - when he started to become well-known, to make and be able to spend money - may have begun, in effect, to live his second childhood. That simpler time had to have included meals at the Automat. Ever frugal, Warhol probably also cherished what could guiltlessly have been a tip-free dining experience. For someone who felt perennially on his own, especially when he was surrounded by an entourage and hangers-on, the Automat may have represented a way to be sociable without making the least effort, which is part of why movie theaters remain popular.

    As he remarks in The Philosophy: My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain American lunchroom or even the good, plain American lunch counter. The old-style Schrafft's and the old-style Chock Full o'Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I'm truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing. No matter what changes or how fast, the one thing we always need is real good food so we can know what the changes are and how fast they're coming. Progress is very important and exciting in everything but food. When you say you want an orange, you don't want someone asking you, "An orange what?" I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people like me called ANDY-MATS "The Restaurant for the Lonely Person." You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

    This was in 1975. Within two years, Warhol had moved closer to his dream, but one that was never meant to be. There were still Automats at the time (the last closed in 1991), but the Andy-Mat would be very different from the coin-operated system that had been in place since the early 1900s. In Warhol's restaurant, diners would make their selections from the menu and, rather than rely on a waiter or waitress, would order their meals by speaking through a kind of phone system set up at each table, connected directly to the kitchen. The food, however, wouldn't be cooked on the premises, but zapped and served there, just like on an airplane. The kitchen of the Andy-Mat, as befits its creator's particular disposition, would be push-button - for all intents and purposes, a large microwave oven. Envisioned as an international chain, the first one was scheduled to open in the fall of '77 in New York at 74th Street and Madison Avenue.

    There is a picture of Warhol in which he's seated at a conference table, with three men standing around him dressed in mostly dapper suits and ties, as he is himself, and holding small plates of food and glasses. An Andy-Mat sign is tacked to the wall behind them, along with a photo and floor plans for the proposed eatery. Although an uncorked bottle of champagne is prominently displayed on the table, no one looks particularly enthused. Warhol himself can only be described as appearing worried and empty-handed, pretending neither to eat nor drink.

    According to GOOD: This photo shows Andy Warhol with his Andy-Mat restaurant business partners, architect Araldo Cossutta, developer Geoffrey Leeds, and financier C. Cheever Hardwick III. According to restaurant historian Jan Whitaker, "Warhol's concept included pneumatic tubes through which customers' orders would be whooshed into the kitchen. The meals served in Andy-Mats, in keeping with the times, were to be frozen dinners requiring only reheating."

Art Thefts

    In November 2010, a Chinese porcelain vase that had been languishing for decades in a suburban London "bungalow" sold for an astonishing 69 million dollars. It catapulted into the ranks of established brand names like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Renoir as one of the all-time highest bids at auction. It was a first for a Chinese artwork, and not even a painting at that. The sale made headlines all over the world, and no wonder: who wouldn't, in economically grim times, warm to a color piece of unsuspecting suburbanites rummaging through Granny's old clutter and stumbling upon a musty old thing that turned out to be worth millions?

    The vase was found by the relatives of one Patricia Newman as they were sorting through her modest property in Pinner, England, after her death. A regional auction house in neighboring West Ruislip had sent out a flyer asking for inventory from just such house clearances, and so in September 2010 some of Mrs. Newman's old belongings, including a colorful sixteen-inch vase with lively goldfish decorations, ended up at Bainbridge's. While the most recent haul was being sorted, a consulting appraiser walked by the vase shelved unceremoniously in storage and remarked that if real, the extraordinary piece could easily fetch "1.5 million pounds." After further archival investigation, the appraiser, Luan Grocholski, concluded that the vase was the genuine article: an imperial porcelain fired in the famous Jingdezhen kilns, created for the pleasure of Emperor Qianlong (r. 1735-1796), fourth Qing Dynasty ruler to control China, and likely situated in the fine rooms of either the Forbidden City or the Summer Palace in the capital city Beijing.

    Peter Bainbridge, the auctioneer, advertised "a superb and very rare yang cai reticulated double-walled vase" just in time for the season when collectors and dealers of Asian art would be in London. The steady stream of Western and Chinese experts who came to the pre-sale viewing murmured in appreciation and disbelief. But nothing could prepare Bainbridge or Grocholski for how the vase's value would take off during auction. Bidding began for lot 800 at a not insignificant 500,000 pounds, but fifteen breathless minutes later, seven bidders were still raising paddles at 20 million. Just before 6:30pm, the gavel fell at 43 million pounds, and Bainbridge declared, "We have the most wonderful, wonderful sum of money."

    Almost immediately, the seeming fairytale began to crack. Dark mutterings trickled into the media, grumblings of a conspiracy: that dealers were artificially creating a bubble to drive up prices of their own Asian artworks, that the bid was staged by the Chinese government as a protest against Western sellers seeking to profit off stolen national treasures, that it could actually be a fake (a respected New York Chinese antiquities dealer had publicly doubted the vase's authenticity). Meanwhile, the successful bidder was still anonymous five months after the sale and had yet to pay a penny. Perhaps he had gotten cold feet.

    The story of the fish vase illustrates much of the wild speculation, murky dealings, and profound uncertainty that characterize the art world. From the vase's origins, its entry to the market, and its subsequent (non)sale, the story raises a few seemingly basic questions of this deceptively glamorous world: where does art come from? Who owns it? And how and why do we value it?

    Many recent books seek to answer these questions, often through the intrigue of art crime -- so many, in fact, that one of them ruefully notes, "It is fair to say [non-fiction titles on art crime] have become a genre, if not an industry." They thrill to the illegitimate side of art, with a particular love of "heists," and position their works as exposes of a seedy criminal underworld populated with black-turtlenecked thieves and cat-stroking villains. Inside the pages, though, these same books will point out that such sensationalizing is largely constructed to grab the public's attention and in fact does a disservice to the majority of art and antiques that isn't by a recognized artist, isn't worth millions of dollars, and wasn't stolen from a world-famous museum.

    Museum thefts are the rare exceptions in art crime but nevertheless continue to fascinate anyone with even a passing interest in art, and new releases on the subject reliably appear on bookstore shelves. One recent book claims to refute the Dr. No hypothesis while its very premise seems to coyly acknowledge it. Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists focuses exclusively on stolen works from one of the most recognized artists in the world. Widely renowned during the seventeenth century Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was also hugely prolific, producing some 300 paintings and 700 drawings, not including the innumerable prints made off his etched metal plates. The depth of his catalogue means that "every major museum, and many smaller ones, has at least one Rembrandt" -- and that opportunities abound for them to be stolen. Each chapter recounts a different Rembrandt heist, mostly from the 1960s and '70s, in which a few adequately competent thieves had very little trouble hauling out priceless paintings from grand fine arts institutions with nearly non-existent security systems.

    Museums may be built to look like temples and fortresses, but inside they're veritable "warehouses" of six-, seven-, and eight-figure valuables watched over by a lone, unarmed guard.

    Authors Anthony M. Amore, head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, itself a victim of a 500-million dollar heist, and Tom Mashberg, a veteran journalist and editor at the Boston Herald, want you to believe that these thefts were committed by fairly crude low-level thugs. Their own research shows, though, that these alleged lunkheads actually spent many hours "casing" their target -- observing guards' schedules, determining the necessary removal tools, perhaps obtaining costumes or disguises -- and had a meticulous plan for entry and escape. Often the thefts were only discovered early the next morning when someone found broken glass and forlornly empty walls. Though there is no billionaire mastermind "shopping" museums to augment his illicit private collection, the thieves at least show cunning and no small amount of derring-do.

    Amore and Mashberg put together an entertaining book that doesn't venture beyond the anecdotal, try as they might to make a larger point: that stealing art doesn't pay. In fact, it can pay reasonably well. Their narrow focus on masterpiece thefts from museums neglects the vast majority of the six billion dollar black market for stolen art, let alone the various other furiously grinding cogs and gears in the art world.

    "Art" is a term that covers all manner of shiny baubles; in the Western tradition, it is almost exclusively equated with paintings. In non-Western cultures, however, two-dimensional representational images are not necessarily privileged above, say, porcelain, jade, ivory, bronze, sculpture, calligraphy, mosaics, or textiles, not to mention the many objects associated with ritual worship. "Antiquities" technically refers to any object of cultural value over 150 years old, though they often refer to a class of artifacts so old they need to be dug out of archaeological sites and come from cultures with no longer extant gods or languages. "Antiques" can include all kinds of furniture, a silver tea service, lamps, a mantel clock, a set of andirons... the whole range of Grandma's musty drawing room can potentially qualify. Which is to say, not all art and antiques had to pass through Hades to end up in your home.

    Books like the debut effort by Joshua Knelman call into question whether we can really know for sure. The elaborate network along which shady art travels is the subject of his far-ranging and well-researched Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art. Through a number of revealing interviews mainly with those who try to police it, Knelman is astonished at the ease with which art can move largely unchecked from private to public, from cultural heritage to commodity, from black market to legitimate market, from country to country to country. According to Knelman's research, stolen art constitutes the fourth largest black market in the world (behind drugs, weapons, and money-laundering). The numbers point to a discomfiting conclusion: a lot of art held both publicly and privately, in fact, more than we care to admit, had to see the darkness of a hayloft, a bike shed, or a stolen vehicle's trunk before it saw the daylight of a SoHo gallery.

    After all, how did a porcelain vase from the imperial courts of the Celestial Kingdom end up atop a wardrobe in Pinner, England? "My aunt got it in the 1930s, from her husband's side of the family," they said. And before then? "From a dealer, I suppose." And how did he get it? Fewer and fewer answers can satisfy the further one goes back, while uncomfortable questions come to the fore. (Only one of the several articles I read on the morning of November 12, 2010 baldly stated the most obvious possibility: that the fish vase was plunder from the Opium Wars of 1860, when British and French troops looted the palaces of Beijing.) Though visions of nimble thieves with sleuthing gadgetry stealing into museums under cover of night may make headlines and lend a sheen of dark intrigue to the art world, they are certainly the exceptions. Because not everything in a museum is worth stealing, and most everything that's stolen isn't from a museum.

    Where art comes from may be a complicated question, but first, where art ends up is usually one and the same place: at an auction house. The two heavyweights, Sotheby's and Christie's, have become centralized clearinghouses for all sorts of art and antiques from around the world. It is at the auction block where an ostensibly priceless act of creative expression becomes a commodity -- and where its "value" is determined in hard figures. As one dealer tells author Sarah Thornton in Seven Days in the Art World, "Only two professions come to mind where the building in which transactions take place is referred to as a house." Thornton argues that the art craze of the past fifty years has been largely fanned by, if not set alight by, the public theatrics of auction houses. The fish vase sale is a prime example: Peter Bainbridge's gavel shattered as it banged down at 43 million pounds and the whole room gasped and cheered -- pure drama. Crucially, auctions give art "the illusion of liquidity," even if they are less like cash or drugs than like real estate; just because something is "worth" 10 million dollars doesn't mean there is always a buyer ready at any time to pay that amount.

    Not all of an auction house's dealings are dirty; to be fair, Knelman reports several instances of auction houses doing their due diligence and turning in to authorities works that were reported stolen. Before international databases of stolen art such as Art Loss Registrar or International Foundation of Art Research's were compiled (and whose existence has only very slightly made a thief's life harder), anyone who could lift a painting uncaught could pass it off to middlemen, then slip it over from the dark to the bright side into the hands of dealers, and eventually, to an auction house, where it would recycle back again to another dealer, gallery, private collector, or even a museum. Every step of the way, money would change hands. With every transaction, legitimate or not, the value would go up and up. Save for perhaps contemporary art, where the sums are largest but definitive value is most uncertain, art continues unceasingly to appreciate. Stocks and bonds never had such good returns.

    It was the promise of a large payout -- moderate risk, huge rewards -- that got thieves to start eyeing comely artwork in the first place. And they didn't even need to make much of a smash to grab them. Knelman interviews a former art thief named Paul who got his start as a "knocker." Going from door to door in the English resort town of Brighton, Paul charmed his way into the homes of creaky retirees, ostensibly to exchange an old item or two (a pair of candlesticks, a string of glass beads) for quick cash. Once inside, he would stake out the real valuables and later send a crew of thieves after them. Not everything was a Cezanne or a Gainsborough or a Qianlong imperial vase. In fact, most of it was mid-level artwork and antiques, worth a few thousands dollars at the final transaction, and the bulk of the illicit art trade is made up of such items that the local police don't have the information, time, or resources to track down. Your mahogany side table, Louis XVI marble urns, and great-aunt's landscape oil painting are therefore left to circulate in the vast underground network of art peddlers, never to be seen again.

    There is another, darker method of getting art and artifacts, one as old as civilization itself. This, too, has spawned a subgenre of not only art books but legal texts. Two weeks ago, I opened my laptop one more time before sleeping to read this New York Times headline: "Sotheby's Caught in Dispute Over Prized Cambodian Statue." A thousand-year-old Khmer sandstone figure of a warrior was pulled last minute from the major Asian art sale at Sotheby's New York last March. The Cambodian government is appealing to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security for its return and, barring that, for an exclusive opportunity to buy it back. The previous owner, "a noble European lady," claims she rightfully acquired it in 1975 from a respected London dealer. She is probably indignant, too, that she's not up a couple million dollars from its sale as expected.

    I remember that statue. I work for an Asian art gallery in New York, and business spikes every March when Asian art collectors and dealers from all over the world come to town for exhibitions, events, and most importantly, sales. I find the day-to-day routine of my job about as glamorous as working in publishing (that is, far less than what outsiders may think), but when there is a cocktail reception or a gallery opening, many of the beautiful and bejeweled come out to play. I wandered around Sotheby's multi-level showroom so large it has escalators, like a suburban mall. Dealers and collectors were upstairs getting on their third drink, from the sound of it, and I had had my fill of inane small talk for the day. Empty glasses were abandoned carelessly atop vitrines. I was left alone to look at the art, and I soon came across a large warrior figure, five feet tall, with a lively expression, thin curving mustache, elaborately carved headdress, posed in an animated stance. Oh look, I remember thinking. This one also has no feet.

    I was recalling another footless Khmer sandstone sculpture I had seen elsewhere, an elegant deity suspended on broken stumps with deep, almost brutal cuts along the inner calves and shins. The feet of the sparring warrior at Sotheby's were later found in the Koh Ker temple complex, sixty miles north of Angkor Wat. The looters must have hacked it off its base during the chaos of bloody political upheaval in Cambodia in the 1970s, when the footless warrior trekked unnoticed across borders and into the hands of eager buyers.

    As it remains in legal limbo, both sides are appealing to archaic statutes, historical precedence, and -- dare we imagine? -- ethics to claim ownership. There is a strong precedence for its removal and sale. Historically, plundering has been synonymous with war. No less than Cicero lamented the pillaging of ancient Greece when its sculptures, paintings, tapestries, and even pantheon of gods were brought back to Rome. But that doesn't mean we can't continue to be outraged about it, or ambivalent, or both. What is notable this time around is the high possibility of its return. The Khmer sculpture dispute follows in the wake of other landmark cases for repatriation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed to return a prized Etruscan krater to Italy in 2006, suspected as a tomb looting from the start, and then nineteen artifacts to Egypt in 2011, which were taken from King Tut's tomb. The Getty Museum of Los Angeles returned a statue of the goddess Aphrodite and forty other artifacts to Italy in 2007. Other institutions have been under pressure to return presumed-loot-turned-museum-property, to say nothing of the most contentious case, the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. Who can really say that they own all this art anyway? Does a nation's heritage necessarily belong within its borders?

    Knelman gets a hold of Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine and lawyer who led the search for art stolen from the Baghdad National Museum after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and who was also interviewed for the Cambodia sculpture article). Maintaining a fully functioning museum complete with security guards and queuing ticket holders was hardly possible within an active combat zone, but Bogdanos hoped he could at least secure and control the potential flood of inventory into black market. But by the time Bogdanos got to the museum site and saw the empty display cases, and the opened vault, many of human civilization's earliest artifacts had already been squirreled away by museum staff or locals for safekeeping -- or for quick profit. Who knows how much of it was already on its way to London, Paris, Geneva, Zurich, New York, and Los Angeles. Americans and their coalition allies suddenly found themselves charged with the responsibility of managing and protecting huge quantities of art that by the time boots hit the ground had already vanished into the yawning chasm rent by war.

    As demonstrated by the fish vase sale, the Chinese approach to such historic grievances is more pragmatic, or at least more economical. Perhaps there is some equation of possession with power going on at a macro level, as James Cuno claims in Who Owns Antiquity? He rails against UNESCO's laws policing the sale and acquisition of antiquities and dismisses them as nationalist bluster, a kind of politicking he believes museums mustn't be sullied with. Cuno's slipshod argument and astonishing presumptuousness doesn't take into account many things, one of which is the deep historical reasons for why countries like China may want to (re)own stolen cultural property. The Chinese are like the goblins in the Harry Potter series, I once tried to explain to friends. A work of art ultimately belongs to its creator, not to whatever wizard paid good galleons for it. And not even, that is, to a specific goblin -- what matters is that it is "goblin-made" and rightfully belongs in the hands of goblins. Unlike the exalted and inviolable individualism of Western art's most celebrated practitioners, who are hailed by that overused epithet, "genius," and who have whole museums dedicated to their lives and works, Chinese vases and sculptures are not always emblazoned with the name of the artist on every base or backside. He (or she) may be one of a series of craftsmen involved in producing a single exquisitely rendered object.

    Granted some porcelains, mirrors, silver, cabinets, and dinner services were made specifically for the export market of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, designed to cater to European tastes, and were shipped halfway round the world for huge profits. Those were never meant to stay in China, were foreign commodities from the beginning, and hold little interest to the Chinese collector. Everything else was made by, and more importantly, for China, and those bearing an imperial mark were made for the Heavenly Ruler himself. How one of the Celestial Emperor's personal effects ended up in Pinner is not much of a mystery to those who recognize its origins.

    The prevailing attitude is that if it's Chinese, it's ours. Reported from the fish vase sale: "This is a very, very important, rare and splendid item. We have never seen such a beautiful thing outside China and it is good that a Chinese buyer has bought it." (One does not hear the French similarly claiming that all eighteenth century mahogany and marble furniture stamped by maitre menuisiers belong back in France.) Chinese collectors are buying their way out of the past's humiliations. No moral outrage like the Koreans foot-stamping at the Japanese. No prolonged legal proceedings like the recovery of Nazi-stolen paintings. No post-colonial guilting like everyone piling up against the British. We know this game, the Chinese are saying. We may have lost the last round. But now that we have money, we're ready to play. Like the Cambodian government, private and public Chinese collectors now find themselves paying for the very things that they believe belong in their "homeland."

    The extraordinary sale of the fish vase once again called into question how and why we value art. It made headlines because it was, by most people's reckoning, an exorbitant amount of money for a single object, no matter how beautiful. "Could it really be worth so much?" everyone inevitably asked. One could ask the same about much of Western contemporary art -- an animal suspended in formaldehyde, an enormous monochromatic canvas, a neon sign -- that regularly goes for millions. In another recent Times article, this one about possible art forgeries sold through an esteemed New York gallery, comments took on two major strains (aside from the outpouring of schadenfreude that extremely rich people were duped out of millions): the first was, who-cares-if-it's-by-the-stated-artist-or-someone-pretending-to-be-that-artist-isn't-it-enough-that-you-still-have-a-pretty-picture? The second refrain was the tiresome "Big deal, I could've done that" (or worse, "My ten-year-old could've done that"). Well, you didn't. Artistic products, and not just visual ones, are expression with intention. Even the same artist will not produce the same painting in exactly the same way twice: Leonardo da Vinci's two versions of Virgin of the Rocks are composed and colored in nearly the exact same way but are two totally different experiences. One could argue his intention was also different with each one.

    The police officer in charge of LA's Art Theft Detail, Donald Hrycyk, identifies for Knelman the unique difficulties of his patrol, mainly, that art is not like VCRs, flat screen TVs, or Toyota Camrys. They don't have a serial number. They're not interchangeable. And they're each one of a kind. That's why forgery, like plagiarism, offends our moral sensibilities. Fakes might go so far as to be pretty, but they're not art -- intention but no real expression, form without content. There is a reason why we so fiercely value the real thing. The first claim is countered by art's irreplaceablility and the second by art's irreducibility.

    Not surprisingly, then, did Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose art-filled home stands today as a museum in Boston, compare her impeccably curated collection to her children. "Art is like a comfortable old friend," one collector tells Knelman. Sarah Thornton finds the same reaction; watching her parents' estate packed up for sale at auction, one woman says, "It was like children leaving home." In his research, Knelman stumbles again and again upon the equation of art to human relationship. It is not a dead, lifeless thing hanging on the wall or holding down the fireplace mantel. Its loss is therefore felt much more acutely than a misplaced iPhone.

    The value of art shouldn't be confused with the price tag on art, but it often is. There is an extreme, and extremely seductive, argument that art is not and never should be a commodity. Rather, it is a gift, both to the artist from whom it sprang and to the community who receives it, and therefore belongs to everyone and no one. I'd like to hold onto this ideal but it can be too easily manipulated to suit political expediency, or to subvert the enforcement of the few laws that are trying desperately to regulate a freewheeling market. And it leaves artists penniless.

    Still, one cannot talk about art and not talk about how its unique properties as cultural products set it apart from other objects. Amore and Mashberg understand this. They emphatically state that art theft is not a victimless crime. Stealing art, especially when held in the public's trust, is to remove a piece of shared beauty and of history. They know that a glossy photo in an exhibition catalog or textbook can never substitute for the interactive experience of viewing the real thing. Thornton understands this. She lingers on collectors who after the first or second hour will liken their art to extensions of their selves, their families, and their beliefs. Art, she finds, has become "a religion for atheists."

    Unfortunately, Knelman does not get this. He may not be much of a prose stylist (whole chapters read like a typed-up transcript of his notes), but even more dissatisfying is that despite the great deal of information he has assembled from extensive travels in Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York, he hasn't built much of a scaffolding from it all on which to hang some ideas. His investigation started when he reported on a local art gallery theft in Toronto in 2003, but nowhere in 350 pages does he reveal any deeper connection, either intellectual or emotional, to his subject matter. One begins to wonder why he spent five years on this subject if he was seemingly so uninterested. The closest he may come is to the people he interviews who work in art law enforcement, but their commitment to this marginal subfield also goes unquestioned. He never asks himself why art might be special, or at least different, why the black market for laptops or Honda Civics isn't multibillions of dollars. His distance from art's particularities renders his subject, unwittingly, as interchangeable as any another commodity.

    This is a hugely missed opportunity to connect the dots of why people of all stripes may want beautiful things, and if they can't have them, why they would fake them or steal them. Business done on a handshake, with virtually no paperwork, and transactions based on trust... he likens it to the drug trade, but fails to see how it importantly diverges. Knelman would probably concede that an art dealer may be in it for more than just the money, that art might hold some value above the cold balance sheet of sums and figures, but this isn't readily apparent after reading his book. Knelman did an admirable good deal of chasing, as his title declares, but perhaps a little more reflection could have illuminated the world he sought to understand.

    Knelman is right in that the art market, if not necessarily the entire art world, is undeniably driven by business interests. By May 2011, the successful bidder on the Chinese vase was rumored to have paid a two-million-dollar deposit, with the rest to follow soon after. But in February 2012, The Telegraph reported that the relatives of Patricia Newman still hadn't received any proceeds from the sale. The vase was supposedly bought by mainland Chinese art collector and billionaire real estate developer Wang Jianlin, though he publicly denies it because of the subsequent bad press. The payment was purportedly stalled because he balked at the twenty percent commission typically given to auction houses on every sale, which would have totaled 8.6 million pounds and made Peter Bainbridge an overnight multimillionaire. Bainbridge now admits he will get something over one million pounds, which is still a pretty sweet deal for a man who clears out granny attics for a living. For now, the vase is still with Bainbridge's auction house, though perhaps no longer stored as before in a grocery cardboard box.

    To enter into the art world at any level is to experience firsthand the appeal of exclusivity and exclusion unknown to most since the seventh grade lunch table. The specialists, critics, curators, dealers, and gallery assistants in black dresses are all selling symbols of culture and erudition to those who are willing to pay for it; those who can't are left on the outside. A clubby world where large sums of money freely circulate inevitably conjures up images of urbane sophisticates in the mold of James Bond and his eccentric nemeses. But even those apparently on the inside don't always know what they're getting into, or how deep they're in it. A video of the November 2010 auction shows Grocholski standing calmly behind the fish vase like a chaperone as the bid numbers spin higher and higher, well beyond his estimate. "Of course it was a lot of money," he later told a journalist, "but as it goes up, it's only figures. It becomes less and less, it's... It's a game, really."

Abstract Art and The Mind

    "My child could have done that!" Wrong - neuroaesthetics is starting to show us why abstract art can be so beguiling.

    STANDING in front of Jackson Pollock's Summertime: Number 9A one day, I was struck by an unfamiliar feeling. What I once considered an ugly collection of random paint splatters now spoke to me as a joyous celebration of movement and energy, the bright yellow and blue bringing to mind a carefree laugh.

    It was my road-to-Damascus moment - the first time a piece of abstract art had stirred my emotions. Like many people, I used to dismiss these works as a waste of time and energy. How could anyone find meaning in what looked like a collection of colourful splodges thrown haphazardly on a 5.5-metre-wide canvas? Yet here I was, in London's Tate Modern gallery, moved by a Pollock.

    Since then, I have come to appreciate the work of many more modern artists, who express varying levels of abstraction in their work, in particular the great Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, and contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. Even so, when I tried to explain my taste, I found myself lost for words. Why are we attracted to paintings and sculptures that seem to bear no relation to the physical world?

    Little did I know that researchers have already started to address this question. By studying the brain's responses to different paintings, they have been examining the way the mind perceives art. Although their work cannot yet explain the nuances of our tastes, it has highlighted some of the unique ways in which these masterpieces hijack the brain's visual system.

    The studies are part of an emerging discipline called neuroaesthetics, founded just over 10 years ago by Semir Zeki of University College London. The idea was to bring scientific objectivity to the study of art, in an attempt to find neurological bases for the techniques that artists have perfected over the years. It has already offered insights into many masterpieces. The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to tickle the brain's amygdala, for instance, which is geared towards detecting threats in the fuzzy rings of our peripheral vision. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings and emotions, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving.

    Could the same approach tell us anything about the controversial pieces that began to emerge from the tail end of Impressionism more than 100 years ago? Whether it is Mondrian's rigorously geometrical, primary-coloured compositions, or Pollock's controversial technique of dripping paint onto the canvas in seemingly haphazard patterns, the defining characteristic of modern art has been to remove almost everything that could be literally interpreted.

    Although these works often sell for whopping sums of money - Pollock's No. 5 fetched $140 million in 2006 - they have attracted many sceptics, who claim that modern artists lack the skill or competence of the masters before them. Instead, they see the newer works as a serious case of the emperor's new clothes, believing that people might claim to like them simply because they are in fashion. In the scathing words of the American satirist Al Capp, they are the "product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered".

    Chimp or Rothko?

    We certainly do have a strong tendency to follow the crowd. When asked to make simple perceptual decisions such as matching up a shape with its rotated image, for instance, people will often choose a definitively wrong answer if they see others doing the same. It is easy to imagine that the herd mentality would have an even greater impact on a fuzzy concept like art appreciation, where there is no right or wrong answer.

    Angelina Hawley-Dolan of Boston College, Massachusetts, responded to this debate by designing a fun experiment that played with her volunteers' expectations of the pieces they were seeing. Their task was simple. The volunteers viewed pairs of paintings - either the creations of famous abstract artists or the doodles of amateurs, infants, chimps and elephants. Then they had to judge which they preferred. A third of the paintings were given no captions, while the rest were labelled. The twist was that sometimes the labels were mixed up, so that the volunteers might think they were viewing a chimp's messy brushstrokes when they were actually seeing an expressionist piece by Mark Rothko. Some sceptics might argue that it is impossible to tell the difference - but in each set of trials, the volunteers generally preferred the work of the well-accepted human artists, even when they believed it was by an animal or a child (Psychological Science, vol 22, p 435). Somehow, it seems that the viewer can sense the artist's vision in these paintings, even if they can't explain why.

    With this in mind, I recently wandered down to an art exhibition at University College London's Grant Museum, where chimp and elephant art is exhibited alongside artworks by abstract artist Katharine Simpson, whose blocky pieces are reminiscent of Rothko's, but on a smaller scale and with more variety of colour. Challenging myself to guess the professional work, I wandered the gallery looking at the paintings before reading the captions. I managed to get it right every time.

    So a liking for abstract art can't be explained by peer pressure. Yet Hawley-Dolan's experiment didn't explain how we detect the hand of the human artist, nor the reason why the paintings appeal to us. With a realistic picture, we might relate to the expression on a person's face, or we might find symbolism in a still life. But how does the artist hold our attention with an image that bears no likeness to anything in the real world?

    Of course, each artist's unique style will speak to us in a different way, so there can be no single answer. Nevertheless, a few studies have tackled the issue from various angles. Robert Pepperell, an artist based at Cardiff University, UK, for instance, has worked with Alumit Ishai of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, to understand the way we process ambiguous figures. They may look familiar, but "don't add up to something immediately recognisable", Pepperell says. Like the work of Wassily Kandinsky or certain pieces by Gerhard Richter, Pepperell's paintings, which sometimes take the composition of older masterpieces (see images here and here), are not entirely abstract but neither can they be readily interpreted like a representational painting.

    Mind games

    In one study, Pepperell and Ishai asked volunteers to decide whether they saw anything familiar in the piece. In a quarter of the cases they claimed to recognise something real, even when there was nothing definite to pick out. They also had to judge how "powerful" they considered the artwork to be. It turned out that the longer they took to answer these questions, the more highly they rated the piece under scrutiny. And this delay seems to be filled with widespread neural activity, as revealed by later fMRI scans. From these results, you could conclude that the brain sees these images as a puzzle - it struggles to "solve" the image, and the harder it is to decipher the meaning, the more rewarding we find that moment of recognition (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 1).

    This doesn't necessarily tell us much about the more abstract work of Rothko, Pollock or Mondrian, since these artists do not offer even the merest glimpse of a recognisable object for the brain to latch on to. But they may instead catch our attention through particularly well-balanced compositions that appeal to the brain's visual system.

    Consider the art of Mondrian, whose work consists exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines encasing blocks of colour. (His conviction in this principle was so strong that fellow artist Theo van Doesburg's decision to use diagonal lines ended their friendship.) Mondrian's art is deceptively simple, but eye-tracking studies confirm that the patterns are meticulously composed, and that simply rotating a piece radically changes the way we view it. In the originals, the volunteers' eyes tended to linger for longer on certain places in the image, but in the rotated versions they would flit across the piece more rapidly. As a result, they considered the altered images less pleasurable when they later rated the work (Journal of Vision, vol 7, p 1445). Changing Mondrian's colours has a similar effect: in one example, a large square of red in one corner is offset by a small dark blue square on the opposite side, which contrasts more strongly with the surrounding white. When the researchers swapped these colours, it threw off the balance, leading the volunteers to take less enjoyable journeys around the piece (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol 5, p 98).

    The same is probably true of many other works. Oshin Vartanian at the University of Toronto, Canada, for example, recently asked volunteers to compare a series of original paintings to a set in which the composition had been altered by moving objects around within the frame. He found that almost everyone preferred the original, whether it was a still-life painting by Vincent van Gogh or Joan Miró's abstract Bleu I.

    What's more, Vartanian found that manipulating the objects reduced activation in areas of the brain linked with meaning and interpretation (NeuroReport, vol 15, p 893). The results suggest that our mind notes the careful arrangements and senses the intention behind the paintings, even if we are not consciously aware of the fact. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the chimps or children would ever hit upon such carefully considered structures. That may explain why the volunteers in Hawley-Dolan's study tended to prefer the work of the experienced artists.

    Besides the balance of the composition, we may also be drawn in by pieces that hit a sweet spot in the brain's ability to process complex scenes, says Alex Forsythe, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK. She used a compression algorithm to judge the visual complexity of different pieces of art. The program tries to find shortcuts to store an image in the smallest number of bits - the more complex the piece, the longer the string of digits used to store the painting on the hard drive, offering a more objective measure that human judgement. The results suggested that many artists - from Edouard Manet to Pollock - used a certain level of detail to please the brain. Too little and the work is boring, but "too much complexity results in a kind of perceptual overload", says Forsythe.

    Art imitating life

    What's more, many pieces showed signs of fractal patterns - repeating motifs that reoccur at different scales, whether you zoom in or zoom out of a canvas (British Journal of Psychology, vol 102, p 49). Fractals are common throughout nature - you can see them in the jagged peaks of a mountain or the unfurling fronds of the fern. It is possible that our visual system, which evolved in the great outdoors, finds it easier to process these kinds of scenes. The case for this theory is not watertight, though, since the fractal content in the paintings was considerably higher than you would normally find in natural scenes - to the point that, in other circumstances, it would be considered too busy to be pleasant. Forsythe thinks that the artists may choose their colours to "soothe a negative experience we would normally have when encountering too high a fractal content".

    It's still early days for the field of neuroaesthetics - and these studies are probably only a taste of what is to come. It is intriguing, for example, that some scans have registered the brain processing movement when we see a handwritten letter. It is as if we are replaying the writer's moment of creation in our brain. That may be down to our mirror neurons, which are known to mimic others' actions. The results have led some to ponder whether the work of Pollock might feel so dynamic because the brain reconstructs the energetic movements the artist used as he painted. This hypothesis will need to be thoroughly tested, though (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 11, p 197). Others have speculated that we could use neuroaesthetic studies to understand the longevity of some pieces of artwork. While the fashions of the time might shape what is currently popular, works that are best adapted to our visual system may be the most likely to linger once the trends of previous generations have been forgotten (Spatial Vision, vol 21, p 347).

    It would be foolish to try to reduce art appreciation to a set of scientific laws, of course. While the research helps us to understand the way the technique used to create an artwork may appeal to the brain's visual system, an artist's ingenuity also depends on their ability to develop or confront the ideas of those before them. Benno Belke, a German sound artist and cognitive scientist, points out that we shouldn't underestimate the importance of recognising the style of a particular artist and understanding their place in art history or the culture of their time, for instance. This is where expertise comes in to help you appreciate works you would have never enjoyed before, he argues. Pepperell agrees. "Art is about heightened sensitivity and awareness," he says. "If you're a connoisseur, you'll be looking for subtleties."

    Science can offer another stopping point on this journey of understanding. "Art gives us knowledge about the world. Some is emotional knowledge, some is the knowledge held by the creator and for the neurobiologist it gives us a means of understanding how the brain is organised," says Zeki.

    Abstract art offers both a challenge and the freedom to play with different interpretations. In some ways, it's not so different to science, where we are constantly looking for patterns and decoding meaning so that we can view and appreciate the world in a new way.

    The duchamp Code

    How do we decode images to give them meaning? Context is crucial, particularly when viewing postmodern, ready-made art like Marcel Duchamp's famous installation, Fountain, which placed a urinal in an exhibition - much to the dismay of the artistic establishment.

    Kristian Tylen at Aarhus University in Denmark recently looked at the way the setting of an object can alter our perception of its message. He found that an understanding of intent activates areas in the right hemisphere of the brain that are traditionally associated with linguistic understanding. This holds whether that intent is conveyed through unusual incongruities in the image, like seeing a urinal in a gallery, or through use of accepted symbols such as a bunch of flowers by a doorway. It is almost as if we "read" the unusual arrangements in the same way that we read meaning in the arbitrary signs of a language.

Authentic Movie Stars

    With his concave cheekbones, lanky build and grooved brow, Daniel Day-Lewis replicates Abraham Lincoln more accurately than the head of a penny.

    His performance in "Lincoln" has earned rousing endorsements from Civil War historians, but close watchers of the film have spotted one glaring anachronism in this otherwise honest Abe - earring holes.

    Day-Lewis, a meticulous actor known for disappearing into his roles, had the tattoos on his hands and forearms covered by wardrobe and makeup. He removed gold hoops from his ears. But despite makeup, the piercings were still visible.

    "My Facebook friends were saying, 'Gee, I never knew Abraham Lincoln had a pierced ear,'" said Scott Stoddart, a cinema and theater scholar and a dean at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. "You can see it in this scene and that scene. People are so visually literate now."

    Historical movies such as Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" have placed a greater premium on authenticity in recent years, with on-set researchers ensuring that costumes, production design and language accurately reflect the age. Filmmakers, however, have a more difficult time making sure the contemporary appearance of their casts doesn't strain a movie's credibility.

    As a poor 19th century French factory worker in "Les Miserables," Anne Hathaway incongruously shakes out the shiny, flowing tresses of a Pantene commercial. As a hard-drinking 1970s CIA agent in "Argo," Ben Affleck peels off his shirt to show a torso sculpted enough for a Men's Health cover. As a cigarette-smoking 1940s mafioso's paramour in "Gangster Squad," Emma Stone reveals an improbably pearly white smile.

    Teeth whitening, plastic surgery, body piercings, weight training, healthful eating and yoga have made it a challenge to find the perfect period performer. Add the unforgiving nature of high-definition video on which more movies are made and seen and the emergence of visually savvy audiences, and you often have a recipe for historical dissonance.

    Actors whose faces seem to belong more to the era of the daguerreotype than HD are becoming rare.

    "The period face is going away from our culture," said John Hawkes, 53, whose slight build and angular face have equipped him to play convincingly 19th century characters like a political operative in "Lincoln" and a merchant in the HBO western "Deadwood." "Younger people are so much more handsome and beautiful than they were when I was growing up. Teeth are better. There's better nutrition. We're mutating into a more attractive species."

    Period dramas "Downton Abbey," which re-creates life on a turn-of-the-century English estate, and "Mad Men," which captures the style of the 1960s, have become staples on television. Historical films like "Lincoln" and "Les Miserables" have earned critical and financial success. Casting directors who can staff a period project are busier than ever.

    "'Mad Men' has movie people running scared," Stoddart said. "The scrupulous detail has made everyone pay more attention to detail in the visual quality of period films - They need to tell great stories, but they also need to take you into that other world in such a way that it overwhelms you."

    Avy Kaufman, casting director for "Lincoln," spent eight months selecting an ensemble of more than 200 characters, many of whom can be described as having wonderfully imperfect, 19th century faces.

    Nina Gold spent more than a year - twice as long as usual - filling parts in director Tom Hooper's adaptation of "Les Miserables" with actors who could not only sing and act but also resemble 19th century French street urchins. Some of the musical's stars, including Hathaway and Hugh Jackman, dropped weight to suit the era of deprivation. For the smaller parts, Gold tried to find people who came by their haggardness naturally.

    "It was Tom's fundamental note - these people have to look like they haven't eaten since 1830," said Gold, who also cast the period films "The King's Speech" and "Iron Lady." "They've never been to a doctor, and they don't use moisturizer. If actors look too well fed and comfortable and like they just walked out of their well-appointed Winnebago, it just wouldn't feel right. But to find the people who really are les miserables? There's not many people in musical theater who look like that."

    Gold, who sifted through rafts of photos and sat through months of auditions, believes she has an advantage being based in London.

    "English teeth are famously bad," she said. "People are less perfect. If I go to lunch in a restaurant in London, there aren't many people who've had their faces reconstructed. In L.A., nearly everybody has. In England, it's easier to find interesting-looking people."

    While recruiting actors for the post-World War II, Paul Thomas Anderson drama, "The Master," Cassandra Kulukundis had the tricky task of finding women for a nude scene set in the 1950s. She wanted to avoid piercings, plastic surgery and what she called "yoga bodies" for the party sequence, in which women of all ages and body types appear naked to one of the characters.

    Anderson shot the scene on Mare Island in Northern California - hundreds of miles away from Hollywood-style grooming - where Kulukundis recruited average-looking non-actors for some of the roles.

    "The people there look more natural than they do in L.A.," Kulukundis said. "I don't know how many were doing laser skin peels. They're not plucked or bleached or what have you."

    Finding actors who didn't hit the gym too hard is also a challenge. Meredith Tucker, who cast the music-driven coming of age story "Not Fade Away," needed to track down young men sufficiently lithe to play musicians in a 1960s rock band. Tucker ended up casting slender, Dylanesque young actors John Magaro, Will Brill, and Jack Huston (grandson of director John Huston).

    "When you have guys with those thick necks, that definitely takes you out of the story," Tucker said. "Men did not have bodies like that back then."

    While character actors often better suit the aesthetic of period films, stars sell the movies at the box office.

    As director of "Argo," which is set during the 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis, Ben Affleck made sure his cast was groomed with sideburns and mustaches, and costumed in over-sized eyeglasses, all of which were popular at the time. But in his own role as CIA agent Tony Mendez, Affleck let slip one historical anomaly when he peeled off his shirt - and revealed his perfectly chiseled chest.

    "We are not the people we were in the 1970s," Affleck said, conceding that his body type was not typical for the era. But he said that detail was one of the less egregious historical imperfections in the film, which included a fabricated car chase on an airport runway.

    When populating historical films, casting directors make a point of telling agents and actors what they don't want.

    A casting notice for a crowd scene in this summer's "Lone Ranger" reboot specified for extras: "Must be able to portray 1800's period look... no tattoos, no dyed hair, no highlights." A notice for a U.K.-set period drama reads, "If you have a ring through your nose and a tattoo on your neck, please don't waste time applying."

    Specificity doesn't always weed out hopefuls, however. Tucker, who also casts 1920s-set "Boardwalk Empire," said agents regularly send in actresses "with perfect white teeth, plumped-up lips and big fake boobs - to play a flapper! That just doesn't work for us."

    Makeup can help, but it adds to the budget if actors in small parts have to be fitted for a set of bad teeth or sit through a tattoo coverup. Most casting directors said they try to avoid saddling productions with these problems.

    Hollywood wasn't always this fixated on such painstaking authenticity. In the past, period movies often drew as much on the look of the era in which they were shot as they did on the one they were depicting.

    Julie Christie's teased-up do in "Doctor Zhivago," for instance, owes more to 1965 fashions than to imperial Russian ones, and the purple- and olive-hued costumes Barbra Streisand wore in "Funny Girl" evoked the movie musical's 1968 release date more than a post-World War I look.

    "It's so obvious these movies are made in the '60s," Stoddart said. "And that's kind of the fun of it."

Seth Godin on Art

    When John Cage published 4'33'', a piece of silent music, there was much consternation. Years later, it's still easy to joke about the absurdity of a piece of music consisting of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence.

    And when the first internet companies that proposed free as a business model (free email, free social networks, etc.) started to gain traction with investors, there was an even louder chorus from those that cried foul.

    When (part of) your marketplace embraces a 'new' that makes no sense to you, it's essential you understand the point of view that's leading people to embrace this new idea. No, you don't have to cheer it on, collect it, support it or pretend you think it's the greatest breakthrough ever. But yes, you probably need to understand why other people were touched, inspired or found something worth talking about.

    Can you explain to me why some people wait in line for that car or that new restaurant? Do you understand why this person is being talked about online or promoted at work? Does it make sense to you that this canvas sells for five times as much as that one?

    Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art - it reveals something about your willingness to learn.

    (Seth Godin has interesting ideas on a wide range of topics - see more here

Jack Vettriano



    Whoever buys Jack Vettriano's flat in west London will get an original painting thrown in. When the artist, 61, bought and renovated his first-floor balcony property in 1998, the siting of the new boiler cupboard on the long wall of the living room began to annoy him. "Every time I was at my easel on the other side of the room, I'd look across and see this black line," he recalls. "So I got a frame made up to hide the lines of the door and started to paint directly onto it."

    "I was trying to do something in the style of my hero, Francis Bacon, in acrylic, but it just didn't work, so I scrubbed it out and painted my friend Carolyn Osborne standing in front of my old Mercedes."

    The new owner can live with it, or hack the door down and sell it. Either way, Vettriano is not bothered - this is an artist whose most famous work, The Singing Butler, has sold more then 10m prints. Art critics pour scorn on his work, accusing him of being merely a populist copyist, but his images of glamorous and erotic 1950s-inspired men and women dancing, embracing and trysting, often on a windswept beach, are some of the most familiar in the world. The original painting of The Singing Butler was sold for £744,800 in 2004. Not that Vettriano made a penny from it: he had sold it in 1991 for £3,000, of which, after commission, he received only £1,000.

    The living room doubles as a studioThe living room doubles as a studio That said, his art, which he started seriously only at the age of 39, has served him well. He owns flats in London, Kirkcaldy, in Fife, and Nice, in the south of France.

    His London apartment is in a solid red-brick, Dutch-style 1878 terrace on Pont Street, built as family houses and since converted into flats. He bought it for £450,000 and is selling for £2m, despite there being only 64 years left on the lease.

    The flat was originally a two-bedder, but Vettriano knocked through to create one good-sized bedroom, and put in a new kitchen and bathroom. The 22ft by 21ft main living room, with huge north-facing windows that open onto a balcony, doubles as his studio.

    "I've enjoyed painting here," he says in his strong Scottish accent. "The light is great and I have my back to the doors onto the balcony, so when I hear the clip of a high heel go by, I can go out and have a look. This is good high-heel territory - two minutes from Harrods, which is the nearest place to buy my cigarettes. But I've got fed up with having to tidy everything up if people come round. I need a separate studio, which is what I have in Nice. I'm thinking of going to Battersea and maybe getting a garden, too, for a wee bit of sunbathing."

    High heels are a recurring feature in his pictures, and a model of a black-stocking-clad female ankle on tiptoe rests on a table near his easel. His female models are either girlfriends or friends, though he did once approach a beautiful girl on his street to ask if she'd pose for him. She walked off, saying: "How do I know you're not an axe murderer?"

    "I love the formality of evening dress and heels, and I loved Come Dancing. I way prefer it to Strictly Come Dancing, where the dresses reveal far too much. A few years ago, I thought I'd try to learn ballroom dancing and went along to lessons in South Kensington. There were all these gorgeous girls there, but then the instructor said, 'And this will be your teacher and partner' - and she was not so gorgeous, and wearing trainers. I can't bear trainers. I never went back."

    Vettriano was born Jack Hoggan in 1951 in Methil, a small mining village in Fife. His father worked in the mines and the family lived in considerable poverty in a two-bedroom terraced cottage. Jack shared a bed with his elder brother, and his two sisters shared another. He left school at 16 to follow his father down the mine. "I wanted to be like my dad - call it misplaced adoration. I didn't want to go into higher education."

    Subsequently, he worked in educational research, but in 1987 left his wife of eight years, Gail Cormack, and his stepdaughter, moved to Edinburgh and changed his name. As an amateur painter, he'd been selling work - mainly to charity exhibitions - as Jack Hoggan. (They still surface at auctions, and are snapped up by collectors.) His style had been impressionist: "Put them all in a mixer and blend, that's how they looked."

    To emphasise his change of style, he adopted his mother's maiden name - Vettrino - but bungled the spelling when he submitted two works to the Royal Scottish Academy. Both sold on the first day and his new career was launched.

    As his fame grew, so did the criticism, which has been vicious - he's been called "the Jeffrey Archer of the art world" and his works have been described as "brainless erotica". Vettriano admits that it hurts: "People can be so vitriolic." Nevertheless, he is extremely successful - annual royalties from his prints are estimated at about £500,000. He retains his thrifty Scottish instincts while being able to afford his gambling habit. He mainly bets on racehorses, and briefly owned one called The Singing Butler, which fell in its first flat race and had to be put down.

    The flat is furnished sparely but elegantly, in art deco style; there's little clutter apart from around the easel. It is obviously a bachelor pad - girlfriends stay over, but don't live there, he says. They tend to be like his models - young and stylish - and there's a photo on the mantelpiece of him with a pretty blonde in staggeringly high heels, on the way to Clarence House for a charity do. "Camilla said she liked my pictures, but I was very expensive," he recalls.

    A good-looking man in trim shape, Vettriano tends to dress formally (Armani is a favourite), with an artist's attention to detail - he sought out his 1930s watch at one of the auctions he attends regularly. He is a heavy smoker, and doesn't confine his habit to the balcony; a loaded ashtray sits on the coffee table. He smokes and listens to music - he particularly likes Leonard Cohen - while he paints. He has a good eye for furniture, most of which was also bought at auction: a huge apothecary chest came from Christie's, and he has a collection of period cigarette lighters and ashtrays.

    The art deco double bedroom features in The Weight, a self-portrait of him slumped on the side of the bed: "I was either melancholic or hungover - I forget which. An Italian photographer took the picture for a magazine, so I worked from that."

    The paintings on the walls are mainly his own works in progress, though there's a Michael Clark pencil sketch of Francis Bacon in the hall. He owns a signed Bacon triptych print, which hangs in the Nice flat. "I saw one in a nearby gallery and was well chuffed to learn that mine's now worth about £28,000," he says.

    An added bonus for the potential buyer is that the flat is in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, so is eligible for a coveted parking permit, valid for a huge area from Notting Hill Gate to Chelsea Embankment. Not that Vettriano has a car any more. He received a 12-month ban last year in Scotland for being over the limit and having £30 worth of amphetamines in the car.

    In London, he prefers to walk or take public transport, and is rarely recognised, which he relishes; in Scotland, where he is something of a local hero, he is often stopped.

    His Kirkcaldy flat is in the converted headquarters of the Nairn linoleum factory, and a recent sale of furniture from the property reached high prices - he was astonished that an old MDF table he used for paint went for more than £500.

    For the moment, Vettriano is taking it easy in his Nice flat, next to the Negresco hotel, on the Promenade des Anglais, and not concentrating on painting. A multimillionaire, he can afford to take a rest while he sells up. With the property market in central London buoyant, he anticipates his flat being snapped up fast - whatever the critics say, his work has earned him some prime real estate. Vettriano is laughing all the way to the bank.

How to create instant 3D animations

  • Two computer programs allow inexperienced users to accomplish the same process in seconds.

    Computer scientists at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Informatics have developed two computer programs that do 3D animation in seconds and can be handled by inexperienced users.

    The spectacular on-screen movements in movies like Toy Story and Transformers are hand-crafted and take a lot of time to produce.

    Max Planck researchers have developed two novel approaches that shorten and simplify this process for amateur movie makers and game developers.

    How it works

    Databases like Dosch Design offer free or low-costdata sets defining the shape of a character or an object. But user can’t customize them. So the MPI software the cleverly splits the 3D database models into components and remembers how they were connected.

    So a designer can select two of the processed models and how much of each they want to combine into a new model, such as a robot for a video game. To make sure that only fitting components can be exchanged, e.g., the arms of A with the arms of B, the program uses segmentation based on identified symmetries.

    The newly created model can then be animated with another algorithm, using a defined movement sequence and a target skeleton. These skeletons are freely available on the Internet, for example, at the Mocap Database, maintained by Carnegie Mellon University.

    The MPI software applies the movement and the skeleton to the 3D model. This is done by a clever algorithm that is able to identify a similar skeleton, including the appropriate joints in the target model. The movement is then transferred to the skeleton animating the model.

    So the clunky astronaut figure of Toy Story star “Buzz Lightyear” can move on the screen like Kung Fu legend Bruce Lee within seconds.

Banksy - Art Outside The Frame

    Banksy, the subversive British street artist, is two weeks into his month-long residency in New York. Every day this month, he has unveiled a new work around the city - a series of murals, videos, and two roaming trucks. Each new piece has attracted hordes of tourists and news crews - and even inspired some enterprising locals to charge tourists to see it.

    But this one may take the cake. On his website on Sunday, the artist announced that he had set up a stall along Central Park on Saturday - selling "100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each." That's right: Banksy, whose works sell for millions at auction, sold canvases for $60 on the streets of New York. And the most unbelievable part? Almost no one bought them. It was part stunt, part social experiment: If people don't know they are looking at work from a world-famous artist, do they even care?

    Banksy's video shows his prints, many of them depicting his most recognizable images, displayed on a picnic table outside Central Park. The street vendor, an older man in a baseball hat, sits by idly as tourists flood past the table. Few of them glance at the art. A hidden camera captures it all.

    The first buyer comes several hours later, at 3:30 p.m., when a lady buys 'two small canvases for her children,' according to the video. She negotiated a 50 percent discount, buying the two works for $60 total. At 4 p.m., a woman from New Zealand buys two. A little over an hour later, a man from Chicago who 'just needs something for the walls,' buys four. With each sale, the vendor gives the buyer a hug or a kiss. At 6 p.m., he closes the table, making only $420 for the day. A limited edition print of Love Is In The Air -- the image of the man throwing a hand grenade of flowers, which was stationed on the center of the table -- sold for $249,000 at Bonham's last June.

    It's the classic example of art without the frame - and it raises the important question: how much does our experience of art rely on context?

    We linger on The Mona Lisa because it's framed in the Louvre, behind bullet proof glass and protected by security guards. Outside the Louvre, we walk right past framed copies of the same painting. Context is everything.

    Banksy's social experiment has been staged before - by The Washington Post, in a Pulitzer-prize winning story, 'Pearls Before Breakfast,' in 2007. The paper stationed the world-famous violinist Joshua Bell (who has played before crowned heads of Europe) in the D.C. metro during rush hour, serenading strangers with his violin case open at his feet, accepting donations. He was completely anonymous - and only a few stopped to listen.

    Mark Leithauser, then senior curator of the National Gallery, made an analogy: "Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant," he told The Washington Post at the time. "It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

    In Bell's case, it said something about people's inability to understand beauty in the same way outside of its original context - to appreciate art without the frame - and, perhaps, a similar point can be made for the Banksys on the street.

    But maybe it also calls into question the extent to which the art market has come to commodify the latter's work, skyrocketing his prices, if, really, we can pass by his work on a street corner and not even bat an eyelash.

Grayson Perry on Art

    The artist sometimes known as Claire did not blink when asked to give this year's Reith lectures. Even Grayson Perry must regard Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's opposition leader, Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, and the conductor Daniel Barenboim as hard acts to follow. Yet when he got the call from the controller of Radio 4, his first thought was: "Yeah, I'll have fun with that. I'm always open to any kind of Establishment position because it's an opportunity for some sort of mischief."

    The 2003 winner of the Turner prize, who was recently appointed a CBE for services to contemporary art, arrived at Tate Modern for his first lecture - which was broadcast last week - in a multicoloured frock, green tights and orange platforms with satin bows. The tone was set when Sue Lawley, the chairwoman of the lectures, introduced him as the first cross-dresser in the event's 65-year history. Perry replied: "As far as we know."

    His confidence in his ability to make mischief was well placed. His lecture, Democracy has Bad Taste, was a deft, humorous and scholarly taking-apart of the art-world elite who determine 'good taste'. It more than fulfilled the Reithian aspiration to educate, inform and entertain. One reviewer defied anyone to listen 'and not be entertained or entranced or illuminated or provoked'.

    Perry, 53, said he had begun to appreciate the impact of modern art when a storyline in The Archers had Lynda Snell - "a kind of self-appointed cultural ambassador" - campaigning to put someone from Ambridge on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth. "I thought: if Lynda Snell is a fan of contemporary art then the game is won - or lost, depending on where you look at it. It's no longer a little backwater cult. It's part of the mainstream of cultural life."

    His point was that middle-class, middle-England Lynda Snells are the last people the art elite wants to attract. Good taste, Perry argued, is decided by ever-smaller groups of curators, dealers and collectors. The more Lynda Snell likes it, the more its lustre fades.

    Even Perry was piqued when popular taste caught up with his own, he admitted. "As a schoolboy, I liked Victorian narrative paintings . . . they're very English, lovely craftsmanship, social history, good frocks. I went through all kind of twists and turns to justify my liking of these paintings . . . saying, 'They're modern in their own time and they're ironic and they kind of almost seem exotic now.' Then, all of a sudden, they were becoming fashionable again and I'd think, 'Oh no, I've no longer got kooky taste. It'll just look like I'm jumping on the bandwagon.'

    Perhaps with an eye on the Frieze Art Fair, London's annual contemporary art jamboree in Regent's Park this weekend, Perry also explored the artist's role as a creator of luxury goods for the super-rich 'have-yachts'. From the Medicis onwards artists have attracted rich patrons, but that tradition has burgeoned in an extraordinary way with the advent of oligarchs and hedge funders as art collectors. It is now almost impossible to be a successful artist, Perry joked, 'unless your work fits into the elevator of a New York apartment block'.

    'You get the Ferrari, and then you'll go and get a nice handbag and then you'll go and pick up a big shiny bit of art to put in the front of the house,' he said. 'Banks now recognise the solid asset group that art is. They even have a little space put aside in their vaults for it: silver, wine, art and gold - Swag.'

    Perry knows how to exploit the system. He once created a pot called Lovely Consensus, a take on the artists, teachers, dealers, collectors, critics, curators and media who decide what is 'good art'. He inscribed on it the names of 50 galleries, exhibitions and art luminaries including that of the collector Dakis Joannou - who bought the pot the moment he saw it. 'So that's a little tip there for artists. Write the names of famous collectors on the side of your work.'

    This cheeky commercialism has served Perry well, since his first exhibitions of ceramics decorated with scenes of sadomasochism, bondage and transvestism in the 1980s. His alter ego Claire taps into a very British taste for drag acts such as Danny La Rue.

    He is still at one level the tortured artist. His childhood in Essex was unhappy: his father, an engineer, left home when Perry was five after his mother took up with the milkman. Perry was afraid of his stepfather and spent hours alone in the shed, drawing cartoon strips. 'I didn't really shine at art until I went to secondary school, but I did my first pottery class when I was nine. We had to wear rubber aprons and I remember being quite erotically excited,' he once recalled. 'Towards the end of my time at primary school I was definitely a burgeoning fetishist.'

    At secondary school he developed an equally passionate interest in guns and camping and considered becoming an army officer. Instead, encouraged by his art teacher, he took an art foundation course in Braintree, Essex, and then a degree in fine art at what was then Portsmouth Polytechnic.

    He met his wife, Philippa, a psychotherapist, at an evening class. She later said their first date 'was a choice between a private view and a tranny club'. Their daughter, Flo, was born in 1992 and a near neighbour describes Perry as a 'devoted father'.

    When he won the Turner prize, the Tate's press officer asked what kind of publicity he was prepared to do. 'Strap me on and fire the engines,' he replied. But if the gallery was expecting the transvestite potter to provoke the sort of opprobrium that greeted its infamous 'pile of bricks' - a minimalist work by Carl Andre that the Tate bought in 1972 - it was mistaken. 'As it turned out, my winning received mainly positive press. An amalgamation of the headlines might read: 'Pervert wins Turner but is actually an all right family bloke and even taxi drivers can appreciate the work in them pots', Perry said.

    This disarmingly blokey manner has helped him to carve out a second career in television. Last year he presented All in the Best Possible Taste, an acclaimed documentary series on British predilections. Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of The Sunday Times, is an admirer. "He's a really bright, clever chap. I like his work as an artist and I have lots of sympathy with his ideas about the art world because it's turned a horrible corner in recent years. It's a small, incestuous, closely knit, international community that . . . needs someone like Grayson, with a bit of distance," he says.

    But Januszczak also observes: "I have always been slightly mistrustful of the transvestite image. You have to stand out on the packed shelves of the art world, but part of me is always incredulous. To be fair, if your only motivation was to make it in the art world you wouldn't start out with pots . . . I guess it is an enlargement of who he is rather than a falsehood but, like many artists, he is a narcissist. He likes people looking at him and saying, 'Oh, isn't he marvellous' - and he is marvellous, so good luck to him."

    Lawley met Perry in June over a cup of builder's tea in his kitchen in Islington, north London. "He was already clear about what he wanted to achieve through his lectures - to explain the contemporary art world to the wider audience, give them the tools to judge it for themselves and licence to dismiss as rubbish some of its worst excesses," she said. Chief among them, he told her, is the 'telephone artist' who rings his workshop and says: "Here's an idea - make it 6ft and colour it blue. See you at the opening."

    In this week's second lecture Perry will challenge the idea that anything can be art. As with the opening talk, his self-assured performance will no doubt look effortless, but Lawley's blog reveals Perry to be a closet workaholic. "He is one of the few lecturers to meet the agreed deadlines for delivery of the text and the only one, to my knowledge, to ask for a full rehearsal. He's also the first lecturer I've known not to read from a script," she wrote. "The man is a pro."

Creative Advertising

    It is a sunny day in August. In a windowless studio in a rundown part of south London, Christmas has arrived. On a small raised stage, a snowy hilltop has been built. It is scattered with small, solid pine trees. In the forefront, a 3ft-high tree is surrounded by beribboned, beautifully wrapped presents.

    The scene is sculptural, white, glittering, depicting wintry rural bliss. Woodland birds and animals of fundamentally British ilk abound: squirrels, badgers, weasels, an owl. There is also a brown bear, with a hare crouching on his back. The animals are tiny. Unlike the surroundings, which are 3D, they are made from 2D pieces of hardboard. Each has been hand-painted and positioned into place by a gloved expert. In a Perspex case in another room, there are many sequential versions of each animal. A baby rabbit scratching its leg is depicted by 15 separate minuscule rabbits, each one slightly different.

    The atmosphere, in this doll-sized world of deep midwinter, is perversely hot. Everyone is in T-shirts and shorts. Nerdy-looking men, all sweating heavily, climb ladders to position lights on the rig. They set up cameras on tripods, gulp water, squint down lenses, put a miniature icicle into place, order another person to move it a millimetre to the left. The atmosphere is of buttock-clenching, breathless concentration - we are watching the creation of the John Lewis Christmas advertisement. This animated film, length 90 seconds, budget £7m, is destined to be seen by most of the nation. More people than will watch the Queen's speech. It might look like an age-old children's tale, but The Bear & Hare has been invented by a team of clever-clog advertising people. The Bear has missed Christmas every year, thanks to his habit of hibernating. So the Hare gives him an alarm clock, timed to go off on December 25. The Bear wakes up for the first time on the right day, sees the tree and festive array. Cue punchline: Give Someone a Christmas They'll Never Forget. Cue coda: John Lewis. Aaah.


    'The atmosphere is of buttock-clenching, breathless concentration - we are watching the creation of the John Lewis Christmas advertisement... length 90 seconds, budget £7m'

    This advert will be teased on social media. It will be on YouTube. It will metamorphose. A book of the ad has been written. Stuffed Bears and Hares, 'a perfect stocking-filler', will also be flogged. You won't be able to escape - £4.2m of the budget is for buying airtime, across all channels. If anything, the £7m budget is quite reasonable, compared with supermarket spends during the run-up to Christmas. Last year, the John Lewis budget was on a level with Aldi's (£6.5m), but dwarfed by that of Asda (£11.2m) and Tesco (£11.8m). Except John Lewis isn't selling food - the shop is selling an idea, a notion of how to be at Christmas, the domestic lynchpin of the year.

    For the first few weeks it will run at 90 seconds. Then 60-second versions will be rolled out, then 30-second versions. The nearer to Christmas, the shorter the ad will become, and we'll all know it by then. We'll think we know it already, anyway. The advert is deliberately designed to remind us of childhood classics: Narnia, Watership Down, The Wind in the Willows. The animals are not computer-generated, but generated by humans, holding pencils. This is the point. It is the shop itself. British, unthreatening, as familiar as a rabbit.

Fakes

    "If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it's good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight," the art critic Blake Gopnik wrote in an essay, In Praise of Art Forgeries, in the Times last Sunday. It's a cute argument that I reject, but which gets me thinking. Gopnik's hook is a scad of forged Pollocks, Rothkos, and other big-name abstract paintings, sold by New York's venerable Knoedler & Company gallery for many millions of dollars over two decades, until 2011. Exposed, the affair ended Knoedler's hundred and sixty-five years in business. (Lawsuits creep forward.) Among the marks was the late, august Swiss collector Ernst Beyeler, who, in 2005, called his bogus Rothko 'a sublime unknown masterwork.' Wonders Gopnik, 'Why not think of that picture as the sublime masterwork that Rothko happened not to have gotten around to?'

    Well, because it's not a 'work' at all but a pastiche whose one and only intention is to deceive. Its maker - reportedly, a guy in a garage on Long Island - wasn't concerned with emulating the historical Rothko but, instead, with mirroring the taste of present-day Rothko fanciers. Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles. No great talent is required, just a modicum of handiness and some art-critical acuity. A forger needn't master the original artist's skill, only the look of it. Indeed, especially in a freewheeling mode like Abstract Expressionism, a bit of awkwardness, incidental to the branded appearance, may impress a smitten chump as a marker of sincerity - even as something new and endearing about a beloved master.

    Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era - the climate of taste - in which they were made. "Forgeries must be served hot," said the art historian Max Friedlander. I've seen two 'Vermeers' that were painted in the nineteen-twenties by the king of modern forgers, the Dutchman Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), and which hung unchallenged, for decades, in the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C. They are ridiculous. Among other blinking signs of fraudulence, there's an interesting suggestion that the likes of flappers and Greta Garbo inhabited seventeenth-century Delft.

    How could anyone ever, for a minute, have mistaken those howlers for Vermeers? That's easy. Connoisseurs are products of their times as much as anyone else, subject to the same unexamined assumptions. But it's usually a connoisseur who soonest smells a rat. He or she does so not by being wary but by becoming puzzled in a normal pursuit of pleasure.

    Believing is seeing.

    What do we see when we look at a painting? Decisions. Stroke by stroke, the painter did something rather than something else, a sequence of choices that add up to a general effect. If you're like me - and, yes, I count myself a middling connoisseur - you register the effect and then investigate how it was achieved; walking the cat back, as they say in espionage. As a trick, ask yourself, of details in a painting, something like, "Why would I have done that in that way?" The aim is to enter into the mind, and the heart, of the creator. Attaining it entails trust, like that of a child attending a fairy tale.

    Looking with this kind of absorption won't immunize you to falling for a fake, but you are apt to be confused by false notes if the supposed artist's style is familiar to you. The game then deepens. The forger hopes that, because you're credulous, you will revise your estimation of the artist to accommodate the surprises. Or consider a reverse case: you're told that an authentic work is a forgery. Paranoically, you view everything in it as sham. Again you're bewildered, this time thrown into doubt about your powers of perception. You conclude that you're a hopeless sucker.

    To judge a work of art involves self-surrender.

    You are something other than your own person when in art's spell. If you dread being made a fool of, you will steer clear of art altogether. But risking foolishness, and succumbing to it occasionally, builds up antibodies of wisdom. You become a harder target - while remaining a target, being eagerly persuadable - for flimflam. Art forgery fascinates because it excites the same susceptibilities that art does. The sanest response to having been fooled, once the chagrin wears off, is gratitude for a lesson that you won't forget.

    So there may be an 'insight' that Gopnik finds in fakes. The possible pleasure eludes me, except as akin to the good time you thought you were having on the night before you woke up with a mother of hangovers.

Comic Book Museum

    There is a place where Snoopy frolics carefree with the scandalous Yellow Kid, where Pogo the possum philosophizes alongside Calvin and Hobbes. It's a place where Beetle Bailey loafs with Garfield the cat, while Krazy Kat takes another brick to the noggin, and brooding heroes battle dark forces on the pages of fat graphic novels.

    That doesn't even begin to describe everything that's going on behind the walls of the new Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum on the Ohio State University campus, opening to the public Saturday.

    "This is the stuff that makes me drool," says Jim Borgman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who now draws the "Zits" newspaper comic strip. "I enjoy art of all kinds, but it's as if cartoons were segregated for many years and not allowed into such hallowed halls. And this is kind of a moment of setting things right, I think, giving cartooning its due when it has been in the wings all these years."

    Jeremy, the kid from "Zits"? He's in there, too, since Cincinnati native Borgman donated most of his art and papers to the museum.

    The whole thing started with Milton Caniff, the influential comic artist whose beloved "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon" adventure strips lived in the nation's funny papers for a half-century.

    Caniff graduated from Ohio State and loved the place so much that he wanted his original art and other papers to be kept here forever. He handed it all over to the university in 1977. Along with library curator Lucy Shelton, Caswell then began urging his cartoonist friends to do the same. Two classrooms in the journalism building soon began to fill with the new comics archive.

    "Prior to that, most universities ignored that type of popular culture," says current curator Jenny Robb, noting that for many years original comic strips were just thrown out with the trash and animation celluloid sheets - known as "cels" - were routinely wiped clean and reused.

    Today, the museum collection includes more than 300,000 original strips from everybody who's anybody in the newspaper comics world, plus 45,000 books, 29,000 comic books and 2,400 boxes of manuscript material, fan mail and other personal papers from artists. The university says it's the largest collection of cartoon art and artifacts in the world.

    The museum has originals from everyone from Richard Outcault - whose "Yellow Kid" in a 19th century comic strip spawned the term "yellow journalism" - to Charles Schulz ("Peanuts"), classic "Pogo" story lines from Walt Kelly, Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury," Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy," early "Blondie" strips from Chic Young and the entire collection of Jeff Smith, an Ohio State graduate who created the hugely popular "Bone" series of comic books.

    It's all been moved to a new 30,000-square-foot home in a high-profile corridor of the sprawling Columbus campus, into a space renamed for Ireland, the former editorial cartoonist for The Columbus Dispatch who was one of the pioneers of the art form. His family donated a big chunk of money for the project.

    The new place has also got what's been missing at the museum's two previous campus locations: a large gallery space for permanent and rotating exhibitions of comics and cartoon art that will finally give it the air of a proper museum.

    Brian Walker, who collaborates on the "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois" newspaper strips created in the 1950s by his 90-year-old father, Mort, is putting together one of the first exhibits.

    "I told my father, this is what we've all be working for for 30 years," says Brian Walker, who has written or contributed to three dozen books on the history of comics. "It's kind of like the ultimate dream that we hoped would happen someday, where all this great artwork is being kept safely and archived and made accessible to the public."

    It's partly because of the Walkers that the museum is what it is today. They held thousands of original comics and artifacts donated to the Mort Walker-founded International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Fla. When the museum ran into financial trouble during the recession, the Walkers were persuaded in 2008 to donate the entire collection, which included 200,000 original strips, to Ohio State.

    About a decade before, the museum got the entire collection of the defunct San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, which included 2.5 million clipped newspaper comic strips and Sunday color comics.

    Robb says she's especially proud of the collection of original strips and other papers donated by Bill Watterson, the famously reclusive creator of the "Calvin and Hobbes" strip.

    "We think this will be a destination for comics fans from around the country and around the world," Robb says. "We hope that Ohio State is synonymous with cartoons in the way it is synonymous with football."

    The grand opening of the museum is timed to the Festival of Cartoon Art, which every three years brings artists and other to the university to talk about the craft.

Vermeer's Camera

    In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters' guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic 'Sphinx of Delft' is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings - at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909 - their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.

    Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius.

    At the beginning of this century, however, two experts of high standing begged to differ. Why, for instance, did Vermeer paint things in the foreground and shiny highlights on objects slightly out of focus? Because, they say, he was looking at them through a lens. By itself, Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces, by a London architecture professor named Philip Steadman, might have stirred a minor academic fuss. But a mainstream controversy was provoked - conferences, headlines, outrage, name-calling - because a second, more sweeping and provocative argument was made by one of the most famous living painters, David Hockney. Hockney argued in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of Old Masters, that not only Vermeer but many great painters from the 15th century on must have secretly used lens-and-mirror contraptions to achieve their photorealistic effects.

    Leading art historians were unpersuaded. Hockney, people said, was just jealous because he lacks the old masters' skills. 'I don't oppose the notion that Vermeer in some way responded to the camera obscura,' said Walter Liedtke, then as now the Met's curator of European paintings (including its five Vermeers), 'but I do oppose drastic devaluations of the role of art.'

    Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Texas, Tim Jenison knew nothing of the brouhaha. Jenison, now 58, is the founder of NewTek, where he has made a fortune inventing hardware and software for video production and post-production. He is a nonstop tinkerer in the rest of his life as well: building giant model airplanes and battle robots, and learning to fly helicopters. Curious, careful, soft-spoken, and comfortably schlumpy, he comes across more as a neighborhood professor you might see at Home Depot than as a guy who owns his own jet.

    But in 2002, one of his daughters, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, recommended he read Secret Knowledge. 'And Steadman,' Jenison says, 'really got me thinking hard.' As a guy who has spent his whole career reproducing and manipulating visual images, and contemplating the deep nuts and bolts of how our eyes see differently than cameras do, Jenison had a strong hunch that Hockney and Steadman were right.

    However, the Hockney-Steadman theories were just that - theories, experimentally undemonstrated. As the nay-saying historian James Elkins (of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) observed in 2001, 'the optical procedures posited in Hockney's book are all radically undertested,' and 'no one, including myself, knows what it is really like to get inside a camera obscura' - a lens projecting a perfect image of one side of a room onto a surface equidistant on the other side - 'and make a painting.' Jenison decided to construct a version of a device that Vermeer himself could have built and used. And since he had no training or experience as an artist whatsoever, he figured he was the ideal beta user of whatever he rigged up.

    He was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. 'Looking at their Vermeers,' he says, 'I had an epiphany' - the first of several. 'The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right,' meaning the color values. 'Vermeer got it right in ways that the eye couldn't see. It looked to me like Vermeer was painting in a way that was impossible. I jumped into studying art.'

    He traveled to Delft again and again, scouting the places where Vermeer had painted. He learned to read Dutch. He paid for translations of old Latin texts on optics and art. Much later, he did a computer analysis of a high-resolution scan of a Vermeer interior, and discovered 'an exponential relationship in the light on the white wall.' The brightness of any surface becomes exponentially less bright the farther it is from a light source - but the unaided human eye doesn't register that. According to Jenison, the painting he digitally deconstructed shows just such a diminution from light to dark.

    But still, exactly how did Vermeer do it? One day, in the bathtub, Jenison had a eureka moment: a mirror. If the lens focused its image onto a small, angled mirror, and the mirror was placed just between the painter's eye and the canvas, by glancing back and forth he could copy that bit of image until the color and tone precisely matched the reflected bit of reality. Five years ago, Jenison tried it out on the kitchen table. He took a black-and-white photograph and mounted it upside down, since a lens would project an image upside down. He put a round two-inch mirror on a stand between the photo and his painting surface. He immediately found that 'when the color is the same, the mirror edge disappears,' and you're through with that bit. Five hours later, he had painted a perfect duplicate of the photo, an astounding proof of concept by someone who can't draw and had never painted a thing. Then he used his mirror trick to copy a color photo. Again, perfect. 'I couldn't believe my eyes,' he says. But while that was all well and good, it wasn't remotely Vermeerian.



    The Vermeer he decided to reproduce is The Music Lesson, 29 inches by 25: a girl at a harpsichord, her male teacher standing at her side, the Delft north light flooding the room through leaded-glass windows. 'My whole experiment was about getting the colors right. Colors are all determined by the lighting in the room. And The Music Lesson shows you the exact position of the windows.' But the challenge was immense, because in order to reproduce the painting with the help of a camera obscura, Jenison would first have to build an exact reproduction of the room in the original painting, and of everything in it.

    Around that time Jenison happened to get a call from his old friend Penn Jillette, the larger, voluble half of Penn & Teller, in Las Vegas. 'I hadn't had an adult conversation outside of work in a year,' Jillette says. 'I needed to talk to somebody who has nothing to do with work and is not a child.' Jenison flew to Vegas that day. Jillette recalls, 'I said, 'Talk to me about something that isn't show biz.' Tim said, 'How about Vermeer? I'm working on this project ....' First Penn and then Teller immediately got it.

    'I was so sucked in,' Jillette says. 'Because I want everything to be a magic trick! The idea of an amateur coming in and understanding things experts can't see - that's a very American kind of plotline. I said, 'Don't do anything else. Stop everything. You've got to make a movie out of this.' A movie, like ... a little thing on YouTube? No, Jillette insisted, a real documentary. In Los Angeles the next day they had half a dozen pitch meetings with TV executives. According to Jillette, 'Some of them thought they were being punked. And Tim said, 'I'm really not liking these meetings.' So instead they enlisted Teller as director and decided to finance and make the documentary themselves.

Wartime Looting

    They lie hidden all over the world, caches of art stolen during the Second World War, hoarded away or secretly sold by dishonest dealers to unscrupulous buyers. Some 15 per cent of the world's great art treasures, known and catalogued in 1939, had disappeared by the conclusion of hostilities.

    This beautiful, priceless, poisoned legacy of wartime booty lies in private collections and hidden vaults; it lies, as we learnt last week after the discovery of 1,400 artworks in a Munich flat, in clandestine galleries, obscenely unseen. But mostly it lies in the storerooms of Russian museums after being systematically extracted from Germany by Soviet troops at the end of the war. The stash of stolen art in Munich is breathtaking in its scope, but it is dwarfed by the great hoard of Soviet war booty, by far the largest collection of disputed art in the world. The paintings seized last year in the flat of Cornelius Gurlitt are estimated to be worth $1.35 billion. The store of Soviet art loot may be worth 80 times that amount, but no one can be sure because its full extent and precise contents have never been revealed.

    Hitler's appalling art pillage is much better known, but Stalin's massive theft remains a source of continuing dispute between Germany and Russia and a standing insult to accepted norms of international behaviour with regard to cultural property stolen in wartime. The world loudly (and rightly) condemned the looting that accompanied wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but largely ignores Russia's adamant refusal to surrender its acquisitions.

    Stalin's 'Trophy Brigades' worked with stunning efficiency as the Red Army advanced into Germany in the final chapter of the war. Hundreds of thousands of artworks, artefacts, books and archives from German collections were packed up and carted off to a special repository in Moscow. In 1945 alone 24 railway wagons full of art left Germany for the Soviet Union. The haul included hundreds of Impressionist paintings, the Bronze Age gold treasure of Eberswalde, the largest prehistoric gold find discovered in Germany, and the Hoard of Priam, the Trojan gold dug up by Heinrich Schliemann at the turn of the century.

    With the establishment of the German Democratic Republic after 1949, one and a half million cultural objects were returned to East Germany, but the rest remained in KGB-controlled strongrooms, mostly inside the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. For decades they were not acknowledged, exhibited or properly catalogued.

    With the collapse of communism, the trove began to emerge from the shadows. Some items have been exhibited abroad, but only on the strict understanding that they would not be subject to claim by others. In 1998, rejecting long-running German demands for restitution, the Russian Duma declared all the expropriated art to be state property.

    In Russian eyes, these objects are not stolen art but trophies of victory, moral compensation for the atrocities inflicted by Germany on the Soviet Union during the war and just restitution for the artworks stolen or destroyed by the invading Nazi armies. The Russian collections undoubtedly contain some artworks previously taken from Jewish citizens and other victims of Nazi persecution, and Russian law makes specific provision for the return of these twice-stolen objects when ownership can be proven. But few such restitutions have been made, simply because the provenance of the looted hoard has never been properly investigated.

    The issue continues to taint relations between Moscow and Berlin. Earlier this year Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to the opening of an exhibition at the Hermitage was cancelled by Russia because she planned to refer to artworks looted from Germany.

    The Nazi expropriation of private property was an atrocious crime inflicted on innocent individuals by a barbarian state. The German treasure seized by Stalin at the end of the war was taken from an enemy regime that had invaded the Soviet Union, lost the war and unconditionally surrendered - thereby, according to Moscow, forfeiting all moral and legal claims.

    At issue are two fundamentally opposed attitudes towards property seized in time of war or political turmoil. The Romans traditionally looted art from vanquished enemies to parade it through the streets of Rome before displaying it in the Forum. Plunder had more than monetary value: it was a visual demonstration of power. That approach to booty held sway until the 19th century and is echoed by Russia today. The Duke of Wellington was among the first to question its utility and morality. The spoils of war assembled by France, he argued, should be returned to those countries from which 'contrary to the practice of civilised warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French Revolution and the tyranny of Bonaparte'.

    The Hague convention of 1907 explicitly banned pillage in times of conflict and established the principle that every state has a duty of care to the cultural property of all nations and peoples, not merely its own. This was the principle adopted by the Western Allies in 1943 in setting up the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section (the subject of a forthcoming George Clooney film) to locate and protect cultural objects, prevent looting by Allied troops, compile lists of stolen art and begin gathering artworks, preparatory to sending them home.

    This was the principle that the Nazis spectacularly violated but which will be observed to the letter as Germany's art historians begin the complex task of working out and then tracking down the rightful owners of the newly discovered Munich hoard.

    Yet this principle, so vital to the conduct of 'civilised warfare', is one that Russia continues to undermine as it jealously guards its looted German treasures, ensuring that the fight over stolen art is a wartime battle without an end in sight.

Wolfgang Beltracchi

    COMMON criminal or artistic genius? Wolfgang Beltracchi, the convicted German art forger, last week proudly showed me an apparently perfect work by Pablo Picasso at his studio near Cologne as he revealed how he masterminded the greatest art scam in modern history.

    Beltracchi is on day release from jail, where he is serving six years for an art fraud that made him millions by fooling the world's leading galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and private collectors, among them the actor Steve Martin.

    German investigators have so far identified about 55 fakes by Beltracchi, widely considered to be the most brilliant art forger of modern times.

    In an interview with The Sunday Times, however, Beltracchi, 63, claimed that in the course of nearly 40 years he had faked hundreds more works attributed to many of the greatest artists of the past five centuries, ranging from Pieter Bruegel to Henri Matisse. "I would often randomly go into a leading museum and see one of my paintings hanging on the wall," he said, leafing through hundreds of catalogues and art books featuring his forgeries.

    A former hippie and high-school dropout, Beltracchi, a father of two, used his forgeries to pay for a life of luxury with his wife, Helene, 55, who was jailed as an accomplice.

    Their spending sprees included the purchase of estates in Germany and the south of France, a vineyard, an 82ft yacht and luxury cars. They also threw lavish parties for friends who knew nothing about the source of their fabulous wealth.

    Beltracchi would not reveal where his undiscovered forgeries are on show, but said most of his work was sold in Britain, America and Japan through leading dealers and auctioneers.

    "Selling fake paintings is dead easy," said Beltracchi. "If they get a certificate from experts, the dealers will not ask too many questions, while the experts, who are mostly incorruptible, simply fail to detect my fakes because they are too good."

    German investigators have so far identified about 55 fakes by Beltracchi. Beltracchi's autobiography, Self-Portrait, was published in Germany last month; a documentary, The Art of Forgery, will be shown in March.

    For decades, leading art experts authenticated Beltracchi's fakes as originals and praised them as the best works of the respective painters.

    Werner Spies, an art connoisseur who was friends with both Picasso and Max Ernst, confirmed seven of Beltracchi's fakes as genuine and wrote essays on them. Ernst's widow, Dorothea Tanning, herself a painter, once called a Beltracchi painting her late husband's "most beautiful work".

    Beltracchi claimed that it took him up to two days to create a painting in the style of almost any artist. During our interview he painted works in the style of Georges Braque and Othon Friesz. "I can paint anything: Rembrandt, Leonardo, anyone," he boasted.

    "My pictures are originals, not copies; only the signatures are fake. Critics attributed some mystical aura to my paintings before they knew they were fake and now they are saying they are worthless. But the paintings haven't changed; only the way they look at them has."

    Beltracchi, born Fischer, met Helene in 1992. After they married he took her surname and made her his accomplice: she sold his paintings, pretending they had been part of the collection of her grandfather Werner Jagers, a German industrialist.

    The couple even staged a fake photograph, using an old camera and pre-war photographic paper, of Helene impersonating her late grandmother, Josefine Jagers. She dressed in period clothing, with some of the fakes hanging behind her.

    Helene tells a story about walking in Paris with a fake Matisse under her arm when she became paranoid that the police might be following her. After failing to ditch the wrapped painting in the Metro and in a cafe - "Mademoiselle, you've left this," passers-by shouted after her - she shoved it under the belongings of a tramp.

    Shortly before his arrest in 2010, Beltracchi tried to buy a palazzo in Venice, where he planned to dedicate the rest of his life to painting in the style of the Renaissance masters.

    Helene Beltracchi poses as her grandmother, with fakes on the wall Helene Beltracchi poses as her grandmother, with fakes on the wall The scheme was foiled when a gallery ordered chemical checks to be made on a painting attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, the expressionist, and found traces of a modern pigment. A complex police investigation followed that ended in the arrest and conviction of the couple and three of their associates. Helene was freed last year; Beltracchi will be released in 2015, after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

    Boosted by his notoriety, Beltracchi's own paintings, mainly figurative works, fetch up to £25,000 each. While some hail him as a hero who has exposed a corrupt system, others criticise the authorities for allowing him to profit from his crimes, although under a court order most of his current earnings go to his victims.

    "I wish they'd applied sharia law at his trial," thundered an unhappy auctioneer who handled his work.

    The German press has speculated that Beltracchi stashed millions in secret accounts, but the couple deny this.

    Asked about his finest work, he thought for a moment and said he most liked a "couple of quite beautiful winter landscapes" - maybe a reference to Bruegel? - and a "very pretty" Matisse.

    Where are they exhibited? "Believe me," said Beltracchi with a grin. "I've no idea."

The Critic (A.A.Gill)

    Nobody grows up wanting to be a critic. But there are those who, through a mercurial mixture of nature and nurture, discover the critical force is strong in them. I am one, though sadly not so much an arty Jedi as a cultural traffic warden. Critics go round the arts and crafts of the nation handing out tickets. We are not loved, and we're not lovable, yet you wouldn't half miss us if we weren't there. The place would be a honking jam of the third-rate, the incoherent, the cackhandedly well-meaning, the cynically exploiting, the repetitive: miles and miles of gridlocked boredom.

    As a child, I told my grandmother that when I grew up, I wanted to go round the world painting birds. I went to art school - Saint Martin's, then the Slade - for five years, an absurdly long time to spend in what is essentially a big dressing-up box, with drugs. In retrospect, being an art student in London during punk on a full grant was a lot more purposeful and insightful than labouring to be a lawyer or to get a BSc.

    For the next 10 years, I signed on and worked in shops, warehouses, Michael Winner's garden, building sites and restaurants, while being an artist in many of its crafty jobbing culs-de-sac. I was a muralist, a portrait painter, briefly a cartoonist, then settled into illustration. I had shows, sold stuff, had a gallery and a dealer, made etchings for girls to come up and see.

    Along with the art came the drink, until the daily shakes and double vision and utter unreliability made them both impossible. I stopped drinking and drawing simultaneously: sober, I realised I was never going to be a great artist. The drink doesn't make anyone a genius, it just tells them they might be one. And I wasn't.

    So my first and most important piece of critical analysis was on myself. When people accuse me of writing things that are so damning that they might stop a sensitive young artist from going on, I usually reply, good. I know exactly how that feels. Sad, but a relief. Of course, this makes me a prime example of Brendan Behan's aphorism that a critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He's seen it done a thousand times, he knows how it's done, he just can't do it himself. Actually, Behan draws the wrong conclusion from the right fact. A critic may be like a eunuch in a harem who has seen it done a thousand times, etc, but the reason he's a critic is that he doesn't want it done to him, and he'll pass on the opinion so you don't have to buy a ticket, book a table or waste an evening having it done to you.

    I was asked by a small (minute) arts magazine to interview artists for them, not because I could write, but because I knew the artists. From the first article, I knew this was what I wanted to do. All the things I'd wanted to put into a drawing, I could do much better in writing. I recently reread something I wrote almost 30 years ago, and in style and confidence, I might have written it last week. I have only ever written in the first person.

    Criticism isn't just having an opinion, or at least it's not having any old opinion. First you have to be able to take apart the thing you're criticising, to understand how it works, or fails to work. Then you have to dissect your reaction to it, and finally you have to gauge your audience's interest in the work and your review of the work. You don't have to have a deep academic understanding or to have done it yourself. Indeed, both can be a hindrance. A critic shouldn't want to be part of the thing he's criticising, and must never talk down to his audience. Criticism isn't meant to be constructive. If you want helpful notes, ask your mother. Neither is it personal. Still, few writers can do it - because they're not analytical, or they're squeamish, or they have to manufacture faux rages for the page. The most important qualification is that you must love the thing you write about. If you don't love it, why will you care if somebody does it badly?

    I've grown up with television. We are almost exactly the same age. I've known all my life that this is the defining art of our time. And I'm very good at criticising it (that's not vanity, it's being a critic, with just a little bit of vanity, perhaps) because of the way I innately think, pulling the wings off other people's butterflies. But, more likely, it's because of the family I grew up in. My father made television, my mother is an actress, and my brother a chef. Everything was argued about over dinner. Every idea and opinion had to be justified. We sharpened our opinions on each other like blades on a leather strop. So here I am, sitting in judgment on all three of their professions, every Sunday. Make of that what you will.

    Someone once dismissively said, nobody ever put up a statue to a critic. Again, snappy but wrong. Show me a statue that isn't to a critic.

Close Copies

    When he was seventeen years old, the artist and illustrator Chris Foss read a glowing newspaper review of 'Whaam!,' the diptych painting by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which was heavily inspired by a panel from a 1962 comic book. "I remember being completely outraged," Foss said. "The world was going mad over this blown-up comic-book panel, and all I could think about was the original artist, the person who arranged the dots and who was being completely overlooked. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?"

    In October, 'Ornamental Despair,' a 1994 painting by the British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science-fiction illustration that Foss created for a men's magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds. Brown's painting was based on a reprint of Foss's original, featured in a 1990 book collection of the artist's work. "I knew he copied it from the book because the painting was cropped to fit the page. His version is clearly based on the cropped version," Foss said.

    Brown, who is forty-eight, is a controversial figure in the art world, well known for reinterpretations of other artists' works that are strikingly close to the originals. Brown has imitated the works of bygone artists such as Rembrandt, Dali, and van Gogh, but also lesser-known living illustrators. In 2000, Anthony Roberts, another British science-fiction artist, sued Brown for breach of copyright over a version of Roberts's illustration for the cover of a 1974 science-fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The painting, titled 'Loves of Shepherds,' was exhibited at the Tate. The ensuing legal battle cost Brown a hundred and forty thousand pounds "Every penny I had," he later said. Roberts's claim against Brown was eventually settled out of court, and Brown amended his painting's title by adding the words '(After Anthony Roberts).'

    Sir Nicholas Serota, the chairman of the Turner Prize jury, said of Brown's oeuvre, "He uses other artists' work, but that doesn't mean to say you could possibly mistake his work for theirs ... he takes the image, he transforms it, he gives it a completely different scale." But, when Foss heard about the mimicry, he was less generous in his appraisal of Brown's originality. In September of 2004, when Brown was given a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, in London, Foss travelled from his home on the island of Guernsey to confront the artist in person.

    "I was furious," he told me. "I stormed into the gallery and shouted at the director, 'Take these pictures off the wall; they don't belong there.' I wasn't happy seeing copies of my work all over the place." With admirable diplomacy, the gallery's director managed to placate Foss, offering to add a credit beneath the paintings that cited the source of inspiration. When his ire dampened, Foss was introduced to Brown. "He is rather a nice chap," Foss said. "I said to him, 'How about, in future, I do the line work and you fill in the colors?' "

    Foss has always taken a pragmatic approach to his work. He knew from a young age that he wanted to become an artist, and at fifteen he was earning a living creating signage for local companies on Guernsey. Foss left to study architecture at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where studying ranked far down on his list of priorities. He attended just two lectures in his first and only year at the college. Instead, he dedicated his time to pursuing professional magazine commissions. When he heard about the launch of Penthouse, he sent an erotic illustration to its founder, Bob Guccione, who, Foss said, "absolutely flipped, and he published the picture in the third issue."

    The newfound freelance gig earned Foss an unusual privilege with the college's night porter, a Penthouse reader, who would allow the undergraduate to slip back into his dorm after the midnight curfew. Foss left Cambridge and was immediately placed on retainer with Penthouse. His move into the field of science-fiction illustration, for which he is best known, came through his relationship with Guccione. "Bob said to me, 'There's this new film out called '2001,' which you have to see,'" he recalled. "That's when the spaceships started."

    Foss, who had bought an airbrush to better render the human skin in nude magazine illustrations, turned the tool to spaceships and, through his agent, began providing the covers for many seminal novels of the time, including ones by Isaac Asimov and J. G. Ballard. Foss would rarely read the books, instead drawing upon his own imagination to create his majestic space vistas, defined by buckshot stars, gaseous swirls of color, and portly spacecraft.

    It was during this time that Foss created Captain Nemo's Castle, the illustration on which Brown would later base his painting. "Men Only magazine commissioned me with a completely open brief," he said. "The concept for the piece was that Captain Nemo had made it into space and needed to dock on an asteroid to resupply." At the time, Foss was creating about three pieces a week. In most cases, he was allowed to keep the original work. "Sometimes, when people said they loved a piece, I'd give them the original," he said. "It never occurred to me that it might be worth something."

    Despite Foss's initial fury over what he saw as plagiarism by Brown, the younger artist had in fact sought permission, in the early nineteen-nineties, to create an homage to the picture. Foss's work had attracted the attention of the film director Stanley Kubrick, who hired Foss to create concept art for his film A.I. "One of the reasons Brown got away with what he did is that I was working so hard for Kubrick. He was a taskmaster," Foss explained. "I was commuting up to his house every day when my assistant received a letter from Brown. He put himself over as a young student who loved my work, and who wanted to create an homage. I scribbled a reply that simply read, 'Go for it.'"

    Today, Foss doesn't know who owns the original 'Captain Nemo's Castle.' "I think a Parisian gallery sold the work in the early nineteen-eighties," he said. But he's certain that it's worth only a fraction of Brown's version. (Friends of Foss who reside in his Guernsey home town own another of the paintings that Brown reinterpreted.) "What I can't understand is, who would pay six million dollars for a copy when they can buy the original for a fraction of the price?" Foss said.



    Foss's modesty about his career is charming but misplaced - or, perhaps, misdirected. Only once did he allow a flicker of indignation to show, when he said, "I wouldn't mind a retrospective of my work at the Serpentine." The source of his restraint may be the simple fact that he worked as a for-hire illustrator during his most productive and influential phase, during the nineteen-seventies, rather than in the echelons of high art where Brown plays. But his freelance work established the visual language of a genre, making vivid the hazy future of routine space travel not only for film directors but for the culture at large.

    There is, then, an undercurrent of injustice to the astronomical price of Brown's imitation: he has reaped a larger financial reward. Foss must settle for something else: the plain knowledge that he defined and popularized a niche - a noble success, but one that seizes fewer headlines than seven-figure auction prices. But perhaps Foss will leave a different kind of legacy. "Just before Christmas, I was installed in London's Shepperton Studios to dream up spaceships for a new Marvel film," he said. "After I sat down, I was joined by these whiz kids with computers, who were all there to do the same thing. I was the only one with pencils and paper. They told me, 'You are the one that inspired us to get into this.' That was a great moment." Foss continued, "To be truthful, I didn't bother asking which film I was there for. I just drew spaceships, which is all most people seem to want from me."

The Art of Perfume

    When I was an art critic at The New York Times, from 2006 to 2010, I thought a lot about photography. I was not a critic of photography, or of any visual medium. In fact, the art I wrote about was invisible. (And it wasn't music.) The history of art in the 20th century has seen an explosion of new mediums - photons in as close to pure form as possible are among the newest (ask James Turrell) - but I worked on one of the three important art mediums that appeared in the 19th century.

    Art historians, curators and the public systematically greet the new with suspicion and bafflement, then, ultimately, embrace it. Photography, invented in the early 1800s, was considered a useful, if simple, record of reality. In the late 1800s, its advocates began to argue that it was art. This was generally dismissed. Then Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Brassai, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman did their work; museums acquired and exhibited photographs; Sotheby's sold a photograph for $1m; and the issue was closed. Since the late 20th century, photography has been accepted as a true art form.

    The second medium was motion pictures, first made in 1888 (depending on how you measure). I wrote about a medium that was created four years earlier: scent. Scent is the equal of paint, film and clay. It has a rich palette of thousands of materials and clearly meets the criteria of 'artistic medium' in all terms: aesthetics, structure, design, the communication of an artist's vision and subjective point of view.

    Artists working with scent are the equals of those in other mediums, you just don't know their names yet We spend our lives finding the most brilliant liars, searching for those few who truly take us for everything we have. What made Paul Parquet the first true olfactory artist was his use, in his transfixingly beautiful 1884 work Fougere Royale, of 2H-chromen-2-one (coumarin), one of the synthetic scent molecules that had been under development since the mid-1800s. It (finally) made scent artificial; a medium in which artists could lie. That is to say, it made it art.

    Art must, by definition, be artificial in the best sense of the word. Art is created by a mind that seeks to impose a vision. Nature does not calculate, artists calculate. Representing something real makes it instantly unreal, and it is not possible to re-create reality; it is only possible for people to make bad art.

    Scent had for millennia been a powerful proto-art created entirely from natural raw materials with the desire, usually, of re-creating nature - useful, if simple, records of reality. Parquet's work destroyed that.

    Art is wonderfully synthetic. The artist puts materials together in order to generate specific emotions in the audience: fear, rage, joy, pity. The artistic mind must say: "I will force you to perceive, or feel, or know something you never have before." We imbibe concoctions of towering myth and overt deceit. Maurizio Cattelan, Wagner's Ring Cycle, Avatar. Not incidentally, the title Fougere Royale - royal fern - is a lie as well: ferns smell of nothing at all. Parquet had created the scent of a thing with no scent.

    To counter a few objections: perfume isn't art because it's marketed and sold? Darling, all art is and always has been: Michelangelo, Picasso (Christian Dior was one of his gallerists in the 1920s and marketed the painter assiduously), Diego Rivera, Rembrandt, all of them were sold, if they were lucky. Julian Schnabel is one of the greatest artist self-marketers in the world, and that's not a criticism. It's called the art market, after all. So what if you can get perfume at Harvey Nicks? You can order Tarantino's Jackie Brown on Netflix and watch Teresa De Keersmaeker's choreography on YouTube. Snobbery will pervert logic every time.

    Is perfume not art because it is infinitely reproducible? Warhol rejected this medieval criterion for defining art ages ago. So did technology. You can infinitely reproduce Pavane for a Dead Princess and The Way Way Back, and both are just as magical, because music and film, like perfume, are meant to be infinitely reproduced.

    It's not art because it's invisible? Well, so is music.

    The artists who work in the medium of scent are the equals in all aspects of artistry - from aesthetics and design to technical mastery - of their counterparts working in other mediums. You just don't know their names yet, but you will. In a decade or two, students of art history will be studying their work and recognising Jerome Epinette, Dominique Ropion and Calice Becker as easily as they recognise Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent and David Hockney. Academic departments and curators will place olfactory art within the mainstream of art history; anything else would be irrational, given that olfactory works are seminal examples of the great aesthetic schools.

    I curated an exhibition last year at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York called The Art of Scent 1889-2012, and exhibited 12 works by some of the great olfactory artists from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries. The artist Pierre Wargnye (born 1947) created what I would argue is the single most important work of art in the industrialist style. Industrialism had some heavy hitters - architects, composers and painters such as Lichtenstein provoked - but Wargnye outdid them. He structured his 1982 work, Drakkar Noir, for Guy Laroche, around an inexpensive molecule called dihydromyrcenol, synthesised after the war in an American laboratory. It had a very strong smell that resembled nothing else; it was cheap, strong-smelling and sturdy, and for decades, had been deployed in the tough task of scenting laundry detergents, which, postwar, had become mass-market products. Wargnye specified dihydromyrcenol as 10% of his formula, which was huge. It radically changed the state of the art and destroyed the line between fine art and industrial product. Drakkar Noir democratised art, one of the great pursuits of 20th-century artists.

    Ernest Beaux's 1921 modernist work pre-dates Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1929 work of Modernism, a school that sought to use technology to push the arts into the 20th century. Using new, high-tensile metals, Mies van der Rohe built the German pavilion for the Barcelona world fair keeping the traditional interior structure of the building but removing the walls, coating it instead with a film of high-technology glass that let in light. Beaux's work kept the traditional interior structure of olfactory art's idea of beauty, but coated it in aldehydes - new, synthetic molecules - to make Chanel No5, one of the greatest works in the modernist style.

    Fabrice Fabron erased the natural landmark, the real-world reference point, as ferociously, thrillingly - and contemporaneously - as Jackson Pollock. His 1957 perfume L'Interdit is an important abstract-expressionist piece. Jean-Claude Ellena is a master of the use of light and clarity as an aesthetic in scent, no less than Erik Satie was in music. His Osmanthe Yunnan (2006) for Hermes is a mesmerising work of luminism - crystalline, controlled, using space as if it were a material. Daniela Andrier took brutalism's aesthetic of pure power and made 21st-century use of it with Untitled (2010) for Maison Martin Margiela, placing it solidly in the natural world.

    The medium must first come to be known. Its design format, the formula, like the blueprint of the architect and the score of the composer, must become familiar to us. An understanding of, and appreciation for, the works will follow quickly. Scent won't go without art-world recognition for much longer. It is far too interesting, and the works made in it far too powerful.

The Forger They Couldn't Prosecute

    The Tribeca Film Fest flick ‘Art and Craft’ paints a crazy picture of a man obsessed with re-creating and donating famous works—and fooling many in the process.

    As a self-proclaimed “philanthropist,” Father Arthur Scott has donated hundreds of notable artworks to museums all across the country. Institutions like the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have accepted works by Paul Signac, Alfred Jacob Miller and Louis Valtat. Or have they?

    Each museum registrar heard the same story: Father Arthur Scott’s mother has recently passed away and while his sister—still in Paris—settles the estate, he is there to facilitate her wish to bequest the institution with a piece from her collection.

    The works came with the proper paperwork, so no one questioned a thing. After all, promises of money and art are these institutions biggest weaknesses. But what seemed like generous donations turned out to be one of the largest, and most unique, deceptions the art world has ever seen—spanning three decades and over 40 museums. Father Scott wasn’t even his real identity—it is Mark Landis—and those Signacs, Millers, and Valtats weren’t real either.

    A new film, Art and Craft, which premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival on Thursday, follows 59-year-old Landis from the moment he was exposed to a full-scale exhibition of his forgeries as the man encounters the many people trying to figure out his motives and convince him to abandon them.

    Funded on Kickstarter, the filmmakers began the project after reading a riveting 2011 profile on Landis in The New York Times. “When we tracked him down in Laurel, MS, we began the three-year journey of telling Landis’ story and unpacking the complicated impulses and influences that brought him to where he is today,” they wrote in an article for Filmmaker Magazine.

    Each work is meticulously copied. Wood is cut to the exact dimensions, sanded and stained to stress the age of the work. A photocopy of the work is pasted onto the wood before being painted over to give the piece its deceiving authenticity. Watercolors are strikingly identical and the charcoal works, done with color pencil, are deceptively perfect.

    Landis’ first “philanthropic binge”—as he calls them—occurred in 1987 when he donated his first copy to the New Orleans Museum of Art. But it was not until 2008 that he was caught in the act. A red flag was raised after he met with Cincinnati Museum of Art’s chief registrar Matthew Leininger, who discovered that multiple museums claimed the same pieces.

    Since then, the museum registrar has become borderline obsessive in devoting his time to stopping Landis. “I sent a message out through the registrar’s listserv,” he explained in the film, “and within the first hour, my phone was ringing off the hook.” At least 20 museums contacted him that day—all with forgeries of works that appeared in multiple museums.

    The task, however, has proved more difficult than he imagined. The fact that Landis is not in it for the money makes it hard for him to be prosecuted. “It wasn’t like Landis went in and [demanded money],” Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team, explained of what can only be deemed as an act of “ego satisfaction.” “That would be fraud. The fact is that he gave it to the museum for free. It’s up to the museum to determine what they think of it.”

    The story of Landis’ folly is exactly what makes this film so captivating. He seems to still seek approval from a father that has long been deceased, while mourning the death of his mother, who his relationship with can only be described as uncomfortably close. The viewer can’t help but empathize for the lone man riddled with schizophrenia and other mental handicaps.

    But with no way to prevent the artist from continuing his quests, Leininger and his colleagues decided to give Landis the ultimate gift—an exhibition of his forgeries. “The show focuses on using a predecessor’s work as inspiration versus simply plagiarizing the work,” University of Cincinnati DAAP Galleries director Aaron Cowan says of the exhibition, which plots out a timeline of Landis’ donations, pairing his works with their originals.

    Invited to be the guest of honor, Landis was then forced to come face to face with the people that he fooled. In the film, patrons of the arts question why he does it and why he won’t stop—or better yet, why he doesn’t create his own original pieces.

    Instead, Landis hinted at his next project—returning lost or stolen works to their rightful owners. The questions remains, though: Does he mean the actual works, or replicas by the world’s greatest forger?

A Future For Movies

    The useful German word Schwiegermutterkurvenlanghals means “the morbid urge to slow down and stare at a road accident”. It also precisely describes watching The Canyons, a Hollywood micro-budget movie boiled up by novelist Bret Easton Ellis and director Paul Schrader. The film stars rehab-queen Lindsay Lohan and professional porn star James Deen. Released this week in British cinemas and on demand, the sub-noir thriller is a mix of swinging cheesecake porn and stilted dialogue — which might have worked as comedy, but Ellis’s script is deadly serious, and obviously received less polishing than his literary works, Less Than Zero or American Psycho. In The Canyons, the characters are minor operators in the Los Angeles movie business, apart from Lohan who has the “shopping and f**king” role as rich-brat Deen’s girlfriend. Lohan displays a tearful, wobbly mien, which may or may not involve acting.

    The movie’s early reviews stank: “a dispiriting, narcissistic slog”; “an inept misanthropic melodrama”; “the dialogue is hellish, the plot goes nowhere slowly and most of the cast can’t act.” Yet as downloads continue apace, Ellis is delighted — and unrepentant: “We were not out to make The Godfather. Look, 80 per cent of people don’t like The Canyons and 20 per cent do, but we only spent $150,000 to make it — no hair, no make-up, no trailers, and we borrowed bedrooms. It was an experiment to have it look like a $10 million professional movie. Financially the project was very successful for us.”

    Thanks to the exotic cast, Ellis’s fame, and Schrader’s reputation as the writer of Taxi Driver and the director of American Gigolo, The Canyons secured an out-of-competition slot at the prestigious Venice Film Festival last autumn. I first met Ellis, Schrader and Deen at a ridiculously grand Vanity Fair Italia dinner there, but I also spoke more soberly to Ellis last month, on the phone to his condo in Los Angeles.

    “I shaped the film to Paul’s sensibility with the sort of characters I am known for — they’re not really human characters but figures from noir I was updating. People are very critical of films that don’t fit with their aesthetic, but I liked the sketchiness, sleaziness, shallowness of it all — and that might be seen as inept to some people,” said Ellis cheerfully. At 50, with seven novels behind him, Ellis is relishing this foray into the movie world, and his next project is not a book, but a ten-hour Fox television series. Meanwhile in London, the successful musical production of American Psycho, starring Matt Smith, is moving to the West End.

    For The Canyons, Lohan was a brave casting choice, and her timekeeping was predictably unreliable. “I used to check the gossip sites in the mornings to guess where she might be,” sighed Schrader in Venice. Plus Lohan refused to take off her bathrobe for a crucial nude four-in-the-bed scene until 67-year-old Schrader took off his clothes too. Ellis laughed: “She’s a flaky actress. There’s a lot of them. What can you do?”

    Of course Schrader and Ellis knew exactly what they were taking on by casting Lohan. The breathless publicity almost made up for the constant chaos, recently featured in Lindsay, Lohan’s reality-TV show on Oprah’s OWN channel. Lohan’s final no-show was on the red carpet at Venice, much to Schrader’s relief. He declared himself “a free man” at the film’s press conference: “For the last 16 months I’ve been held hostage, by my own choosing, to a very talented but unpredictable actress. She was supposed to be here today. She said she would be, but she is not.”

    At the grand Venice dinner on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, under the moon and later rain that sent bejewelled Italians squealing for cover, the rest of The Canyons’ cast and Ellis sat drinking on little gold chairs, with the aura of magicians who had just fooled the audience. Schrader was so bored of talking about the drama that we shared dog photos on our phones. In fact, he is deeply frustrated by the film industry, and his opening montage in The Canyons shows ruined art-deco and Fifties’ movie theatres, abandoned popcorn stalls and rubble-strewn auditoria.

    While Schrader seems hangdog about it all, Ellis says the decaying shots were a requiem for the old ways, and a message about the “new economics of film-making”. He is evangelical about his experiment. “More and more, movies are going to be made like The Canyons — it will be less of a strange phenomenon. You’ll just go out, collaborate with a few friends, pay for it yourself, deliver it to iTunes, earn. Basically that’s the future for a certain kind of movie.”

    The delightfully named James Deen agreed — although his expertise is more as a director and actor in the pornography business. He is a charming, entrepreneurial young man, although it was sometimes tricky to continue the conversation as his girlfriend — also a porn actress — kept sitting on his lap during dinner. “James is a great guy,” said Ellis. “He’s great at that crossover stuff. He’s also got a production company creating seven porn movies based on the seven deadly sins.”

    Ellis — always portrayed in the media as a crazed, bad-boy contrarian — turned out to be huge fun and an avid filmgoer, with trenchant opinions on recent art-house and mainstream releases. “Schrader and I are outdated and antiquated cinephiles. We love movies.”

    In Ellis’s infamous Twitter-stream, there are often snappy 140 character reviews of movies. “Just saw Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin. If I had seen it last year it would have made my top ten. Beautiful, hypnotic, violent.” That’s spot on, and the film is out here next week.

    But Ellis has courted entire Twitter meltdowns with his comments — in particular when he suggested that Oscar-winning Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow “would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.” At least he is equally unpleasant to men. He recently described David Foster Wallace as: “The most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation.”

    “Ah. Twitter,” said Ellis. “I’ve mostly stopped that now — 140 characters is too short to say anything, so now I do a regular podcast where I can talk for ten minutes, interview interesting people, and put things in context. It’s easy to be outrageous on Twitter.”

    In one recent podcast, Ellis talked very sensibly about the lack of women directors and the fact he’s only had one woman so far as a guest over 15 podcasts. “But then I’ve only had one gay man, Gus Van Sant, and he didn’t want to talk about being gay.” Van Sant has a cameo in The Canyons as a psychoanalyst. “Perhaps I only like talking to straight white men?” said Ellis. In fact the novelist lives with his boyfriend, the musician Todd Schultz.

    The most amusing part of the podcast is Ellis doing the car and audiobook adverts at the beginning, like an old fashioned DJ. Ellis is all about selling direct to the public, whether it is his opinions, or his film on iTunes. The brat-pack author of the Eighties has decided that he is no longer a novelist but a “content provider” for television, film and perhaps books.

    Ellis has been researching and scripting a massive ten-part series for Fox TV on the Manson Family — the strange California commune led by Charles Manson who was found guilty in 1971 of conspiracy to murder seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. Ellis loves an evil protagonist — eg, Patrick Bateman with his nail gun in American Psycho. “I’ve 600 pages on this Manson thing so far, so now I’m getting down to writing the script. I’m not flinching away from the sexuality.” Of course not. And Ellis is also still working on a film adaptation of The Frog King, “a rom-com on Adderall”. “Will the Fox thing ever air? I don’t know — 95 per cent don’t.”

    There is, said Ellis, an unfinished novel in his computer, but for the moment he is still keen to do “bits and pieces” for the movie business. “Meh-OK movies and books are being overpraised right now. There’s grade inflation by self-important critics dealing with cultural and economic uncertainty and fatigue is setting in. The moment of the disposability of movies has finally come.” With The Canyons very much at the forefront.

What Makes It A Masterpiece?

    In 1993 a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.

    That was what got him thinking.

    Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?

    The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.

    Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.

    Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.

    Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars”, Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”

    The process described by Cutting evokes a principle that the sociologist Duncan Watts calls “cumulative advantage”: once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still. A few years ago, Watts, who is employed by Microsoft to study the dynamics of social networks, had a similar experience to Cutting in another Paris museum. After queuing to see the “Mona Lisa” in its climate-controlled bulletproof box at the Louvre, he came away puzzled: why was it considered so superior to the three other Leonardos in the previous chamber, to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention?

    When Watts looked into the history of “the greatest painting of all time”, he discovered that, for most of its life, the “Mona Lisa” languished in relative obscurity. In the 1850s, Leonardo da Vinci was considered no match for giants of Renaissance art like Titian and Raphael, whose works were worth almost ten times as much as the “Mona Lisa”. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo’s portrait of his patron’s wife rocketed to the number-one spot. What propelled it there wasn’t a scholarly re-evaluation, but a burglary.

    In 1911 a maintenance worker at the Louvre walked out of the museum with the “Mona Lisa” hidden under his smock. Parisians were aghast at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see the gap where the “Mona Lisa” had once hung in a way they had never done for the painting itself. The police were stumped. At one point, a terrified Pablo Picasso was called in for questioning. But the “Mona Lisa” wasn’t recovered until two years later when the thief, an Italian carpenter called Vincenzo Peruggia, was caught trying to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

    The French public was electrified. The Italians hailed Peruggia as a patriot who wanted to return the painting home. Newspapers around the world repro­duced it, making it the first work of art to achieve global fame. From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to represent Western culture itself. In 1919, when Marcel Duchamp wanted to perform a symbolic defacing of high art, he put a goatee on the “Mona Lisa”, which only reinforced its status in the popular mind as the epitome of great art (or as the critic Kenneth Clark later put it, “the supreme example of perfection”). Throughout the 20th century, musicians, advertisers and film-makers used the painting’s fame for their own purposes, while the painting, in Watts’s words, “used them back”. Peruggia failed to repatriate the “Mona Lisa”, but he succeeded in making it an icon.

    Although many have tried, it does seem improbable that the painting’s unique status can be attributed entirely to the quality of its brushstrokes. It has been said that the subject’s eyes follow the viewer around the room. But as the painting’s biographer, Donald Sassoon, drily notes, “In reality the effect can be obtained from any portrait.” Duncan Watts proposes that the “Mona Lisa” is merely an extreme example of a general rule. Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations.

    “Saying that cultural objects have value,” Brian Eno once wrote, “is like saying that telephones have conversations.” Nearly all the cultural objects we consume arrive wrapped in inherited opinion; our preferences are always, to some extent, someone else’s. Visitors to the “Mona Lisa” know they are about to visit the greatest work of art ever and come away appropriately awed—or let down. An audience at a performance of “Hamlet” know it is regarded as a work of genius, so that is what they mostly see. Watts even calls the pre-eminence of Shakespeare a “historical fluke”.

    Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia University, thinks the way we define “great” has as much to do with status anxiety as artistic worth. He points out that in 19th-century America, the line between “high” and “low” culture was lightly drawn. A steel magnate’s idea of an entertaining evening might include an opera singer and a juggler. But by the turn of the 20th century, the rich were engaged in a struggle to assert their superiority over a rising middle class. They did so by aligning themselves with a more narrowly defined stratum of “high art”. Buying a box at the opera or collecting impressionist art was a way of securing membership of a tribe.

    Although the rigid high-low distinction crumbled in the 1960s, we still use culture as a badge of identity, albeit in subtler ways. Today’s fashion for eclecticism—“I love Bach, Abba and Jay Z”—is, Khan argues, a new way for the bohemian middle class to demarcate themselves from what they perceive to be the narrow tastes of those beneath them in the social hierarchy.

    The innate quality of a work of art is starting to seem like its least important attribute. But perhaps it’s more significant than our social scientists allow. First of all, a work needs a certain quality to be eligible to be swept to the top of the pile. The “Mona Lisa” may not be a worthy world champion, but it was in the Louvre in the first place, and not by accident.

    Secondly, some stuff is simply better than other stuff. Read “Hamlet” after reading even the greatest of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and the difference may strike you as unarguable. Compare “To be or not to be”, with its uncanny evocation of conscious thought, complete with hesitations, digressions and stumbles into insight, to any soliloquy by Marlowe or Webster, and Shakespeare stands in a league of his own. Watts might say I’m deluding myself, and so are the countless readers and scholars who have reached the same conclusion. But which is the more parsimonious explanation for Shakespeare’s ascendancy?

    A study in the British Journal of Aesthetics suggests that the exposure effect doesn’t work the same way on everything, and points to a different conclusion about how canons are formed. Building on Cutting’s experiment, the researchers repeatedly exposed two groups of students to works by two painters, the British pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and the American populist Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade’s garish country scenes are the epitome of kitsch—the gold standard for bad art. The researchers found that their subjects grew to like Millais more, as you might expect, given the mere-exposure effect. But they liked Kinkade less. Over time, exposure favours the greater artist.

    The social scientists are right to say that we should be a little sceptical of greatness, and that we should always look in the next room. Great art and mediocrity can get confused, even by experts. But that’s why we need to see, and read, as much as we can. The more we’re exposed to the good and the bad, the better we are at telling the difference. The eclecticists have it.

Digital Art

    From a 1970s video game to a dynamic medium that has liberated artists, a landmark show charts the rise of digital art Look around you. Everywhere that you turn you will find digital art. It’s there in the games you play on your smartphone, in the photographs you edit on your laptop, in the books you download to your Kindle and the films you stream on your tablet. It’s on your computer, your TV, your radio. It’s all over our galleries, in our cinemas and in our concert halls. It won’t be long before you are wearing it and, at the rate at which developments are going, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether we next might be eating it.

    This is the result of a ubiquitous shift that the Barbican will celebrate in its forthcoming exhibition Digital Revolution — a show that looks at the transformation of our culture by digital technology. A venue with a long history of engagement with digital creativity — not least with its unprecedentedly popular Rain Room, installed in The Curve last year by artist/designers rAndom International — is about to stage its most ambitious project in this field to date. Bringing together artists and film-makers, architects and musicians, designers and game-developers, Digital Revolution goes back over the history of the key individuals and seminal moments that have come to define our new digitalised age. It promises to be a landmark show. Digital art marks a generational divide, suggests its curator Conrad Bodman. Those in their forties and fifties will of course be aware of it, but they may not fully understand it, nor have a clue how to design their own programs. Yet digital developments, he believes, have reached a tipping point. A whole new code-literate generation has grown up. They don’t need intermediaries to put their ideas into practice and their work is transforming our cultural milieu.

    So, what exactly is digital art? “It’s art made with codes,” Bodman says. “Artists familiar with computer programming languages can use these codes creatively and often in an interactive way.” The dream conceived back in the Twenties when Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus (a school which, bringing together a utopian community of creators, sought to combine old-fashioned craftsmanship with innovative new techniques), first coined the slogan “art and technology: a new unity” has come almost a century later to fruition.

    Digital art as we know it traces its history back to the Fifties, to a time when hardware and software limitations imposed some sort of unity upon the pieces that a computer could produce. Computer artists, their work connected by similar visual and philosophical concerns, came close to forming what they saw as a coherent movement. However, this Barbican show begins in 1972 with the game Pong. It was this rudimentary interpretation of table-tennis, played on screen with blocks for ball and bats, that spawned the multibillion-dollar video game industry.

    Digital art has moved a long way since. Several pieces will premiere at this show, among them the 2013 Laser Feast, created by design studio Marshmallow: an interactive “woodland” environment of laser rods, each of which has an acoustic component, activated when touched, so that the visitor wanders through it to the accompaniment of constantly changing notes.

    The visual and the sonic combine and this blurring of distinctions between disciplines and media — perhaps the most salient characteristic of digital art — has liberated artists, who now work across a wide range of forms. “Once you have understood the language of codes,” Bodman says, “you can apply it anywhere from the gallery artwork through the pop concert to the ballet.” The digital artist breaks free to explore possibilities that more traditional practitioners can only dream of, as the “Sound and Vision” section of the show will explore.

    Among other pieces will be a new commission by the musician will.i.am in collaboration with the entrepreneur Yuri Suzuki, in which three mechanically animated analogue instruments (guitar, keyboard and drums) will play a selection of songs. Robotics and projection mapping are brought together to create a completely enveloping audio experience.

    Digital art offers an increasingly collaborative experience. The Romantic notion of the individual genius, which for so long has held sway, rolls over to make room for such creative collectives as Antirom which, formed in 1994, set out to explore interaction as a form of media in its own right. Matt Pyke presents a radical new installation that expands on his interest in the relationship between the hand-drawn and the digital (digital art began by encouraging programmers to blur long-held distinctions between art and graphics). It allows visitors both inside the venue and online to submit a hand-drawn artwork that will be mounted on a huge wall of screens in the form of a looped animation. His Together will serve as a sort of archive of creativity from across the country.

    The distant spectator, once standing apart, becomes a participant, a part of the art piece. Umbrellium’s Assemblance — specially commissioned for this exhibition — pushes this interactive system to intriguing limits. It motion-tracks the visitor who moves into its theatrical realm of colour lasers. The spectator becomes the artist as he sculpts ephemeral light into constantly shifting forms. (It would be wonderful if the Barbican were able to push this collaborative spirit further by inviting, say, a dancer to interact with Assemblance; fingers crossed.)

    Via digital technology, we are moving towards a future in which art, as the performance artist Marina Abramovic (currently working in the Serpentine gallery) sees it, becomes less an object but an energy. Quintessentially ephemeral, it slips free of the financial markets that seek to commodify it. It discovers its purest form.

    In our contemporary art world, the computer is likely to play a more prominent role in the studio than the palette or brush. It has become an indispensable partner in myriad creative projects that quite simply could not be achieved without its help. And as this Barbican exhibition casts an eye to the future, we find it complicit in the creation of anything from photovoltaic clothing to sophisticated robotic pets.

    But can a computer be truly creative? Will this century see paintings signed “Microsoft”? Since 2006, Dr Simon Colton, professor of computational creativity at Goldsmiths, has been working on a project called the Painting Fool. Its stated aim: to one day be taken seriously as an artist in its own right.

    “Art is 99 per cent cognitive, 1 per cent making marks on paper,” Colton says. So after studying the psychological aspects of art making — the intention of the painter, for instance, or his mood — he sets out to challenge the idea that a computer program can’t be imaginative. The Painting Fool, operating by what he describes as artificial neural networks and using a grammar similar to that of a language, can paint portraits that are influenced not only by the “mood” of the computer (formed by its “reading” of newspaper articles which it extracts and cross references) but also by the mood of the sitter (detected via its software).

    Learning, accountability and appreciation have all been programmed into it over the years. It can be stubborn, Colton says; telling a sitter to go away (sometimes repeatedly) when it’s not inclined to work. It can comment upon and interpret its pieces. And each time it makes something it gathers more information and learns from it.

    There is still much to develop, Colton admits. He doesn’t think of the Painting Fool as a “living being”; he describes it rather as a disembodied intelligence. Nevertheless, he has, over the course of its ever-growing sophistication, come to consider it as genuinely creative: “Because I can’t think of any reason why it’s not any more. And the whole point of it,” he adds, “is that you can never predict it. You can never know what its going to do next. It’s independent. And it can sure as hell piss me off. I have given it that independence, but still it frustrates me.”

    Even as it ventures into unexplored territories, digital technology returns us to the fundamentals: in this case, it would seem, to such time-honoured philosophical conundrums as free will. And what more can we ask of art than it offer us a vision that is as fundamentally human as it is technically fresh? Art history describes the course of this very narrative. So turn to the current chapter and study the Digital Revolution if you want to get up to date with the story — and discover what will happen next.

Constable vs Turner

    Constable invented the English countryside, Turner matched the wonders of nature. Now their rivalry is being revived It was varnishing day at the Royal Academy’s 1832 Summer Exhibition and artists were putting the finishing touches to their exhibits. Among them were two of the great British painters of the age: John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Born only a year apart and long-time acquaintances, the two now found themselves in uncomfortable proximity: their paintings had been hung next to each other.

    As Constable completed a canvas he’d worked on for 13 years, Turner looked on with dismay. His small seascape Helvoetsluys seemed worryingly bland by comparison. And so, as soon as Constable was gone, Turner applied a stroke of vivid red paint to its foreground. He claimed it depicted a buoy in the water, but it was really an audacious attention-grabber. When Constable returned, he was horrified to discover the show-stealing addition to his rival’s exhibit: “Turner has been here,” he growled, “and fired a gun.”

    The two first met at a dinner in 1813, where Constable described his counterpart as uncouth but entertaining. Over the years their prickly relationship soured. At the 1831 Summer Exhibition, Constable masterminded his own petty victory over Turner by removing his rival’s submission from a prime position and replacing it with his own effort — the now famous Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. Turner was furious with Constable and apparently “opened upon him like a ferret” in front of stunned bystanders.

    The rivalry between Turner and Constable remains one of the more famous in art — alongside Zeuxis and Parhassius, Michelangelo and Leonardo, Picasso and Matisse. Now it is to be revived as Tate Britain and the V&A open new exhibitions of their work next month. The rivalry is particularly resonant because their differences were a microcosm of many fault-lines that ran through British society. Constable was a middle-class Tory, Turner a working-class barber’s son; Constable was from East Anglia, Turner was an inveterate Londoner; and while Constable is often viewed as an old English fogey, Turner is presented as a radical English eccentric.

    Turner no doubt wanted it this way. Like many artists of the modern era, he eagerly portrayed himself as an enemy of social and cultural conventions. Where Constable was a paragon of family values, Turner refused to get married, preferring to devote attention to his homemade erotica. And while the popular image of Constable is of a man politely painting haystacks in Suffolk, Turner is famous for lashing himself to a ship’s mast in a storm, braving the elements like a pencil-brandishing cockney Odysseus.

    That storm anecdote is almost certainly untrue. Turner was actually a staunch member of the establishment. He was an insider at the Royal Academy, having exhibited there since he was 15. He was also unashamedly commercial and left a huge sum of money at his death. Constable, on the other hand, struggled in ways that we’ve come to expect only of the avant-garde: in a career spanning more than four decades, he sold only 20 paintings in this country. And although he eventually joined Turner as a member of the academy, he was granted full access only at the end of his life.

    Furthermore, although we like to think of Turner’s near-abstract paintings as harbingers of things to come, Constable probably had more influence on modern art. On seeing The Hay Wain in 1824, Eugène Delacroix was so inspired that he rushed back to his studio to repaint the background of his great Massacre at Chios. Constable’s fresh approach to landscape influenced every major French art movement, from the Barbizon School to the Impressionists.

    Yet Constable remains the quintessential English painter. His endless studies of clouds are the result of a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon empiricism, as well as a native obsession with the weather. And though to my eyes his grand “six-footers”, The Hay Wain among them, are clunky and overwrought, they helped to establish a catalogue of visual set-pieces that are now etched into our national consciousness.

    Constable went a long way towards inventing the English countryside itself. In the face of industrialisation, he held up the country’s church spires, oak trees, thatched cottages, cornfields and horses as the essence of bucolic England. His vision may have been nostalgic, perhaps even reactionary, but it continues to seduce us today, from the background of The Great British Bake Off to the pages of Country Life.

    But which is the greater artist? In my view there is no doubt: Turner. He was the most original landscapist of the 19th century and he is today one of the few British artists genuinely revered around the world. Constable, for all his achievements, will never quite shake off the parochialism to which his work has lent itself, while Turner’s breathtaking canvases seem to transcend the time and place from which they came.

    Turner’s finest work — such as Rain, Steam and Speed, of ships struggling amid storms, of trains hurtling across bridges, and of dazzling sunrises and sunsets — is picture-making at its most primal. The subjects quickly disappear, dematerialising into a constellation of incandescent colours, violent vortexes and brush strokes so vital they seem to possess a life of their own. Turner’s greatest images are no less than a validation of image-making itself. For in them he produced an art that matched — and maybe even surpassed — the wonders of nature.

    It was one of the great rivalries in the history of art. But to my mind, there is no competition.

Slow TV

    “I was in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker,” John Giorno, a poet and the star of Andy Warhol’s 1964 film “Sleep,” once told a British newspaper. “The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time—when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, ‘Let me guess, sleeping?’ ” Warhol, being Warhol, saw some beauty in the pattern, and, in 1963, he shot a movie, more than five hours long, of Giorno asleep. It premièred at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, in 1964, before an audience of nine people. Two walked out. Later that year, the experimental poet Ron Padgett published a sonnet responding to the film. A representative passage:

    zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
    zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

    The movie camera has been called both an eye and a pen, but in truth it’s neither; a motion-picture lens can render what transcription and human consciousness can’t record, which is the full visual experience of being in time. Why bother, though? The high attrition rate for Warhol’s vérité shows that many people do not actually want to spend time with records of real life as it is lived (or slept through); the only thing more unendurable than a weekend with Aunt Virginia and her second husband, Joel, might be the thought of seeing it all again without the relief of selective memory. Most art, even the naturalistic stuff, instead comes in espresso form: the complexities of human perception are picked when ripe, roasted to intensity, milled, tamped down, and infused into something that’s quickly consumed. It is surprising, then, to find a challenge to this ancient premise arriving in a novel entertainment form—suddenly everywhere—known as “slow TV.”

    The term is deceptive. Slow TV is slow compared only with normal broadcast timetables. It runs not at the warp speed of narrative drama but at the rate of actual experience. It is not scripted or heavily edited; it is more concerned with movement than with tension, contrast, or character. The iconic slow-TV program is “Bergensbanen: minutt for minutt,” the real-time recording of a train journey, from Bergen to Oslo, in 2009. That show was nearly seven and a half hours long, and consisted mostly of footage from the train’s exterior as it moved. The landscape often changed. Even when it did, though, it did not change much. Other efforts followed. For people who aren’t train enthusiasts, there is a continuous five-day program on travel by boat. Those who’d rather hew closer to home can watch a twelve-hour real-time special about knitting.

    The capital of slow TV is, at the moment, Norway. Norway is, in fact, a capital for many good, slow things. Its G.D.P. is high; its higher ed is free. It is known for hunting down and lauding the most peaceful human beings on Earth. Soon after the train show, Norway’s public-service broadcaster, NRK, aired a twelve-hour program about firewood. It featured people chopping logs and then discussing how to stack it. That took four hours; the remaining eight of “National Firewood Night” depicted the logs burning in a fireplace. (Stephen Colbert: “It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like ‘So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry’ and ‘The Amazing Glacier Race.’ ”) Yet slow TV has been bizarrely popular. Half of the Norwegian population reportedly tuned in to the boat show. The final episode of “Seinfeld,” by comparison, got forty-one per cent of households in the U.S.

    Given these numbers, it is tempting to diagnose slow TV as a symptom of Scandinavian enlightenment—something, like public health care or the metric system, that our restless, striving culture would never abide. (Slow-TV programs have also aired in Finland and Sweden.) For last week’s Times Travel section, the novelist Reif Larsen wrote a marvellously reflective tribute to Norway’s landscape and slow TV, suggesting that the latter is a reaction to “intensive modernization in nearly all sectors of Norwegian life.” It’s too easy a leap from there to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” a multivolume autobiographical novel that—as James Wood wrote in the magazine, introducing readers to the work in 2012—displays an “artistic commitment to inexhaustibility … which manifests itself as a kind of tiring tirelessness.” Yet the projects are, in fact, notably different. Knausgaard’s work has a consciousness at its core: though the narrative of his experience is unusually paced, it is still filtered, varied, and enlivened by his inner life. Slow TV seems slow in part because, unlike our standard experience of the world, it’s unshaped by interior consciousness. Instead of drowning out its viewers’ inner lives, it seems to want to be a backdrop that can give rise to their own reflections. A slow-TV program is like a great view you encounter on vacation: it’s always there, impervious, but it gains meaning and a story depending on what it conjures in your head.

    We aren’t really used to that exchange onscreen. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition,’ ” Marshall McLuhan wrote in his famous, meandering study of different media forms. “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.” Slow TV is high-definition in its visual information, yet it gets its meaning from viewers’ imaginative consciousness. As entertainment, it is backward: it appears to do its job by casting viewers into their own minds.

    There’s a growing notion that this is a good thing. One of my prized possessions is a T-shirt purchased from a surf shop down the California coastline. It has a mystical logo on it. Beneath that, it says, in small type, “BE MINDFULL.” To me, this strikingly erroneous command reveals a lot about a certain West Coast subculture. “Mindfulness” sounds as if it ought to mean fastidiousness, but it’s recently been taken as a psycho-spiritual imperative. The idea is that the world is distracting, gluttonous, and fast, and that we should work toward a purer and more present-focussed consciousness. Late in the twentieth century, this was known as being chill.

    Should watching a boat slip down a fjord be touted as the chill-and-mindful person’s television? Slow TV is usually grouped within the so-called “slow movement”: a nebulous federation of campaigns to slow down things like food production, manufacturing, education, religious services, and (perhaps a bit gratuitously) sex. Geir Berthelsen, the founder of the World Institute of Slowness, a kind of think tank, has argued that “slowness in human relations” produces “better health and more opportunities to live a good life.” Another slow-life advocate, Carl Honoré, writes of striking “at the heart of what it is to be human in the era of the silicon chip” in his book “In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed,” which was the basis for a TED talk. (The slow movement has nurtured some fast careers.) At first glance, slow TV appears to fit among these efforts, partly because regular TV is now so hot and quick. What could offer more welcome relief from the cliffhangers of a richly plotted cable drama than a tour of Scandinavia’s landscape from the perspective of a train headlight? What’s more of an affront to habits of streaming and binge-watching—that is, viewing TV asynchronously around the globe, without missing episodes—than a show, like “National Firewood Night,” that’s simultaneously experienced nationwide and is rarely seen from start to finish?

    The aesthetic challenge of slow TV is less about attention, in other words, than about use. Yes, the screens have won, it grants. But no, we needn’t employ them as directed. Look: you can avoid the consciousness-devouring rush of “The Good Wife” (Norwegian: “Brutte løfter”) and use your flat screen to view the regular world. Though slow TV appears to reach back to simpler times, it is in many ways the realization of twenty-first-century media technology, relying, for its full effect, on footage that’s high-definition, organic, and continuous. (The hours of unbroken footage for “Bergensbanen” would have been all but impossible in an era when high-quality images needed to be shot on film.) At its best, it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism, a global window with a formless and subjective meaning. There’s no zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz in that.


Investment

    You could be forgiven for thinking the boxy structure that opened last November in Long Island City, Queens, with gray-and-white stripes flanking a blue frontispiece, was a bold new art museum. The modern-looking facility, built from the ground up at a cost of $70 million, is set to span 280,000 square feet when an adjacent building opens this spring. The complex will be packed with thousands of works of art, from old masters to contemporary rising stars. But unlike at a museum, few will ever see the works that live inside it.

    That’s because the structure is the flagship location of an upstart art-storage company called Uovo. Rather than refurbish an old warehouse, Uovo built from scratch, creating a vault with “Mission: Impossible”-grade security and bespoke technology for cataloging artworks that makes information about them readily available to interested buyers.

    Uovo has already leased a vast majority of its available space, a reflection of the incredible demand for these services as the art market booms. Christie’s and Sotheby’s combined sold roughly $14 billion worth of art last year, in record-setting amounts for both auction houses, as a flood of expensive works moved through the market. More than 2,000 works sold for more than $1 million in 2014, compared with about 460 such sales in 2004, according to data from Artnet. In 2013, with the global art market estimated at $65.9 billion, about $16.8 billion was spent on services.

    Deep Thoughts This Week

    1. More people than ever are buying art for investment purposes.

    2. That increases demand for places to stash it.

    3. Good news for Queens.

    4. But not always for artists.

    The wealthiest Americans have grown wealthier since the Great Recession, and many are investing their wealth in art. Especially with bonds and other assets offering rock-bottom yields, the art market — where reports of record-high sales now emerge regularly — has an obvious appeal. According to a survey last year by Deloitte and ArtTactic, an art-research firm, 76 percent of art buyers viewed their acquisitions as investments, compared with 53 percent in 2012. And with more collectors viewing art as a financial investment, storage can become an artwork’s permanent fate.

    Largely hidden from public view, an ecosystem of service providers has blossomed as Wall Street-style investors and other new buyers have entered the market. These service companies, profiting on the heavy volume of deals while helping more deals take place, include not only art handlers and advisers but also tech start-ups like ArtRank. A sort of Jim Cramer for the fine arts, ArtRank uses an algorithm to place emerging artists into buckets including “buy now,” “sell now” and “liquidate.” Carlos Rivera, co-founder and public face of the company, says that the algorithm, which uses online trends as well as an old-fashioned network of about 40 art professionals around the world, was designed by a financial engineer who still works at a hedge fund. The service is limited to 10 clients, each of whom pays $3,500 a quarter for what they hope will be market-beating insights. It’s no surprise that Rivera, 27, who formerly ran a gallery in Los Angeles, is not popular with artists.

    Despite the seemingly prosaic nature of its service, Uovo also encourages speculation in a more subtle way. Everything about the facility seems designed to remove friction from the art market — to turn physical objects into liquid assets. Apart from its private viewing rooms for deal making, which are now common in the storage business, what really sets Uovo apart is its vast database. After each artwork is tagged with a bar code, the company’s technicians use a proprietary app to quickly retrieve detailed information about the pieces, including their precise location and recent movements, says Christopher Wise, executive vice president of operations.

    Wise says the technology is largely in place for security purposes, to keep track of such valuable investments. (This is not a hypothetical concern. In 2013, a Norman Rockwell painting worth more than $1 million simply vanished from its Queens storage facility, only to be tracked down later in Ohio.) But giving clients and prospective buyers remote access to so much data, while making the business more efficient, also helps make the art more like a tradable unit, able to change hands without even leaving a warehouse. Buyers can use the database in much the same way a hedge funder uses a Bloomberg terminal.

    Collectors have not always been so willing to consign their new acquisitions to storage. Near the end of his life, Henry Clay Frick, the 19th-century industrialist, built a mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to house his art collection. He bought more art to fill up the house, and after his death, it became the site of the Frick Collection museum. In 1945, the oil baron J. Paul Getty bought a seaside home near Malibu that he filled with art, later opening the house periodically to the public. To be sure, these men weren’t inviting the masses into their homes while they were alive — but they did hang their art, which was the fruit of their wealth, not its source.

    Enrique Liberman, a lawyer who works with funds that buy art on behalf of wealthy investors, says the art market now “has all the trappings of traditional investment markets in the form of the services provided.” While that may be a slight exaggeration — the art market, after all, remains opaque and unregulated — places like Uovo bring us closer to that reality.

    All of this tends to make artists uncomfortable. One prominent artist, who insisted on anonymity to speak freely about the matter, says that the growth of art-storage companies like Uovo demonstrates “something about the way art is functioning, which is less about the artwork saying something or doing something and more about the artwork representing a value.”

    He has reason to be alarmed: Not long ago, ArtRank suggested that anyone who owned his work “liquidate.”

Luxembourg

    Collectors avoid steep import levies by storing their masterpieces in a Luxembourg bunker.

    At the back end of Luxembourg airport stands a big, brown bunker surrounded by three-metre concrete walls, topped by razor wire, with security cameras peeping over the top: a scene reminiscent of a Bond baddie’s lair. The fingerprint scanners on the doors wouldn’t work if someone cut off your finger to gain entry. “The blood has to be running,” an employee explains.

    The Luxembourg Freeport and others like it are designed to store some of the world’s best and most expensive artworks, tax-free. Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the Fine Art Fund Group, says that if you could peer into the freeport and similar facilities in Geneva and Singapore, you would find “any number of the best Picassos in the world sitting there at any one time. You’ll see the best Monet or Gauguin or Van Gogh moving in and out.” It is not known precisely how many artworks are in them but Mr Hoffman, whose clients use such facilities, says it is “billions” of pounds’ worth. The high-end art collector faces a conundrum. Buy yourself a nice Picasso and hang it in your loo and you will get to look at it every day, but it will cost you. Purchase a painting at Christie’s and ship it to Brazil, say, and you would have to pay a 40 per cent levy to bring it into the country. New York is more welcoming at less than 1 per cent.

    Customers will go to great lengths to avoid paying. One client Mr Hoffman works with “bought a Picasso for about 60 million at auction in New York. He decided to ship it to his house in Sao Paulo. Just before shipping he found out that there was a $24 million import tax. He decided it would be cheaper to buy an apartment in New York and hang it there.” And so he did.

    Alternatively, the frugal collector could put the work in a bonded warehouse. This would allow someone to store it tax-free — but they’d never get to see it.

    However, freeports such as the one in Luxembourg, which opened in November, enable people to store their artworks tax-free, at 18-20C and 50 per cent humidity, and look at them whenever they like. It costs about €2 a day for a standard-sized painting (60cm x 80cm). The freeports are useful for collectors and particularly for dealers, who use them as holding points between sales.

    No one who works within the Luxembourg Freeport knows everything that is inside. David Arendt, the managing director, doesn’t keep an inventory; the clients who use the port know what they — but only they — have in there.

    The only people who know everything, and who have the authority to ask to see anything, are the Luxembourg customs officials.

    Inside the freeport, past another fingerprint scanner, a passport check, an airport scanner and an airlock door, is its grand concrete hall. Making up one side of this hall are two floors of viewing rooms with opaque glass walls. Your €2 a day will get you complimentary coffee and biscuits, although Mr Arendt says: “If you want a chamber orchestra and expensive French champagne, I will charge you extra.”

    Mr Arendt is quick to correct the suggestion that the purpose of his enterprise is to appreciate art tax-free. “It’s a tax suspension,” he says.

    The freeport — which has lots of art but few walls — could loan works to local galleries, such as the Mudam, Luxembourg’s largest contemporary gallery. Enrico Lunghi, the museum’s director, admits that it would be practical but he has reservations. “I think the heart of people who put things in the freeport is not beating in the same rhythm as mine when I am in front of an art piece.”

    So what makes their heart beat faster? “Probably when they see the mound of money it represents.”

    Yves Bouvier, the Swiss businessman who is the majority shareholder in the Luxembourg Freeport, was detained last month in Monaco on suspicion of manipulating art prices. Mr Bouvier vigorously denies any wrongdoing.

    Mr Arendt will say only that Mr Bouvier is “completely disconnected to the operation of the freeport in Luxembourg, so even if he fell under a bus it would not impact the functioning of the freeport”.

    Melanie Gerlis, art market editor at The Art Newspaper, has an idea why people want to buy art rather than shares. “It gives the owner a sense of ‘look at me, I am sophisticated because I have this art’,” she says.

    “When you talk to collectors about the feeling of wanting to buy a work of art sometimes they do say it’s like seeing a woman that you have to have. Then once you have her, you move on to the next painting. If you want to look at art, you can go to a gallery. This is a personal, private, obsessive activity . . . about having a quiet moment to yourself to think about how rich you are.”

Artist Royalties On Resale

    The news that, in a week of contemporary-art auctions that saw more than a billion dollars’ worth of art sold, the record for the price of a single work sold at auction had once again been broken—this time, with a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars spent on a so-so Picasso, from his just-O.K. later period—couldn’t help sending some observers, with what is technically called hollow laughter, back to 1980 and the conclusion of Robert Hughes’s great synoptic history of modern art, “The Shock of the New.” There Hughes wondered at how a “spiralling market” had made for “a brutalized culture of unfulfillable desire,” producing auction prices that had seen “a mediocre Picasso from 1923” sell for three million dollars. Yesterday’s outrage becomes yesterday’s bargain, as the price spiral extends, upward and outward, with no end in sight.

    Two arguments arise from such events: one mostly moral, the other largely legal. The moral issue is about what rising prices can do to our feelings about pictures. For good or ill, some idea of money has always been constitutive to our idea of art. Whatever Phidias or Praxiteles did it for, it wasn’t the naches. The intertwining of art and money has even been part of the positive character of the modern age, when artists fought free of princely and church commissions, and began to paint pictures intended for sale in a free market of collectors. What would a sane, well-ordered art market look like? What is a so-so Picasso really worth? Who knows? Markets are designed to make their own rationality. Where people put their cash reflects what they think and desire. That is why we have auctions.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, as S. N. Behrman documented in these pages, in his famous Profile of the art dealer Joseph Duveen, the same kind of inflationary bubble afflicted the world of Old Master art. The most striking thing about the current craze is that the Old Masters are among the least affected. The rising tide of money has elevated the resale value of contemporary art and the work of living artists sometimes close to the level of that of the distinguished dead—though, like the dead, they don’t make money from the resale. And so a movement has got under way, led by Jerrold Nadler, who represents a chunk of this city in Congress, to give artists and their estates a royalty, capped at thirty-five thousand dollars, when their work is resold at a large auction house. It’s a complex issue. Copyright law is called copyright law because it is meant to be concerned with the problem of copies. Since books and records can be copied freely (as, indeed, they are, online), we impose a royalty on the copyist in order to insure that the originator isn’t cheated for his labor. The deal that visual artists typically make with their buyers is different: the artist sells the original and reaps the benefit. The logic here is that if the owner of a Jeff Koons sells it at auction for a profit, that will be reflected in the next Koons that Jeff Koons makes; the “royalty” that he reaps is the increase in the value of his next work of art, sold to the next individual buyer.

    Yet the idea of paying royalties to artists probably still resonates emotionally with most of us. That’s because what distinguishes a work of visual art is not merely that it passes through many hands, increasing or losing value as it does, but that it is made by a singular hand (or, at any rate, comes from a singular vision), whose claim on it lingers, even after it changes owners. A work by Chuck Close can be a wall decoration, an investment, a legacy, and a tax deduction, but, before it is any of these, it is, and remains, a Chuck Close. That’s why the French doctrine of “moral right,” which holds that an artist has the right to guarantee her work’s integrity even when she no longer owns it, seems to us both moral and right: if you possess an artist’s painting, you can’t deface it or mutilate it or alter it without the artist’s consent. Essentially, what artists are asking for, through Nadler’s bill, is little more than the courtesy of a tip. The counter-argument is that a good chef is rewarded not with tips but with a better job in a richer kitchen, but our moral intuition tells us that he deserves one, especially if his dish is still mysteriously delicious years after he first served it.

    In some ways, a mediocre Picasso that sells for three million dollars is no more or less shocking than one that sells for nearly two hundred million, but the increase suggests something more than the inflation of time. It suggests the intrusion of oligarchy—the ever-greater gap, hard to imagine even thirty years ago, between people who have the money to buy art, and the human values that it frames, and the rest of us. Neil Irwin, in the Times, by factoring in inflation and a metric for how much of their worth people are willing to spend, calculated that the number of those who “could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has increased more than fourfold since the painting was last on the market”—in 1997. It seems to be not inequality alone but also that other four-star economic force, globalization, that drives the art market now. More wealth may be in more countries, but it remains in few hands, and there are as many shoppers abroad as there are on Park Avenue or in Beverly Hills. Their money is chasing the same brand-name art goods, and there are only so many Picassos.

    Pressed to an extreme, inequities, both visible and symbolic, become a source of social outrage even if they are no worse than older inequities. Paintings matter to us as visual symbols of order and balance, of creative energy and innovation, so can we be surprised that seeing works of art withdrawn to the top of the oligarchic tower offends our moral sense? Even mediocre Picassos derive from a modern belief that a liberal civilization can produce social space for originality, for self-expression and unhindered invention. There is something admirable about a society whose highest values include such works of daring and imagination. And there is something disturbing about one in which there seems to be so little imagination left to find ways in which democratic horizons of human possibility that such art once symbolized can still be shared. For the time being, at least let’s tip the chef.

Richard Prince and Copying Art

    The Internet is the place where nothing goes to die. Those embarrassing photos of your high school dance you marked “private” on Facebook? The drunk Instagram posts? The NSFW snapchats? If you use social media, you’ve probably heard a warning akin to “don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your employer (or future employer) to see.”

    We agree, and are adding this caveat: Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want hanging in an art gallery.

    This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission.


    The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each.

    How is this okay?

    First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince after he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.”

    In other words, Prince could make slight adjustments to the photos and call them his own.

    Prince’s 1977 work “Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right),” which is made of photos that previously appeared in print. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Pictures Generation” exhibition) This is what he did with the Instagram photos. Although he did not alter the usernames or the photos themselves, he removed captions. He then added odd comments on each photo, such as “DVD workshops. Button down. I fit in one leg now. Will it work? Leap of faith” from the account “richardprince1234.” The account currently has 10,200 followers but not a single picture — perhaps so you can’t steal his images in return?

    “New Portraits” first debuted last year at Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue, the same location where the artist displayed the Rastafarian images he was sued for.


    Knowing that more legal action is unlikely, Prince appears to be enjoying the attention. He has been re-tweeting and re-posting his many critics.

Managing Collectors

    WHEN it comes to the rich young tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, art dealers around the world are clamouring to know: are they buying? The answer is yes, discreetly, and often with the help of a firm called Zlot Buell.

    The San Francisco-based art consultancy does not have a website, preferring word-of-mouth recommendations to self-promotion. The firm vets its clients, probing them about their reasons for buying and their willingness to observe a certain art-world etiquette that some may find old-fashioned. If prospective collectors are interested in art only for interior decoration or speculative investment, Zlot Buell would prefer not to work with them, regardless of budget.

    Mary Zlot began recommending art in the 1970s while working at an architectural-design firm specialising in corporate interiors. When she broke free to set up her first art consultancy in 1983, she took one important client with her, KKR, an investment firm. From the outset, Ms Zlot steered clear of conflicts of interest. She does not buy and sell art and is paid only by her collectors. Although the Association of Professional Art Advisers suggests this is a sensible way to do business, many trade in art and some take payments from dealers behind their clients’ backs.

    Ms Zlot gave Sabrina Buell (pictured left) her first job after she graduated in art history and economics at Stanford University. Ms Buell comes from a prominent San Francisco family; many who knew her had made calls on her behalf. Shortly after, she went to New York to broaden her horizons, taking a masters in arts administration and then working for Matthew Marks, a respected dealer. A decade later, Ms Buell returned to San Francisco, becoming a partner in Ms Zlot’s consultancy in 2012.

    Like a law firm, Zlot Buell works with some clients on retainer and others on a combination of commission and hourly billings. The pair counsels old and new money in the Bay area. Ms Zlot looks after the private and corporate collections of Charles Schwab, founder of the investment firm and chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SF MoMA) board of trustees. Another client is George Roberts, the R in KKR, whose personal collection focuses on Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Ms Buell works with younger clients, such as Lucy and Larry Page (CEO of Google), Kaitlyn Trigger and Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) and Alison and Mark Pincus (she is co-founder of One Kings Lane, an online marketplace; he is the co-founder of Zynga, a social-gaming company).

    The advisers specialise in positioning their clients to get the highest-quality works at a discount, typically between 10% and 20%. Quality is vital. When an artist sells works for the first time, all the paintings in a particular size tend to be priced the same. But when these works are resold at auction, the strongest painting could fetch three times as much as the weakest. Good manners are also important. In order to be first in line for an offering of new art works, Zlot Buell coaches its clients in art-world behaviour. For example, if collectors decide to sell a work of art, they need to give first right of refusal to the dealer who sold it to them.

    Zlot Buell’s methods contrast drastically with those of Stefan Simchowitz, an art consultant who is based in Los Angeles and who describes himself as the “poster child of evil speculation.” Mr Simchowitz advises Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and the first president of Facebook. Mr Parker recently bought Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” (2010) for $4.4m at Phillips, an auction house. Collectors affiliated with Mr Simchowitz may, on occasion, find themselves forced to buy at auction because their adviser has been blacklisted by some galleries who do not like his penchant for taking controlling short-term positions in an artist’s oeuvre and reselling art works as quickly as he can buy them.

    Whereas Mr Simchowitz uses hype to engineer speculative bubbles, Zlot Buell tries to protect its clients from them. It generally advises collectors to buy on the primary market (first-time sale) rather than secondary one (resale); the selection is broader and prices tend to be lower. When a client is keen on an artist whose work they consider overpriced, Ms Zlot and Ms Buell try to divert them towards a similar artist whose work they see as undervalued. For a client who wants to acquire a Jeff Koons (record price $58.4m), for example, they might recommend a work by Robert Gober, an important American figurative sculptor of the same generation. Mr Gober’s record price is $4.2m.

    Eye mileage

    Knowing your art history is as important as understanding the art market, and neither is much use without a lot of what Ms Zlot calls “eye mileage”. The firm advises its clients to think twice before buying anything in their first year of looking. For many collectors, art fairs such as Art Basel, which started on June 18th, are an efficient means of clocking up eye mileage. “Art acquisitions are the end of the journey in which your adviser is like a safari guide,” says Mr Krieger, who is amassing a collection of photography and sculpture with Ms Buell’s help. “Training your eye is the key to discerning the good from the great.”

    Good advice is not just about expertise, but connections too. Advisers who get the first call from the best galleries are supportive of artists’ careers and help them gain a following among museums. Zlot Buell encourages collectors to donate works to museums and to sit on their acquisitions committees and boards of trustees. After a $300m remodelling, SF MoMA will reopen next spring with a range of new exhibitions, including one of recent gifts; 20 of them will have been acquired with Zlot Buell’s assistance, including works by Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, Ellsworth Kelly, George Condo, Peter Doig and Mark Bradford.

    A good art collection is a highly personal one, so a skilled adviser should help a collector steer clear of fads and avoid the common trap of buying the same artists as their friends. Many people assume that tech people want to collect digital art, but generally they are unimpressed by it. “They look at a screen all day long; they don’t need to look at another,” Ms Zlot says. Indeed, for many in Silicon Valley art offers reassuringly physical objects in a world that is ever more digitised.

Banksy's Dismaland

    Bansky’s ‘a-mazing’ Bemusement Park mimics and subverts everything Disney stands for, writes Waldemar Januszczak

    The shenanigans began a couple of months ago when my phone started to fill up with messages to phone Jo Brooks. Oh no, I thought. The trouble with Brooks is that she does the press for Banksy, Britain’s most cunning and manipulative street artist. When Brooks leaves messages on your phone you know you are going to be cunningly manipulated. And so it turned out.

    A few days later, I was at the degree show at the Royal College of Art when the phone rang and I absentmindedly punched the green button. “Waldemar. It’s Jo. You’ll never guess what Banksy is going to do. It’s going to be the biggest thing he’s ever done. A-mazing, Waldemar. A-mazing.” “What is it, Jo?” “You know I can’t tell you that, Waldemar. But keep August 20 free. You’ll be travelling. But you won’t need a passport. Biggest thing he’s ever done, Waldemar. A-mazing.”

    Before I get round to visiting the weird and wonderful alternative theme park that Banksy has created in Weston-super-Mare — it’s a-mazing, reader, a-mazing — I should probably fill you in on how I became Brooks’s tame art critic.

    It began a decade or so ago when I foolishly gave a good review to a pop-up show in Notting Hill, west London, by a street artist called Banksy who had filled a shop with subversive reimaginings of familiar British artworks. Pretty rural ponds, filled with supermarket trolleys and discarded Tesco bags, in the style of Constable. That kind of thing. By Sunday lunchtime, Brooks was on the phone. It turned out that I was the first art critic to have reviewed Banksy in a national newspaper. “He’s a-mazing, isn’t he, Waldemar? You won’t believe what he’s doing next. Have you ever been to Bethlehem. . . ?”

    That, reader, is how I ended up in Palestine that Christmas, buying Banksy posters in a pretend gift shop he had opened opposite the church built on the site where Jesus was said to have been born. On the way back to Jerusalem, I could not help but notice that the concrete wall the Israelis had built to separate themselves from the Palestinians was now covered in sarcastic graffiti art that looked familiar. A-mazingly so.

    Getting back to recent events, nothing popped up on the radar about what Bansky was up to on August 20, until last week. First, I heard from Brooks that on the big day I needed to get myself to “the West Country”. She would not tell me more than that. Then someone who follows me on Twitter began muttering digitally about strange goings-on in Weston-super-Mare. Apparently, a film company had sealed off a ruined lido on the seafront, called the Tropicana, and was building a huge set on the beach with a ruined castle in the centre. Hmmm. Weston-super-Mare? Isn’t that where Jeffrey Archer comes from?

    On August 19, the phone rang again. “Waldemar, don’t wear sandals or opentoed shoes tomorrow.” “Why not, Jo?” “You know I can’t tell you that, Waldemar. But I promise you it will be a-mazing.” And, indeed, it is.

    If you have ever wondered how Westonsuper-Mare got its comedy name — super what? — it comes from the Latin super mare which means “upon sea”. Hah! Coming out of the railway station, you turn left at the big wheel, past the Premier Inn, past the donkey rides and the Driftwood Cafe, and there is the Tropicana, a crumbling walled enclosure that was once a fashionable slab of seaside art deco, complete with faux Egyptian detailing, across the front of which Banksy has written the word Dismaland.

    He used to come here as a kid, apparently, in the days when the Tropicana was still a working lido. In its heyday, it boasted the highest diving board in Europe. But since 2000, it has been walled up, another dank British victim of cheap foreign holidays. A few months ago, Banksy, who is from nearby Bristol, happened to walk past and peer through the fence. Since then he has been dreaming of installing a theme park here. And not just any old theme park. But a theme park that hilariously and ruthlessly sends up all the other theme parks, notably Disneyland itself, whose style and appearance Dismaland ridicules at every step.

    Outside, you are met by glum staff wearing Mickey Mouse ears who answer all your questions with an excessively unhelpful shrug. Which way do I go in? Shrug. Where is the door? Shrug. As you walk away, they mutter “end-joy”. Next up are the security gates, or at least an absurd replica of some security gates, made of cardboard, and staffed by wonky security guards wielding cardboard surveillance equipment. “Stand on one leg,” they instructed me. “Are you carrying any guns, explosives or hand grenades?” “No hand grenades,” I replied.

    Disney’s lawyers have been banned from entering Dismaland. Were they to penetrate the cordon of deliberately moronic staff sporting Mickey ears they would find an experience that mimics and subverts everything that Disney stands for. Did you ever see that brilliant 1960s TV series, The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, who wakes up one morning in an unreal world where the normal rules no longer apply? It is a bit like that.

    At the Punch and Judy show, Punch has turned into a Jimmy Savile lookalike who beats and rebeats his wife in a script written by Julie Burchill. At the coconut shy, there is a game called Knock the Anvil where you try to knock an anvil off a pedestal by throwing a table tennis ball at it. The first prize is an anvil.

    Dispersed among the warped fairground rides of Bansky’s “Bemusement Park” are various pointed artworks, not just by him but by a selection of artists. The unwinnable anvil game has been devised by the Turner prize nominee David Shrigley. Inside the main exhibition tent, there are two large sculptures by Damien Hirst.

    If you are curious why you cannot wear sandals it is because all this is set in a rubbish-strewn expanse of gravel that seems at every turd-strewn step to evoke the crumbling grottiness of roadworks Britain. See the black pond with the motorised dinghies packed with illegal immigrants? That is another Banksy sculpture. See the fire pit near the exit? That is where they burn a selection of Jeffrey Archer’s books every night.

    It all adds up to an experience that keeps pummelling you with surprises. To pick the most ambitious example, the ruined castle at the centre of the ruined lido, the one whose moat is filled with unwanted supermarket trolleys and dog poo, turns out to house a spectacular reimagining by Banksy of the Cinderella story. The first thing you see when you walk in is a battered old television set on which the Disney film is about to come to an end. Cinderella has been to the ball. She has met her prince. He has tracked her down with the glass slipper. They are about to live happily ever after.

    But wait. What is that light flashing on and off in the darkness beyond? Oh no. There has been a terrible accident. Cinderella’s coach has crashed, and some lifesized police have turned up to investigate. There is a body hanging out of the door. It is Cinderella. And is it just me, or does she not suddenly look a bit like Lady Di?

    So that is how it all works. Using the language and methods popularised in theme parks, Banksy has built a full-scale alternative to Disneyland in which every ride, game and exhibit sets out to question not just the purpose of theme parks but also the crumbling, grotty state of modern Britain.

    The Tropicana must have been a-mazing in its pomp. But it is even more a-mazing in its decay.

    It will be open for the next five weeks, and for the £3 entrance fee you and your kids will be treated to the most entertaining submersion in “entrylevel anarchism” that theme park Britain has seen.
    YouTube
    Imgur

Problems of Living In A Comic Book Superhero World

    Everybody's dreamed of living in a comic book universe. But here's the catch: In said daydreams, you're always the hero. What if you're just an average, everyday Joe/Jane, trying to live your life in a world where spandexed superfolks are constantly zooming around bashing in the skulls of evildoers? Well, the short answer is you really don't want to do that. The long answer is you really don't want to do that because ...

    #5. You Couldn't Possibly Afford To Live There

    Comics are always focusing on dangers such as alien invasions and maniacal megalomaniacs, while all but ignoring the most insidious evil out there, one that not even the most powerful of superheroes could hope to vanquish: sky-high insurance rates.

    For the millions of people living in major comic book cities, every day is a shitty game of Russian Roulette where, if you lose, your property is annihilated in that week's superhero showdown and, if you win, you get to play again next week with an additional bullet in the cylinder. Repeat until everything you own is inevitably reduced to ash in the next big battle to save the world (but not your Miata). The climactic Avengers battle against the Chitauri, for example, would cost New York City an estimated $160 billion, an amount so astronomical that even a guy whose superpower is literally money couldn't begin to put a dent in it.

    "We have a huge deductible. Can we do this in Jersey?"

    Insurance companies have CYA clauses to avoid shelling out cash for things like war or "acts of God" (thanks a lot, Thor), either of which would probably allow them to wriggle out of coughing up for your Chitauri-brain-spattered carpet. But, let's say, such events being commonplace in their reality, comic book insurance companies actually include "So Superman Tripped And Demolished Your Home" coverage in the average homeowners policy. In that case -- considering we're talking about a world that sees a Japanese tsunami-level disaster every other goddamn week -- insurance would quickly become an unsustainable industry. They wouldn't even offer coverage for major cities, leaving you ruined every time the Vulture kidnaps Spider-Man's stupid girlfriend. Jesus Christ, can you get her, like, a LoJack or something? It's the sixth time this month.

    #4. Science Would Be Pants-Shittingly Terrifying

    Quick, what do nearly all of Spider-Man's adversaries have in common? If you said "an unhealthy fascination with a certain teenage boy," that's a completely different article.

    No, it's that the vast majority of them were created thanks to science. Green Goblin sports the technologically advanced suit and glider, Doc Ock scienced himself some new murder-arms, and The Lizard was the result of a genetic biologist's experiment to regrow missing limbs gone wrong. And this phenomenon isn't limited to Spider-Man -- catastrophic failure with horrifying consequences seems to be a core scientific tenet of every comic book world. We're not sure how every elementary school science fair doesn't become the origin story of Baking Soda Volcano Girl.

    It could even go worse ...

    It's important to note that it's not just the bad guys tinkering on the scary side of science. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner create artificial intelligence in, like, an afternoon, which almost results in Earth's destruction. And after being bitten by a spider that can bestow god-like powers on ordinary humans, Peter Parker does the responsible thing by telling exactly no one, despite the obvious scientific and ethical implications. It's only a matter of time before someone else who isn't bound to fight crime by the memory of their dead uncle joins the ranks of the spider-endowed and uses his wall-climbing abilities to become the world's most prolific peeping Tom.

    But the scariest thing isn't that everybody, even the heroes, plays fast and loose with science; it's that nobody is trying to stop them. Comic book science completely lacks that whole "just because you can doesn't mean you should" principle that guides real-world science. How do you even end up with a radioactive spider, anyway? Why, you end up with a radioactive spider by wantonly blasting particle beams every which way during a crowded public science exhibit, that's how.

    #3. No One Would Trust You (And You Wouldn't Trust Anyone)

    Though widespread mistrust of the superpowered is a recurring theme in comics, the fact of the matter is that there's a very good chance this epidemic of apprehension would hop right over Wolverine, do a baseball slide past Ms. Marvel, and trickle right on down to poor, little unsuperpowered you.

    A lot of people are going to be understandably pissed off at the superpowered jerkwads wrecking the city, and that's not to mention the jealousy factor. All that anger has to be directed somewhere, and the most likely targets are those who are gifted at anything, on the off chance that they're actually a superhero's secret identity. Is your poker buddy just really good at the game, or is he secretly a mind reader? Is that Olympic medalist a hard worker and gifted athlete, or did she just get struck with a bolt of cosmic radiation? Did you win that bonus because you're a great accountant, or are you secretly the alter-ego of Number-Man? Suspicion and paranoia would be rampant. It would be witch hunts all over again, only in a world where we definitely know witches are real.

    #2. Cities Would Trap You In An Inescapable, Apocalyptic Cycle

    Because supervillains stick to attacking cities and superheroes stick to protecting them, your local metropolis is a carnival of casualty-inducing showdowns and the subsequent financial ruin. At this point, you might be thinking a change of scenery is in order. Perhaps it's time to flee to a rural area and learn how to milk a bull or whatever.

    Here's the rub: Everybody else has the exact same idea. Millions of people would willingly flee the city tomorrow, but the countryside doesn't exactly have the resources to handle droves of new refugees. So all those people you see in the background of comic panels aren't emotional masochists, categorically refusing to leave the dangerous city; they have no choice but to stay.

    In the dystopian wasteland that is a comic book city, people who aren't insanely wealthy would be forced to eke out a living in one of their many fast-growing job markets: corpse collecting, clearing the streets of rubble, and reforming said rubble into something vaguely un-rubble-like just in time for it to get clobbered again.

    And if you don't want to do any of that shit work? Well, we hear the local supervillain is hiring ... just don't expect insurance benefits.

    #1. Religious Tension Would Tear The World Apart

    The Catholic Church, the various factions of Islam, the followers of Hinduism -- they all exist within the Marvel universe. But ... why? We all know the one true religion: Norse mythology. Thor's a dude. We can see him. He's over there. You can go say hi, if you want. Give god a high-five.

    "Just chillin' at the diner!!" -- with Jane Foster, Erik Selvig, and our Lord and Savior

    So how did all the other religions handle the sudden appearance of an actual deity on Earth? Some religious leaders thought the theory of evolution was a dangerous attack on the faith. Some Dutch cartoonists mocked Muhammad and stirred up an outrage. This is an immortal god from another religion appearing in your city and demonstrating miracles in front of the masses, while traveling freely back and forth from his "Heaven" to Earth. He has infinite strength and can control the weather and wields a magical artifact.

    "And a hammer too."

    Now imagine you're a starving family from a drought-stricken area. Why would you pray to God or Allah for relief, when you can send a letter to the actual Thor, who lives in New York? If your nation is about to be invaded by an evil dictator, why would you pray to anyone but Superman to come save you? We'd say some people might start worshipping superheroes, but that's a ludicrous understatement -- worshipping anyone BUT superheroes would be stupid and pointless. Those other religions require blind faith; a superhero is an all-powerful, immortal god who can come chill out at your house if you want. Your choice: Wait for an unproven, possibly allegorical being, or split a burrito with one of the real Messiahs just down the street. Oh, but Jesus died for our sins and returned from the grave? So did Cyclops. Like eight times. This year.

    Within 10 years of superheroes showing up, all other religions would be extinct ... or else they would have gone to war to fight off that extinction (by trying to kill the heretic superheroes who are turning people away from the true faith with their hoax miracles). You think religious tension is bad now? Life in the comic universes would be Armageddon. Literally.


Copying Art - The Bean and the Bubble

    ANISH KAPOOR has been making headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. In June, one of his sculptures on display in the garden of the palace of Versailles, which he described as “the vagina of a queen taking power”, was spray-painted by vandals. This month he is in the news because the city of Karamay in western China is unveiling a sculpture that looks very similar to “Cloud Gate”, a 110-tonne stainless-steel structure nicknamed the Bean, in Chicago’s Millennium Park, that is popular with Chicagoans and tourists alike.

    In both instances Mr Kapoor, a Mumbai-born British artist, reacted grumpily. The act of vandalism “represents a certain intolerance that is appearing in France about art”, he told Le Figaro, a French daily, adding that he saw this mainly as a political problem. And he fumed that the making of the sculpture by an artist whose name Karamay city officials are not releasing was a blatant act of plagiarism. “In China today it is permissible to steal the creativity of others,” he said, vowing to take his grievance to the highest level and pursue those responsible in court.

    Mr Kapoor expressed hope that the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, would join him in his crusade for his copyright. Yet Mr Emanuel took a very different view of the Karamay version of the Bean. “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” he said. “And if you want to see original artwork…you come to Chicago.”

    In visual and other forms of art, a copy of an artwork is an infringement of copyright, whereas using elements of others’ copyright-protected work can be permissible under the “fair use” provision of American copyright law. In 2013 Richard Prince, an American artist, won a landmark case when an appeals court overturned a decision that he broke the law when he used photographs from a book about Rastafarians to create a series of paintings and collages. Mr Prince had argued that his appropriation of the photos should be permitted under the fair-use provision.

    Determining “fair use” is complicated and to some extent subjective, but a prerequisite is that the artist accused of borrowing (or stealing in the Kapoor controversy) admits to using another artist’s art. That is not the case with “Big Oil Bubble” as the Karamay sculpture is called. Its defenders say that it was inspired by the city’s natural oil well (Karamay means black oil in Uighur, the local language) and that the blobs around the sculpture represent little oil bubbles. However similar to the Bean it looks, any resemblance to Chicago’s sculpture is coincidental, they claim.

    The Karamay sculpture very probably infringes Mr Kapoor’s copyright, says Eduardo Peñalver at Cornell Law School, but what has actually been stolen from him? The Chinese are not printing T-shirts with the Bean or selling miniature statues of the sculpture. If anything, they are paying homage to the original as they did when replicas of the Eiffel tower were built in the cities of Shenzhen and in Hangzhou. Guangdong province has a clone of the entire Austrian village of Hallstatt.

    When the good burghers of Hallstatt found out about a Chinese mining tycoon’s plans to build a copy of their Alpine jewel in 2011, they were surprised and scandalised. The Chinese had charged ahead with their duplicate without telling anyone in Hallstatt, let alone ask for permission. Yet soon they came to see the advantages of having thousands rather than a few dozen Chinese tourists visit their town, eat their schnitzels and stay at their inns every year. Perhaps Mr Kapoor too will eventually come to see the bright side of the cloning of his Bean.

Pop culture

    Pop culture is a curious term. What are the alternatives? It’s a bit like those signs declaring the existence of “Accessible Toilets”. Are there really any other sort? In culture, or anything else, popularity is the only true measure of value. Sure, great art is not always immediately accessible, but always becomes so. When you read a programme note that says “not performed since 1754” you know that it’s going to be mind-numbingly awful. As Joni Mitchell said, an art that speaks to only half a dozen people isn’t really art at all. It took an Anglophile American, TS Eliot, to recognise that culture includes both cabbages and cathedrals.

    It’s in that spirit that America’s leading museum and research institution, the Smithsonian, has accepted props and costumes from the television series Breaking Bad, one of the greatest shows to have been made in the past decade. The chemical protection suits worn by the unlikely drug dealers at the heart of the series now join in the pantheon of US culture the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key’s The Star-Spangled Banner and the hat worn by Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination.

    American museums have always had a more inclusive view about their collections than English ones. Henry Ford set up his own museum in Michigan to display “everyday genius” in the form of the things people made and used. “You can”, he quite correctly said, “read any object like a book if only you know how.” Our foolish preoccupation with trying to distinguish between “high” and “pop” culture, by contrast, only reinforces unhelpful types of snobbery.

    New York’s influential Museum of Modern Art was the first in the world to put industrial design on display, so that an artistically conceived plastic bucket could take its rightful place beside a Picasso; a record-player next to a Henry Moore. In 1951, MoMA was the first serious museum to put cars on show. It called them “rolling sculpture”. And that’s what you see on the M25 daily. Except it’s not rolling, it’s stationary.

    We have a severely constipated view of artistic merit in this country. In the 1980s I ran an exhibition space in the V&A devoted to design. It was absurd that the V&A took no notice of cars because, encumbered by Victorian taxonomy, no one could decide whether an automobile was “sculpture” or “metalwork”. So I put a rather fine early Saab on show. A perplexed senior member of staff thundered into my office and declared: “You have traduced a great museum!” Needless to say, the V&A is now planning a major exhibition on car design.

    And now we have the question of whether ordinary clothes worn by extraordinary people should be on display in museums. Here, I think, the V&A was right to express reservations about accepting some of Lady Thatcher’s outfits, although they have yet to make a final decision. For my part, her pussybow blouses and padded-shoulder power jackets are significant images of female power, but that can be perfectly preserved in photographs. Let’s be honest — there is little intrinsic merit in the craft or technique employed in making them compared with the Coco Chanel or Tom Ford originals in the permanent collection. Nor, indeed, in their design. Never mind that the V&A lifted its patrician standards recently to display Kylie Minogue’s knickers or David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust bodysuits. Thatcher’s outfits belong in a museum of folk art, not one powered by campaigning traditions of improving public taste.

    Ever since the explosion of massproduction and mass-media in the middle of the 19th century, people have fretted about value. How do we know what is good and what is bad when everything is available and anything can be copied? It’s noteworthy that the great museums and the great department stores evolved at the same point in the middle of the 19th century. In one, everything was labelled and put on sale for the customer’s use. In the other, everything was labelled and put on display for the visitor’s edification.

    The same era saw the rise of the music hall as a palace for entertainment, as distinct from the museum as a palace for learning. It helped to reinforce the notion of “high” and “low” culture which, in this country, still seems to disturb us.

    But the old distinctions are becoming less clear. When Terence Conran and I opened the Design Museum in 1989, I thought: “This is terrific but isn’t it just like a swanky shop where nothing is for sale?” On the other hand, when people who call themselves artists abandon the pursuit of beauty is it any wonder the public takes its aesthetic pleasures from the best-designed objects in their everyday lives instead?

    Beyond our shores, the frontiers of cultural discrimination are blurring. In 1947 the future French minister of culture, André Malraux, imagined a “museum without walls”, a world with no traditional barriers. We are living in one now: the imbecilic tyranny of “high” and “low” genres has gone. But Malraux could not have imagined that very soon we will have an app that enables you to point your phone at any object and assess its cultural value on your behalf. You’ll be able to wave it at Lady Thatcher’s blouse or costumes from Breaking Bad and it’ll tell you if they are any good. In future, arbiters of taste will not be panjandrums in museums, but nerds who write code in California.

Alexander Calder

    Childishness is an interesting quality in art. At its best, it’s a doorway to a fresh and uninhibited creativity. When Picasso, for instance, expressed his childishness, it led to marvellous things. Those late sculptures of baboons fashioned from toy cars, or bulls made of bicycle parts, are delightful. The same with Miro, who made a career out of releasing his inner scamp. Or Klee. But get childishness wrong, forget to let down the drawbridge that connects it to adult concerns, and you are left with a childishness that is merely childish. Tinguely was a serial offender on that score. So, alas, was Alexander Calder.

    It’s unfortunate, because Calder is a popular presence in 20th-century art, especially in his native America, where he is counted among the giants of modernism. His most famous achievement, the invention of the mobile, has had an impact on countless babies’ lives as they stare up from their cots and gurgle happily at the pretty colours dancing above their heads. In the end, though, art is a grown-up’s game. And that’s where it goes wrong for Calder.

    All this is made clear in an impeccably put-together display at Tate Modern that proves — should anybody need further proof — that the gallery has these kinds of shows down to a T. As with the recent one-person celebrations devoted to Sonia Delaunay, Malevich and Klee, the exhibition-making here is faultless. Even the captions, with their mix of sensible comment, perfectly chosen quotation and striking absence of unhelpful art-world jargon, are probably the best I have read at the Tate. So it’s a shame about the art, which dances prettily above our heads, but never really does more than that.

    Calder was born in Pennsylvania in 1898, the son of two artists. At college, he studied mechanical engineering. So the artistic and the mechanical collided in him, as is evidenced by everything on show here. This is not a full retrospective. We do not see his first efforts at art, which is a loss, because they might have supplied some different tones to an event that begins as light and trilly as a wind chime, and stays as light and trilly as a wind chime.

    In 1926, he made his way with eager American predictability to Paris, where he immersed himself in the full avant-garde experience, and where his art settled quickly on a soft surrealism devoted chiefly to that most predictable and ruinous of Paris School obsessions: the circus.

    Is there anything in Parisian art quite as regrettable as the influence of the circus? I can’t think what it might be. Picasso, with his Saltimbanques, managed to turn it into a haunting metaphor for modern rootlessness; and before him, Toulouse-Lautrec found sexual tension and alienation in the big top. But most of the artists who followed were guilty either of squirting straight-from-the-tube sadness into the faces of their clowns, or of expressing nothing more weighty than a childish liking for balancing acts and bright colours.

    Calder falls into the second camp. At the show’s beginning, he’s seen showing lots of ingenuity and cheek in a set of sculptures made of bent wire, which he would shape with pliers into the figures of balancing acrobats or circus elephants or, best of all, portraits of his new avant-garde pals in Paris — Léger, Miro, Josephine Baker. These fun portraits are shown suspended from the walls, and quickly make the point that Calder was “drawing in the air” with his sculptural hangings.

    In Paris, he also began putting on shows of the Cirque Calder, a pocket circus manned by his creations, which he would operate and activate with lots of mechanical jokes and ingenious homemade technology. The circus appealed because its tightropes, its tent poles and its trapezes offered a ready-made example of a sculpture that depended for its impact not on weight or mass, but on thin lines of connection and a sense of movement.

    All this probably sounds more revolutionary than it looks. There’s a film of the Cirque Calder in action. The first bent-wire sculptures are charming and playful, and it surely took a clever engineer to make them, but once you’ve gurgled at the sight of them, that’s it. No other emotions or visual insights follow.

    So far, his art has remained figurative. But in 1930, Mondrian invited Calder to his studio. “The shock... converted me,” he later recalled. “It was like the baby being slapped to make [its] lungs start working.” Immediately — too immediately — he became an abstract artist.

    If abstraction were something you could buy off the peg, that might have been fine. But it isn’t. Great abstraction, like Mondrian’s, is the culmination of an exacting visual journey, not a presentational trick that’s easily learnt.

    In the large gallery filled with Calder’s first attempts at abstraction, not a single sculpture appears resolved. It’s an impression heightened by the fact that all were made to move, and were fitted with motors; these are now too fragile to work, so in no instance are we seeing the sculpture as Calder intended us to see it. Approached from the side, these unsatisfactory abstract arrangements have the weight distribution you find in garden gnomes with fishing rods. Seen from the front, all are stopped in unsatisfactory mid-action, like broken clocks.

    It’s evident also that he was not a colourist. Yes, he was bright and used bouncy reds, yellows and blues, but brightness is not rightness, and in the entire show, the only example of genuinely inventive colouration that calls from the wall is the lovely orange-red and mossy green of Snake and the Cross, from 1936.

    From the motorised kaleidoscopes to the first mobiles is but a tiny step. It’s taken here via a room filled with the best works in the show, a set of sculptures inspired by the movement of stars and constellations, and the scientific instruments used to record them: orreries, celestial spheres and the like. They work because they are fixed in their final positions — a rare moment of certainty at this flighty, itsy-bitsy event. Perversely, it’s the lack of movement that makes them.

    From here on, it’s mobiles all the way. When Calder returned to America, he returned, you sense, to moods and shapes he recognised from his childhood, and which he tried now to evoke in floaty sculptures that belong, emotionally, at the end of the cot.

    Snow Flurry, from 1948, is a set of pure white flakes drifting gently down in circles. Black Widow features spidery black shadows that ascend the gallery wall. Other mobiles are reminiscent of autumn leaves on trees. Others still of musical notations and the meetings of quavers and crotchets.

    All this is charming, but it doesn’t haunt. Driven by a folksy nostalgia for whirligigs and weather vanes, activated by natural breaths and winds, these Miros in the sky seem always to be fishing for oohs and aahs.

    If modernism were a box of chocolates, Calder would be down in the second layer, among the softest centres.


Prince Charles

    The Prince of Wales is one of Britain’s most successful living artists, having made millions through sales of his paintings and prints. An analysis of sales carried out by Clarence House found that he had raised £2 million since 1997 by selling copies of watercolours through the shop at Highgrove House, his residence.

    The true figure may be closer to £6 million when total sales from other outlets are added, The Sunday Telegraph reported. Limited edition lithographs currently on sale at Highgrove, are priced at £2,500, including one showing a view of Lochnagar, Scotland.

    At the Belgravia Gallery, which previously handled the prince’s watercolour sales, his limited edition prints are being sold for as much as £15,000. All the money raised goes to the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation. Clarence House said the prince painted “in the open air, often finishing a picture in one go”. His favourite locationsl include Balmoral and Sandringham House. A recent survey found that fine artists earned an average of £10,000 a year.

Outsourced Art

    Alexander Tarrant is surrounded by paintings: the Mona Lisa with rappers, a Mondrian-looking work generated from a Google search for colored squares. His name is on all of them, which is a little odd considering that he didn’t paint a single one. Instead, he and his friends came up with ideas and then hired others to do the labor. Where, oh where, to turn when you want someone else to make your art? A village of painters in China, naturally.

    Welcome to the world of modern — really modern — art, defined by robot painters and outsourced creativity. Tarrant, 35, has ties to the wealthy tech world, which has some of the world’s most active art buyers these days, from Marissa Mayer to Larry Ellison. In addition to working with startups to help them brand themselves (what would Picasso say?), Tarrant practically apprenticed with David Choe — Facebook’s graffiti artist, who cashed his stock in for major money — collaborating on projects like helming Reddit’s front page for 24 hours.

    Tarrant, who looks the stereotypical part of artist — tall, bearded, beanie on head, white V-neck splattered with black paint — recently tried to hustle an artist program with SpaceX, using “0.1 percent of their budget,” he reasons, to add artwork like murals and to orchestrate meetings between engineers and artists. Although his leads there have nearly dried up, Tarrant is persisting. His tenacity and reach have yielded a diverse, full portfolio that includes music videos for artists in the indie circuit, including provocative South African oddballs Die Antwoord and Portland, Oregon, hip-hop artist and producer Aesop Rock; a video project with Snoop Dogg culminating in a framed blunt; sculptures; and the outsourced paintings, which will hang in Tarrant’s first gallery show in Los Angeles. “He’s enabling the people without the technical skill to paint to enter that medium,” says Alex Benzer, co-founder of Internet video site vid.me and LA art site curate.la.

    It’s a funny ploy. Artists like Rembrandt and Andy Warhol had to become famous before they could get others to do their dirty work. But the art world is anything but cookie cutter these days and the definition of “artist” is up for debate. Someone who never breaks out a paintbrush can still be a genius artist — a concept that started with the daddy of Dada, Marcel Duchamp, in the early 1900s when he placed a urinal in an art gallery and called it Fountain. Art historian Blake Stimson ranks Tarrant’s work as “topical”: “It’s about the outsourcing of labor and the division between intellectual and manual labor.” For his part, Tarrant is responding to what’s in the water: advanced technology and the Internet.

    Which might explain why his job title these days has more slashes than a horror flick. “Artist / writer / director / producer / designer / photographer / creative consultant / wedding planner / corporate yes-man,” Tarrant calls himself, and that self-description mirrors his upbringing. He moved every few years, from Hong Kong to Boston to Ohio to Los Angeles. As an undergrad, he attended art school in San Francisco, and then held design jobs making video content to sell brands like Audi to the masses. And while Tarrant is now taking some credit for work done by artists in China, in the past he was often the sideline figure whose subjects were more famous than he was. His friends say he connects far-off communities by outrageous stunts — like an email that contained a video of an Indian man reading an email message that a normal person would have just typed.

    Tarrant isn’t interested in playing Luddite. To him the question is: How do you market creativity in the 21st century? He has tons of ideas of course. One is to make 20 T-shirt designs a day for two years — if he puts those on on-demand printing sites, he’ll have passive income for a lifetime. And the relationship between art and technology works both ways. His big pitch to SpaceX: Artists could communicate the intentions of tech companies through their “artist algorithm,” as he calls it. “A lot of younger startups realize traditional marketing isn’t enough anymore. Younger users really expect a salient experience,” Benzer says. “[Tarrant is] really clever about coming up with ways to provide that.”

    Finding the backing for his ideas isn’t always easy, though Tarrant has hustled better than some. For instance, his dream last year was to shoot a war film in Afghanistan while documenting the entire experience, but costs got in the way. He’s considered bootstrapping the project, but hasn’t yet pulled the trigger and booked it. For some, Tarrant’s work is the opposite of where art should go. While his work embraces technology and consumer culture, old-school art theorists appraise this as the lowest kind of art. Many artists might be “critical” of his work, claiming “it simply reflects and reproduces the world we live in rather than [interposing] some critical distance,” Stimson says.

    For his part, Tarrant seems OK surrounded by “his” paintings and gigantic rabbit heads from a video project. He’s just “experimenting,” he says, creating the “abnormal” in a tech-driven world. And besides, what’s normal anymore?


Paint It Black

    To most of us the colour black is simply a colour, whether it is the hue of the famous All Blacks rugby union kit or the colour of the night sky. To artists, however, the subject has become a source of great debate and even anguish.

    The contretemps centres on the one shade of black for which every artist is striving: the blackest black in the world.

    The shade is called Vantablack and the sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor, who designed the Arcelor-Mittal Orbit for the Olympic Park in London, has been given exclusive rights to its use, provoking fury in the art world.

    The shade of black has a pigment so dark that it absorbs 99.96 per cent of the light that hits it, so much that the human eye cannot pick up on the kind of shadows which help the brain to interpret the shape of an object.

    Sir Anish, 61, said: “It’s so black you almost can’t see it. It has a kind of unreal quality and I’ve always been drawn to rather exotic materials because of what they make you feel. Imagine a space so dark that as you walk in you lose all sense of who you are and what you are, and also all sense of time.” By acquiring exclusive rights, Sir Anish has found himself facing heavy criticism from his peers. Christian Furr, who had planned to use Vantablack in a series of paintings called Animals, told The Mail on Sunday: “I’ve never head of an artist monopolising a material. All the best artists have had a thing for pure black — Turner, Manet, Goya. This black is like dynamite in the art world. We should be able to use it.”

    Scientists at the Surrey-based company Nano-Systems developed Vantablack in 2014 to help to disguise satellites. Paint with its light-absorbing properties has been used to hide stealth fighter jets.

    Visitors to the Science Museum in London can currently see Vantablack in a work — not created by Sir Anish — featuring a bust which appears to look flat because of the colour.


The Art UK Project

    There is a cartload of Canalettos bought by George III, dozens of Holbein’s portraits and one of the few Vermeers, not to mention a sprinkling of Titians and Leonardos.

    And they belong to you. Or do they?

    The Royal Collection Trust has refused to allow thousands of paintings bought by or given to royal households over the centuries to be included on a database of the country’s entire public art collection.

    The Art UK project, which is digitising all of Britain’s publicly-owned paintings, drawings and sculptures for a website, has had two approaches for permission to photograph and scan the royal trust’s holdings rejected.

    The trust refused to say yesterday whether the 7,000 paintings it holds, second in size only to the National Trust’s holdings, were a public or private collection. It would only say they were “held in trust on behalf of the nation”.

    While some of its holdings — which amount to around one million items including books, ceramics, drawings, watercolours and oil paintings — are occasionally lent to exhibitions and some can be seen for a fee at royal residences, there is not a catalogue of what exactly has been obtained. It is possible that some of the world’s most extraordinary paintings will never have been seen outside private royal residences for centuries.

    Sources said yesterday that the nub of the issue was whether the collection was private or public, adding that it seemed clear that those running it thought it was private. One source said: “Private or public, that’s a big debate. This [Art UK] project is very comprehensive with only one large collection not participating.”

    The Art UK website, which was launched yesterday, already contains more than 200,000 oil paintings from 3,000 public collections. It is partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and is also planning to digitally scan sculptures from the last 1,000 years and also add watercolours and drawings. Users are able to look in detail at paintings, map where they are held and even search for paintings that contain certain quirks, such as beards for example.

    Andrew Ellis, the director of Art UK, said the project was “democratising access to the UK’s art collection” allowing people to see works of art that “are not normally shown”. He added that it was now moving on to “arguably the greatest sculpture collection in the world, again much of it not displayed, not digitised”.

    Gisela Stuart, a member of the speaker’s advisory committee on works of art and who helped ensure that the government art collection in its entirety has been included, said yesterday that the Royal Collection Trust should be encouraged to participate. “I would really welcome it if the Palace could see its way to making its collection available to the website.”

    A spokeswoman for the trust said: “A charitable objective for the Royal Collection Trust is to ensure the royal collection is accessible to and enjoyed by as many people as possible, and we are increasing our resource and investment in our digital platforms as a way to do this.”


The Bust of Queen Nefertiti

    One of the world’s most celebrated ancient treasures has fallen victim to a very modern crime.

    The bust of Queen Nefertiti, crafted 3,361 years ago in Ancient Egypt and on display in the Neues Museum in Berlin, has been swiped from under the nose of the ever-present security guard.

    These were no ordinary thieves. Two guerrilla artists captured the image of the 48cm limestone and stucco carving using a concealed 3D scanner and produced a breathtakingly precise copy for a Cairo museum.

    For the pair who masterminded the heist it was the ultimate act of revenge. They said that they were determined to redress the act of plunder by German archaeologists who discovered the sculpture in Egypt in 1912, sparking a dispute between the two nations over ownership that has raged ever since. The German-Iraqi artist Nora al-Badri and her German colleague Jan Nikolai Nelles say that they will make the ancient secrets of the bust freely available to anyone who wants to print a 3D copy.

    The British Museum might want to rethink its own security policy for the Elgin marbles — although it has embraced the modern age by inviting visitors to a “scanathon” of its treasures last May and has various 3D images available on its website.

    “The Berlin museum monopolises the bust and thus continues an imperial practice, instead of allowing open access to Nefertiti, especially for Egyptians,” Mr Nelles said when asked what motivated the robbery. His goal was open access and for “the museum to lose out on the commercialisation” of the bust, widely regarded as a symbol of timeless beauty and a jewel of Berlin’s antiquities collection, drawing in crowds of admirers.

    Nefertiti, a name that means “the arrival of the beautiful one”, was the royal wife or chief consort of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled from 1352 to 1336BC. One of her six daughters married Tutankhamun. Nefertiti’s remains may be buried behind a wall in Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

    Although the likeness is unnamed, Nefertiti is recognisable from her distinctive crown, which she is shown wearing in other depictions. The bust is believed to have been made in 1345BC by the sculptor Thutmose because it was found during excavations of his workshop by Ludwig Borchardt, a German Egyptologist, who allegedly misreported it as made of gypsum so as to be allowed to take it back to Germany.

    Nefertiti was chosen by the artists as symbolic of “millions of stolen and looted artefacts all over the world”. They hope that their act of plunder will put pressure on western institutions to repatriate works from abroad.

    Mr Nelles told The Times that they visited the museum several times in October to scan the bust surreptitiously; even still photography is banned in the display room.

    A group of anonymous computer experts generated the 3D printing instructions, and the pair cast a copy from polymer resin. The artists told a German newspaper that the scanning device was hidden under Ms al-Badri’s coat and further concealed by a scarf that she moved to one side to obtain images as they circled their quarry.

    The Nefertiti data was leaked at the Chaos Communication Congress, the world’s largest hacker conference.

    The artists said: “We want to activate the artefact and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany’s museums.” They said their intention was “to make cultural objects publicly accessible and to promote a contemporary and critical approach on how the ‘Global North’ deals with heritage and the representation of ‘the other’”.

    The Neues Museum referred inquiries to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which did not comment on whether any action would be taken. The artists have not been charged and it is not clear whether they have committed a criminal offence.

The Secret Life of the Real Banksy, Robin Gunningham

    The Secret Life of the Real Banksy, Robin Gunningham On the first of the intercontinental painting tours that would eventually turn Banksy into a global graffiti star, the young artist had plenty of help.

    His first intervention in international politics came in the semi-autonomous region of Chiapas in southern Mexico in January 2001.Banksy didn’t choose the location himself—he was tagging along with around 20 other Brits who had organized transport into the mountains where the Zapatista Army of National Liberation held sway.

    The 27-year-old didn’t even paint the Zapatista solidarity murals all on his own; his traveling companions picked up paintbrushes and unwittingly became part of street-art history. “Yes, my hand has painted part of a Banksy,” Will Simpson told The Daily Beast. “It was the start, I guess... We had no idea how much his star would ascend in the next few years.”

    Tracing back the chain of events that took this young man into the Mexican jungle—where he developed a taste for the kind of trips that would transform the art world over the next 15 years—offers a unique insight into not only the identity of this extraordinary artist but the community and influences that helped to inspire him. The expedition into the remote mountains of Latin America had been organized by the Easton Cowboys, a pub football team, based in Bristol, in southwest England.

    Their training ground and Banksy’s small house nearby were at the very center of a geographic profiling investigation which appears to have confirmed that Robin Gunningham, 42, is the real identity of the secretive artist.

    Tracking techniques favored by police hunting for serial killers and scientists monitoring the spread of infectious diseases were used to compare the locations of Banksy’s work with addresses linked to Gunningham. A year-long investigation by the Mail on Sunday in 2008 had also concluded that Gunningham, a private-school boy from a comfortable home, was Britain’s most notorious graffiti artist.

    An article published in the Journal of Spatial Science now lends scientific weight to the Mail’s claim. “The spatial locations of Banksy artworks in both London and Bristol are associated with sites linked to one prominent candidate. The case hinges on a number of striking coincidences between Banksy and Robin Gunningham,” wrote the authors.

    Those coincidences did not begin with the beautiful, quiet street where Gunningham grew up with his big sister and professional parents.

    Today the houses are painted in alternating pastel shades; pale blue, chalky pink, aquamarine, and a brighter pink, but there is no sign of graffiti on that suburban road or the streets around it.

    It was when he moved to a truly horrible-looking pebbledash rowhouse on the shabbier side of town with another young artist, Luke Egan, that Banksy paintings began to spring up all around him. Within a 10-minute walk of the house you can still find some of Banksy’s earliest surviving work.

    By the late ’90s, he was developing a name for himself in the area. At the same time, he was going to soccer training with the Cowboys who were based in an extraordinary pub called The Plough Inn, which is a few minutes walk from his house in Easton. Banksy has been a regular there since his mid-twenties if not earlier.

    Bristol has a reputation as an “alternative” city—a pared-down version of Portland, Oregon—and Easton is probably its edgiest, most creative neighborhood.

    The Plough is right at the heart of the community—a pub where the front doors are locked at the mandated closing time but the party rages on late into the night; often through until daylight on the weekends. The regulars are multicultural—Sikh, Jamaican, Indian, and white working class—and the bar is decked out with political flags, left-wing pamphlets, and solidarity pledges.

    After raising cash in the bar, the co-owner took a van to France this week to help move migrants stuck at the refugee camps near Calais to better accommodation—a subject that Banksy has also tackled.

    This is a pub that embraces politics, and inspires its customers to follow suit.

    Though it is part traditional English boozer, walking out into the backyard the pub’s unique allure becomes clear; you are met by a buzz of conversation, and a cloud of marijuana smoke that obscures the graffiti on every wall.

    It’s no surprise Banksy comes back here when he’s in town. Mention his name to the punters, though, and suddenly eyes are diverted toward the ground. One regular even mimed turning a key to lock his mouth shut.

    Eventually one drinker points to a space near the front door where a Banksy oil painting used to hang. “It went up on the wall right here for a while,” he said. “We were the first ones bigging him up.”

    But Banksy’s fame began to grow—still slowly at this point—and the Cowboys started thinking the painting might eventually be worth quite a lot of money.

    Banksy had produced the picture of masked men playing football for a fundraising event in honor of the Zapatistas in Mexico. The Cowboys had set up a solidarity group—Kiptik—and were raising money to help bring fresh drinking water to the Chiapas villages, after their first tour there in 1999.

    Banksy suggested they raffle off his work, somewhat underselling the value his pieces were soon to acquire. The Cowboys went along with his request but hatched a controversial plan to save it by buying up loads of the raffle tickets with club funds, which would come back to them anyway.

    In the end the Cowgirls—members of the ladies soccer team—were dispatched to secretly do the deed, but backed out and didn’t buy the tickets, allowing the picture to be won by a stranger and just a few hundred pounds to be raised. However, Banksy did allow Kiptik to print and sell T-shirts with the same image, which eventually raised some $15,000. “It became capitalism. That’s not what we’re about; not an individual, it’s the community,” said one of the Cowboys, remembering the arguments over what to do with their Banksy.

    Minor disputes aside, it’s clear that the young artist was swept up by the mission to help the Zapatistas, who were waging a radical left-wing revolution against the Mexican authorities. Indeed, Banksy decided to join the Cowboys on their second trip to Mexico.

    “He fitted in with us in terms of getting on with us as individuals but also the political side of it as well,” said Simpson, 46, a veteran Cowboy. The club’s other tours have included regular trips to the Palestinian territories (where Banksy later painted images of peace and hope on the Israeli wall), a regular anti-fascist tournament in Germany, and a cricket tour of Compton in Los Angeles. Simpson spent many hours crammed into buses with Banksy as they made their way up to altitude where they would take on the locals at soccer, once they had shooed the cows off the pitches.

    He was more concerned about the murals though. “There’s a serious intent there,” said Simpson, who has written a history of the Cowboys. “We didn’t want the village to look like a piece of shit so it had to be good, and luckily it was. “He’s got a very sharp mind and obviously he’s a very good artist,” he said. “We had an amazing experience and it’s changed all of our lives really.”

    Jasper Beese was another of the Cowboys on that tour of Mexico. “He’d done a bit of homework—there’s a great tradition of murals of resistance in Mexico. It fitted into that. He had some books about the history and he replicated a really famous photograph from the struggle where this Zapatista woman has her hands around this soldier’s throat,” he told The Daily Beast.

    Banksy’s trademark political approach to public art was taking shape before his teammates’ eyes.

    Experiences on that tour undoubtedly helped to shape his beliefs. One thing that upset all of the British lads, said Beese, was the presence of Coca-Cola for sale in every village but no access to clean drinking water. Later that year, The Herald in Scotland quoted Banksy saying he wanted to tear down the whole capitalist system (an aim of the Zapatistas, incidentally).

    ‘‘There is a side of my work that wants to crush the whole system, leaving a trail of the blue and lifeless corpses of judges and coppers in my wake, dragging the city to its knees as it screams my name. Then there is the other darker side.’’

    Beese, a handsome man with a nose ring, established a trade link from Bristol to Chiapas. He convinced his ethical grocery company, Essential Trading Cooperative, which supplies Whole Foods in London, to sell Zapatista coffee bought direct from the communities they had visited. An additional 60 cents per two pounds of coffee sold goes to Kiptik to build more water access. Beese says Kiptik has raised around $150,000 since that first trip to Mexico.

    All of this because of a football tour. Foreigners are technically banned from entering the Zapatista-controlled areas but the Cowboys had letters from the local football association, backed by FIFA, which allowed them safe passage because they were a football team.

    “It’s amazing you can turn up somewhere with a football. You can’t speak the same language, but you play football and then you come off best mates,” he said. “It’s a real counteraction with what happens in professional football—which is quite nationalistic and very tribal.”

    The trip may have changed all of their lives, but Beese, Simpson, and Banksy are still the same when they are down at the Plough.

    “If he turns up in the pub we have a drink with him, but you wouldn’t be phoning up your mates going ‘Banksy’s in the pub,’” said Beese. “You’d just say, ‘How’s it going?’ He’s just a guy that does graffiti and has done quite well out of it.” He said Banksy had never asked people not to speak to the media about his true identity. They had just all played along.

    “We all knew him as Banksy from the pub,” said Beese. “Although, I thought his name was Robin Banks.” It is believed that Robin Banks was Gunningham’s first street nickname—a pun based on his real first name that later transformed into Banksy.

    Fifteen years after his little-known first foreign painting tour, Banksy is now Bristol’s most famous son. The man inspired by the characters he found in Easton—has in turn inspired the whole city.

    Graffiti, which was always part of the city’s culture, has been allowed to grow unchecked up to the point that street after street in some neighborhoods are filled with multi-colored artworks by hundreds of local and visiting artists.

    The council have taken to promoting Banksy walking tours rather than cracking down on vandalism. The formerly run-down Stokes Croft district has been transformed into a haven for street art. That’s not the case in all parts of the city. Gunningham’s mother lives in a modest cottage on a lovely quiet street in the hills above the Bristol Channel—there’s no sign of urban artistry there. Or in the leafy, residential streets surrounding the red-brick assisted-living facility where his father resides. The imposing Bristol Cathedral School, where Banksy studied until he was 16, also stands in the center of the old town with no graffiti in sight.

    Back in Easton, you can still find some of the original small-scale Banksys.

    One of them, a gorilla in a pink mask, was painted over by an Islamic center in 2011. “They have no idea Banksy, no idea who is. Very sorry. Accident! Accident!” the cheerful imam of the Jalabad Islamic Center, Syed M. Islam, told The Daily Beast. After the furious reaction to their renovations, the Islamic center has partially succeeded in restoring the work, which is now visible as a faded ghostly presence in between the mosque and the church next door. “Now we know—everybody in the community loves having it here,” the imam said.

    A few minutes’ walk away, another early Banksy has been given far more reverence on the sidewall of an anarchists’ social center.The building was a squat when Banksy was invited to get to work. His picture depicts a cat using a spray can while two mean-looking dogs approach on patrol.

    But Bob Smith, 58, who has been a volunteer at the social center since it was a squat, says it’s not always so easy to tell what you should be respecting and what you can just paint over. “I re-painted the side door red and black and went over some little stick men—I could have done them myself. Then I bumped into ‘Stik’ at the Anarchists’ Bookfair in London and he said; ‘How are you enjoying my painting on your door?’ And I was like ‘Uh oh!’”

Guerilla Drama and Music

    I was recently in a friend’s dining room, in a state of polite inattention, listening to the organisers of a philanthropic theatre company, Gods and Monsters, asking potential sponsors for support. The thirty of us present were shown a stylish video clip of their production of Women of Troy. My mind wandered. “This year we’re planning to put on Crime and Punishment. Here’s an excerpt,” said the producer. We waited for the video to begin.

    Instead, an anonymous-looking man in his fifties, seated at one end of the dining table, leapt to his feet, just as a handsome young man burst into the room, asking to see the inspector. He needed to reclaim his watch from a murdered pawnbroker. The anonymous figure was instantly transformed. Urbane, commanding, he welcomed the newcomer: “Ah yes, come in! You must be Radion Raskolnikov! The author of that fascinating piece on how extraordinary men have the right to commit any crime!” We suddenly found ourselves witnessing the reeling-in of a murderer.

    It was spellbinding. For fifteen minutes, with no warning, no set and no props, and without even the tacit agreement that a theatre audience gives to suspend its disbelief, we were transported to a 19th-century Russian police station by nothing other than the electrifying conviction of the actors inhabiting somebody else’s characters. When it had finished, we remained on a high, slightly giddy with the sensation that the world around us wasn’t predictable and mundane, but full of enchantment and possibility.

    This heightened consciousness is, of course, what art aspires to but often fails to attain. When we watch actors on stage we discount their ability to some extent. They’re just doing what we expect, and there are plenty of reasons why we might not appreciate it; a poor script, bad direction, someone’s head in the way, another person tapping away on their phone, or a longing for an ice-cream in the interval. But it’s when they’re detached from the theatre and dropped among us that their talent becomes freshly apparent.

    The arts world is preoccupied with how to reach new, younger, poorer and more diverse audiences. If they can’t extend their appeal the number of patrons will shrink. Gods and Monsters is part of this movement, putting on an annual London season where the tickets are free. Rather than simply urging more people to enter traditional venues, artists and the organisations and individuals that fund them should be captivating us by taking performances out of their locked boxes.

    People who have experienced this feel alive with the delight of it. Soho Theatre has put on a series of unlikely hits inside a derelict former art college. Audience members enjoying a drink in the interval of La bohème were taken aback when an aria started up behind them. Within moments, what appeared to be other theatregoers lounging on sofas stood up and revealed themselves as the chorus, filling the room with sound, sending shivers down the spine, and thrusting everyone to the heart of Mimi and Rudolfo’s tragedy.

    Companies such as Punchdrunk have created unforgettable theatre by playing with our expectations. Shows such as The Masque of the Red Death had twenty scenes from a gothic novel playing simultaneously in different rooms of an abandoned warehouse, with the audience free either to follow the actors in the thread of a single story, or to stay in one room and watch events unfold. For the past few years the company You Me Bum Bum Train, which asks its audience to keep details of the productions secret, has given participants a wholly original experience, akin to living through several lives in less than an hour. But it’s an hour that I’ll remember on my deathbed.

    It’s not just arts organisations that are experimenting with this approach. A Spanish bank brought choirs and an orchestra together as a flashmob in the centre of Sabadell, near Barcelona. The film of the event, on YouTube, starts with a man on a double bass playing the opening of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, while oblivious children race by on scooters. He is then joined by a casually-dressed cellist. As the music builds, a couple of violinists and a bassoonist arrive, prompting a crowd to gather. More violinists appear and a man in a check shirt begins conducting this apparently impromptu orchestra. Many of the passers-by in the square are revealed to be the choir as the anthem reaches its climax. It’s the wonder on people’s faces that’s as uplifting as the performance. The music hasn’t been sealed off in an auditorium, and it’s being played by people who look just like them, rather than dressed in black tie and long skirts.

    Interventions such as these have to be sparing, so that they don’t become irritating or routine. But there’s so much scope to surprise us and it’s too little used. Marcel Duchamp revolutionised our view of art by taking an ordinary object and setting it in an artistic context, making us see it in a completely new light. Performers can do the same by moving in the opposite direction; using art in unexpected ways to thrill us in our ordinary lives. More of us need to be surprised by joy.

Painted By Computer

    This week in Amsterdam, a team of computer scientists and Rembrandt experts unveiled a new portrait that looks alarmingly similar to the work of the famed Dutch artist.

    The portrait of a man wearing a broad hat is the latest example of how advanced computer methods are making it increasingly easy to mimic the style of history’s most acclaimed artists. Art that hangs in museums, sells for millions and that has endured for generations is being emulated by computer wizards without the pedigree of Rembrandt and kin.

    When lined up against Rembrandt’s work, it can be difficult to tell which portrait a machine created and which the Dutch painter created roughly 400 years ago.

    The creators of the “new Rembrandt” used computers to 3D scan and analyze 346 Rembrandt paintings. Next, they used facial recognition software to identify the most common geometric patterns Rembrandt used. Once their computer system had learned this, it could replicate the style and create new facial features.

    [This algorithm can create a new Van Gogh in an hour]

    The process relies on a hot field in technology, deep learning, in which machines are fed massive amounts of data and are able to suss out patterns and then mimic them in new creations.

    The team decided to create a portrait of a white male in his 30s with facial hair, dark clothes and a white collar, because those traits were so common in Rembrandt’s work. They generated the facial features individually and then assembled them into a face. The distance between features were based off calculations of what was typical in Rembrandt’s other works.

    To create a look that mimicked the brushstrokes of Rembrandt, the researchers scanned the surface texture of Rembrandt originals to identify patterns in his texture. The portrait was then 3D printed with 13 layers of ink to create the appearance of Rembrandt’s brushstrokes.

    The project took 18 months to complete, and the final product included more than 148 million pixels.

    The work is reminiscent of a series of apps and online services that have sprung up in the past year, including DeepArt and Pikazo. These allow anyone to apply the style of a famous painter to an ordinary image.

Damien Hirst and Copyright

    Damien Hirst has long been obsessed by drugs. They nearly wrecked his career in the mid 1990s, when he was consuming too many, and then became a recurring, profitable theme in his work. In 2007, around the time he gave up drinking and drugs altogether, one of his glass medicine cabinets filled with rainbow-hued, bronze-cast pills sold for a record $19.2 million at auction.

    That same year, Hirst launched a line of gold and silver pill charm bracelets that are still available on his online shop today, priced between $15,000 and $30,000—and now, the source of a new lawsuit claiming Hirst copied a Canadian artist and jewelry designer named Colleen Wolstenholme. Filed in Manhattan federal court last week, the suit alleges that the Wolstenholme has been making pill charm bracelets since 1996, and that the pill motif has figured in her other jewelry designs ranging from necklaces and earrings to cuff links.

    Wolstenholme has asked that the court order Hirst to stop selling his pill charm bracelets, citing copyright infringement and unfair competition laws. She’s also seeking compensatory damages, including the total revenue generated from profits of Hirst’s bracelets. But experts say the Wolstenholme doesn’t have a very strong case since the charms on both artists’ bracelets are mini sculptures of generic pharmaceuticals.

    “She doesn’t own what the actual pill looks like,” Robert Clarida, an intellectual property lawyer and author of the treatise Copyright Law Deskbook, told The Daily Beast.

    There would be a stronger case for infringement if Hirst used Wolstenholme’s pill casting to make his own bracelets, Clarida said, or if the specific charms were arranged in the same order, but the suit makes neither of those claims. “If the similarity between these bracelets is just the idea of a charm bracelet with pills on it, then there’s no copyright issue,” Clarida said, since only the expression of an idea—not the idea itself—is copyrightable.

    June Besek, Executive Director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts at Columbia Law School, agreed that the designer could only claim copyright protection if the pill charms were arranged in a remarkably similar sequence.

    If her work was copyrightable, the next step for the courts would be to look at “fair use,” as they have in recent copyright suits against Richard Prince and Jeff Koons. “I don’t think this is a fair use case, because he doesn’t need the plaintiff’s work to comment on society’s dependency on pills,” said Besek.

    She acknowledged that appropriation artists like Koons and Prince “tend to think that everything out there is allowed to be their material,” but noted that the courts’ have become increasingly tolerant of the kind of appropriation contemporary artists are doing these days.

    NYU law professor Amy Adler argued that courts are still ill-equipped to discern fair use, because it requires them to “get into the business of what art means.”

    So who is equipped to make that determination? “Arguably no one, but certainly it seems ridiculous that it’s now increasingly in the hands of courts.”

    A spokesperson for Science Ltd., Damien Hirst’s company, wrote in an email to The Daily Beast: “We refute the claim made by Colleen Wolstenholme. Damien Hirst signed his earliest pill work in 1988, long before Wolstenholme created her first jewelry. We will defend any action brought against Damien.”

Secret Knowledge Part 2

    The rich realism of Rembrandt’s selfportraits has long been celebrated as proof of his artistic genius. However, research suggests that the Dutch painter may have had a helping hand, using mirrors and lenses to effectively “trace” his own face.

    Rembrandt and his 17th-century contemporaries could have used optical technologies to project their own images against a surface, according to Francis O’Neill and Sofia Palazzo Corner, writing in the Journal of Optics. Their study tested whether it would be possible with the materials available in Rembrandt’s time to produce projections of his face against a canvas.

    David Hockney, the artist, and Charles Falco, the physicist, suggested in the early 2000s that Old Masters used projection but this was contested.

    The new study claims to offer proof that materials available then could have been used. It also claims that there is evidence, such as the materials used and where the artists’ eyes are looking, that this is what they were doing.

    “What really intrigued me was that Hockney had put forward this theory and had applied it to all these Old Masters, but he exempted Rembrandt and [Leonardo] Da Vinci,” O’Neill, himself an artist, said.

    Painters were able to use a camera obscura, where light passes through a pinhole to create a projection, to trace their subjects. This did not work for self-portraits, as the artist would have had to be in two places at once. Using concave and flat mirrors, lenses, copper plate and canvas, the researchers experimented with setups.

    “If I create a triangle between my face, a concave mirror and a canvas,” O’Neill said, “I can face the painting surface, with the concave mirror projecting my profile on to it. With that you could do a profile self-portrait.”

    The study notes that some of Rembrandt’s early self-portraits were on copper. Its reflective surface, the researchers argue, is ideal for projection, as it shows the image with great clarity.

    The way Rembrandt could paint himself laughing or looking surprised would require incredible discipline to maintain the pose. The direction of the eyes also throws up questions. “Numerous times the eyes are not staring out of the picture, they’re looking laterally,” O’Neill said. “If you’re looking in one flat mirror you will see your eyes looking back at you. If your eyes are looking laterally out of the painting, then something has to explain that. If all the Old Masters are doing that, is that by choice? Or is that the only way they could record themselves because they were tracing their images?”

Guardian Long Read on Art Forgery

    The unravelling of a string of shocking old master forgeries began in the winter of 2015, when French police appeared at a gallery in Aix-en-Provence and seized a painting from display. Venus, by the German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder, to describe the work more fully: oil on oak, 38cm by 25cm, and dated to 1531. Purchased in 2013 by the Prince of Liechtenstein for about £6m, Venus was the inescapable star of the exhibition of works from his collection; she glowed on the cover of the catalogue. But an anonymous tip to the police suggested she was, in fact, a modern fake – so they scooped her up and took her away.

    The painting had been placed in the market by Giuliano Ruffini, a French collector, and its seizure hoisted the first flag of concern about a wave of impeccable fakes. Ruffini has sold at least 25 works, their sale values totalling about £179m, and doubts now shadow every one of these paintings. The authenticity of four, in particular, including the Cranach, has been contested; the art historian Bendor Grosvenor said they may turn out to be “the best old master fakes the world has ever seen.” Ruffini, who remains the subject of a French police investigation, has denied presenting these paintings as old masters at all. To the Art Newspaper, he protested: “I am a collector, not an expert.”

    The quality of these paintings – their faithful duplicity – jolted the market. The sums of money at stake in art, never paltry to begin with, have grown monstrous. Thirty years ago, the highest auction price for a painting was $10.4m, paid by the J Paul Getty Museum for Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi in 1985. In contrast, while the $450m paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017 counts as an outlier, abstract expressionists and impressionists frequently come, in auctions or private deals, with nine-figure price tags.

    In lockstep, the incentive to be a proficient forger has soared; a single, expertly executed old master knockoff can finance a long, comfortable retirement. The technologies available to abet the aspiring forger have also improved. Naturally, then, the frauds are getting better, touching off a crisis of authentication for the institutions of the art world: the museums and galleries and auction houses and experts who are expected to know the real thing from its imitation.

    What was most unnerving about the alleged fakes sold by Ruffini was how many people they fooled. The National Gallery in London displayed a small oil painting thought to be by the 16th-century artist Orazio Gentileschi – a battle-weary David, painted on an electric-blue slice of lapis lazuli; the work is now suspect. A portrait of a nobleman against a muddy background was sold by Sotheby’s in 2011, to a private collector, as a Frans Hals; the buyer paid £8.5m. Sotheby’s also sold an oil named Saint Jerome, attributed to the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, in a 2012 auction, for $842,500. With care, the catalogue only ventured that the work was from the “circle of” Parmigianino– an idiom to convey that it was painted by an artist influenced by, and perhaps a pupil of, Parmigianino. But the entry also cited several experts who believed it was by Parmigianino himself.

    The works were full of striking, scrupulous detail. On Jerome’s arm, for example, dozens of faint horizontal cracks have appeared; every so often, a clean, vertical split intersects them. In French canvases from the 18th century, cracks in paint tend to develop like spider webs; in Flemish panels, like tree bark. In Italian paintings of the Renaissance, the patterns resemble rows of untidy brickwork. On the Saint Jerome, the cracks match perfectly. Prof David Ekserdjian, one of the few art historians who doubted that the painting was a Parmigianino, said he just didn’t feel the prickle of recognition that scholars claim as their gift: the intimacy with an artist that they liken to our ability to spot a friend in a crowd. “But I have to be frank, I didn’t look at it and say: ‘Oh, that’s a forgery.’”

    When Sotheby’s sells an artwork, it offers a five-year guarantee of refund if the object proves to be a counterfeit – “a modern forgery intended to deceive”, as its terms specify. In 2016, after uncertainty crackled over the Hals and the Parmigianino, the auction-house sent them to Orion Analytical, a conservation science lab in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Orion was run, and staffed almost solely by, James Martin, who has loaned his forensic skills to the FBI for many art forgery investigations. Within days, Martin had an answer for Sotheby’s: both the Hals and the Parmigianino were fakes.

    The “Hals” contained synthetic pigments that the artist, in the 17th century, could not have used. In Saint Jerome, similarly, Martin found phthalocyanine green, a pigment first synthesised four centuries after Parmigianino died. It showed up consistently across 21 paint samples from various parts of the painting – “a bit like taking the pulse of a corpse 21 times,” Martin told the New York Times last year. Sotheby’s refunded both buyers, and filed suits against the sellers, demanding they return their proceeds from the sales.

    In December 2016, in a signal of how attribution scandals have spooked the market, Sotheby’s took the unprecedented step of buying Orion Analytical, becoming the first auctioneer to have an in-house conservation and analysis unit. The company had seen enough disputes over attribution to mar its bottom line, its CEO, Tad Smith, said: “If you looked at earnings reports from a year or two ago, you’d see little blips here and there. These were expenses coming from settlements – not a slew, the number was small and statistically insignificant, but they’re expensive.” The cost of insurance that covers such settlements was also rising. With Martin in the building, “the pictures and other objects moving through Sotheby’s now have a much higher chance of being checked”, Smith said. Last year, Martin analysed more than $100m worth of artworks before they went under the hammer or into private sales. Sotheby’s employs him, in part, as a conservator, so he ministers to the health of the paintings and sculptures that pass through. But over the past two decades, Martin has also become the art world’s foremost forensic art detective. He has worked so many forgery cases with such success that he also serves Sotheby’s as a line of fortification against the swells of duff art lapping into the market.

    The first major painting sold by Sotheby’s was also a Hals – a real one: Man in Black, a half-length portrait of a hatted gent. Until 1913, Sotheby’s had dealt in books for a century or thereabouts; art made up only a wan side business. In that year, though, a Sotheby’s partner found a Hals consigned to the firm, and rather than forwarding it to Christie’s, as was often the practice, decided to auction it. After a spirited contest of bids, Man in Black sold for £9,000 – a 26% rate of return per annum since Christie’s had last auctioned the work, in 1885, for around £5. It was the first signal, for Sotheby’s, that there was profit to be mined from paintings. Last year, it sold $5.5bn worth of art, jewellery and real estate.

    For Sotheby’s, the question of authenticity is not merely, or even primarily, academic. There is more at stake than a satisfying answer to the fundamental conundrum of whether authenticity matters at all – a debate that has been fought and refought in the history of western art. “If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt,” the critic Aline Saarinen once wondered, “is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine?” Typically, this debate comes to rest at the same place every time. Of course authenticity matters; to study a false Rembrandt as a true one would be to hobble our understanding of Rembrandt as an artist, and of the evolution of art. Now, however, the question’s philosophical whimsy has been replaced by financial urgency. At a time when the art market is synonymous with art itself, a lack of regard for attribution would derail a trade that traffics in the scarcity of authentic Rembrandts.

    Leaving straight forgeries aside, any discussion about the “authenticity” of an artwork opens suddenly, like a trapdoor, into the murk of semantics. On the sliding scale of attribution that art historians use – painted by; hand of; studio of; circle of; style of; copy of – each step takes the artist further from the painting. These variations, often subtle, are compounded by the unease about overpainting; Salvator Mundi had been worked over so many times and so heavily, critics argued, that it was less by Da Vinci than by his restorers. Deliberate fakes, misattributions and poor restorations all encroach into the realm of the authentic. In two decades at the Met in New York, Thomas Hoving, the museum’s director until 1977, must have examined at least 50,000 objects, he wrote in his book False Impressions. “I almost believe that there are as many bogus works as genuine ones.”

    Like criminals of every stripe, modern forgers have kept easy pace with the techniques that attempt to trap them. The mismatch between the purported age of a painting and the true age of its ingredients is the workhorse of Martin’s technique. So forgers have grown more rigorous in their harvesting of materials, taking the trouble, for instance, to source wooden panels from furniture they know is dateable to the year of the fake they are creating. (The trick isn’t wholly new; Terenzio da Urbino, a 17th-century conman, scrabbled around for filthy old canvases and frames, cleaned them up, and turned them into “Raphaels”.) Forgers also test their own fakes to ensure they’ll pass. Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German artist who served three years in prison for forging paintings worth $45m, surveyed the chemical elements in his works by running them under X-ray fluorescence guns – the same handheld devices, resembling Star Trek phasers, that many art fairs now train upon their exhibits.

    Georgina Adam, who wrote Dark Side of the Boom, a book about the art market’s excesses, told me that many forgers are sensibly choosing to falsify 20th-century painters, who used paints and canvases that can still be obtained, and whose abstractions are easier to imitate. “The technical skill needed to forge a Leonardo is colossal, but with someone like Modigliani, it isn’t,” she said. “Now, scholars will say it’s easy to distinguish, but the fact is that it’s just not that easy at all.” In January, in a celebrated Modigliani exhibition in Genoa, 20 out of 21 paintings were revealed to be counterfeits.

    As the tide of money in the market has risen, making decisions about authenticity has turned into a fraught venture. Collectors, realising how much they stand to lose, are now happy to take scholars and connoisseurs – traditionally the final authorities on the authenticity of a work – to court for their mistakes. Realising that their reputations, as well as their bank balances, may wilt under the heat,these experts have begun to subtract themselves from the game entirely.

    The estates of several 20th-century artists had once taken on the duty of resolving doubts over attribution, setting up authentication committees, consisting of experts or the artist’s former colleagues or friends – people expected to know the work best. In 2007, a collector named Joe Simon-Whelan sued the Andy Warhol estate’s authentication committee, claiming it had twice rejected a Warhol silkscreen he owned because it wanted to maintain scarcity in the Warhol market. Four years later, after spending $7m in legal fees, the estate dissolved the committee. The authentication boards of other modern artists – Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder – have followed. Individual connoisseurs – as the art world calls its experts – won’t always challenge popular identifications, wrote the critic Jerry Saltz in a scorching essay on the vertiginous price of Salvator Mundi. They are reluctant to “rock the already splintering institutional boat. As in the wider world, where people sit by for fear of losing position, it’s no wonder that many old master experts are keeping quiet, not saying much of anything.”

    The collapse of these committees feels like a victory of the market over the academy, like a blow to the very cause of trustworthy authentication. (In New York, a small band of lawyers is lobbying for legislation that will protect scholars from being sued merely for expressing their opinion.) In this void of opinion, Martin’s abilities – premised not on the mysterious instincts of connoisseurship, but on the verifiable results of the scientific process – have an even higher valence.

    Martin, a tall man with lumber-beam shoulders, has a voice that never surpasses a murmur. He is a consummate nerd; find someone who looks at you the way Martin looks at his Fourier-transform infrared microscope. He trained as a conservator of paintings, but now he assays them: picks out their chemical constituents, inspects pigments and binders, peers under their washes of colour. From a painting’s materials, he can extract the vital detail of when it could, or could not, have been created.

    The field of scientific art conservation is not a crowded one; Martin, who set up the first for-profit art lab in the US, has been consulted in nearly every major fraud case in the past 25 years, often working alongside the FBI or other investigators. When he is described as the premier forensic detective working in art today, the accolade comes not only from people such as John Cahill, a New York lawyer who has managed dozens of art transactions, and who called Martin “hands-down the best in the business,” but also from those on the other side of the fence, so to speak. Beltracchi, the German forger, told me that, after his arrest, he had seen an assortment of technical studies collected by the police and the prosecution. He remembered Martin’s well. “His reports contained the most accurate results. His reports were factually neutral and without unrealistic guesses.” By folding Martin into its staff, Sotheby’s has given itself a muscular chance to stamp out problems of attribution before they flare into spectacular, expensive affairs. But it’s hard not to feel, at the same time, that it has cornered a precious resource, at a moment when the art world needs him most.

    Martin spent much of last year setting up a new lab in what used to be a photo studio on the fifth floor of the Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan. Soon, he will also have a London facility, in the building where the Beatles once recorded A Taste of Honey for the BBC. The New York lab, one large room, is as white and aseptic as a dentist’s clinic. Many of the cabinets are still empty, and the desk surfaces often bear nothing apart from one red pack of Martin’s Dentyne Fire gum. Outside the lab, above the lead-lined double doors, is a warning light; if it’s on, so to is the giant x-ray fluorescence machine, and no one is allowed in.

    One Friday in mid-February, the room held only two items of art. A carved wooden chair sat on a counter; on a stand was a painting that, for reasons of confidentiality, may be described here only as “a late-19th century American work”. When a painting checks into the lab, it is first submitted to a visual examination in bright, white light; then the lamp is moved to one side, so that the light rakes over the surface at an angle, showing up restored or altered areas. The canvas in Martin’s lab was at the next stage; it had been photographed under ultraviolet and infrared, and then under x-rays to discover some of the painting’s chemical elements.

    On a computer, one of Martin’s two colleagues cycled through the images. Under infrared, the painting’s browns and yellows and greens turned into shades of grey, but no spectral underdrawings peered back out. (Not that underdrawings would have suggested anything about authenticity one way or another; they’d merely have been a further nugget of information to consider.) Mapped for lead by the x-ray fluorescence unit, the painting looked faded and streaked with dark rust; the streaks betrayed where restorers had perhaps applied touchups with modern, lead-free paint. Mapped for calcium, the painting showed yellow-green splashes where conservators had made repairs with a calcium carbonate filler.

    Not every object needs to move beyond these non-invasive phases. (At Orion, Martin was once able to unmask a fake Modigliani after seeing, under infrared, a faint grid, which had been drawn by a forger who wanted to guide his work.) If Martin has to disturb the painting, he will place it under a stereo microscope and, squinting through the two eyepieces, pick out a grain of paint with a scalpel. He demonstrated with a sample of phthalocyanine blue, a synthetic pigment he picked out of a box that held paint cakes of different colours. Working with the same steady, cautious manner in which he speaks, he teased out a particle smaller than the width of a human hair, flattened it gently, then nudged it on to a slim, small rectangle of metal, where it was held in place between two tiny diamonds.

    The metal plate then goes into the Fourier-transform infrared microscope, like a slide. The spectrometer pumps infrared light through the flecks of pigment; a computer analyses the light’s behavior and returns a tidy spectrum graph. Martin has looked at so many of these spectra that he recognises on sight the patterns thrown up by different pigments, but even if he didn’t, the computer could rifle through databases of the spectrum patterns of other known chemicals, find the nearest match, and tell Martin what, in this case, he already knew: that his sample was phthalocyanine blue.

    By a system of triage – sorting, for instance, for artists with a high incidence of being faked in the past, or for works accompanied by scientific analysis reports that are suspiciously long – only a small percentage of the tens of thousands of objects passing through Sotheby’s is diverted to the lab. Martin thinks of them as patients showing symptoms. Sometimes, like a doctor doing general checkups, he will tour the galleries at Sotheby’s just before a sale, reading every work with a handheld infrared camera. In the past year, his lab has stopped several lots from going to market, preventing possible disputes after the sale. In one case, a painting valued at $7m was removed from sale after the lab found that it had been completely and irretrievably overpainted by a restorer. “An appraiser would’ve said it’s worthless,” Martin said. “So it wasn’t sold.”

    The arduous process of Martin’s work divorces art from its aesthetic. It reduces compositions of great prestige or high beauty to their very particles; it frees Martin up to think of art as pure matter. In this way, he comes closer to the artist than anyone has before, often becoming only the second person to think as intensely about the materiality of the object, about the chemical nature of its pigments or the physical properties of its canvas. The art he analyses derives its worth from unique, flashing inspiration. His own talent, if anything, has more in common with the forger. It lies in his capacity to be unflashy but diligent – to perform a step time after time without a slackening of attention, to never leave a molecule unturned, to never conclude more about a work than what it tells him about itself.

    When Martin turned 13, his father gifted him a microscope, a chemistry kit, and art lessons – a splendid piece of foreshadowing. He used them all, but he was particularly attracted to art. The family lived in Baltimore, and whenever they visited Washington DC, Martin spent his time at the National Museum of Natural History, drawing the dioramas, while the others wandered the capital. His father worked in army intelligence. “As a child, I’m not sure I understood what he did. I do remember being in airports and trying to guess who was a spy,” Martin said. He devoured detective stories and loves them still, particularly Patricia Cornwell’s novels about Kay Scarpetta, the forensic pathologist. “We both examine patients that cannot speak their past,” he said.

    In a universe a twist away from ours, Martin might have become a forger himself. Late in his teens, he joined an art school where students were taught how to grind their own pigments and stretch their own canvases. For practice, he set up an easel in the Baltimore Museum of Art and copied the works he liked; he grew so accomplished that once, as he was leaving with his copy of William Merritt Chase’s Broken Jug, the museum director spotted him and asked if he was returning the painting to storage.

    “I was very good technically,” Martin said, “but like most art forgers, I didn’t have my own creative way of doing things.” He thought he’d become an illustrator of medical textbooks, but then heard about a conservation programme at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. The portfolio he submitted included his copy of the Chase, as well as of other painters – all at such a high level of craft, said Richard Wolbers, who taught him at Winterthur, “that we were blown away”. He was such a good copyist, in fact, that he was almost rejected. “Later, I heard that the committee worried that if they trained me to be a conservator and taught me all the science, I’d be a natural forger.”

    After Winterthur, Martin was hired by the Clark Art Institute, a museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to conserve paintings. A couple of years later, he set up the museum’s first conservation lab, filled with equipment that he bought or begged from chemistry departments in nearby universities. At the time, in 1990, the apparatus of analysis – the microscopes, the spectroscopes, the infrared cameras – was bulky, expensive and difficult to operate. Few museums had their own labs, Martin said. “The Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], the museums in San Francisco – none of them had the facilities.”

    In getting to know a painting, conservators in these museums relied first on the tactility of their craft – “listening to the sound of the swab on the canvas”, Martin said, or “feeling the pull of the swab in the varnish”. Most conservation departments owned microscopes, some perhaps even x-ray machines. But if they needed some serious technology – Fourier-transform infrared microscopes, say, or scanning electron microscopes – they could turn only to the lab in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or to those in universities. Even then, an expert was still needed to interpret the data. “Small museums really didn’t have any place to go. Some people took paintings to the vet to get them x-rayed.”

    Martin’s lab began by assisting conservators who had no equipment of their own. “If someone was trying to get a varnish off a painting and didn’t want to damage it by using a solvent that was too strong, they’d send me a sample,” he said. “I’d tell them: ‘It’s polyurethane. You’re not going to get it off.’ Or: ‘It’s shellac. You need to use alcohol.’” A conservator wondering if the strange sky in a landscape was overpaint – paint applied by later restorers – could mail Martin a tiny cross-section tweezed out of the work, so that he could examine it under a microscope. “We’d see the layers in the cross-section: varnish, varnish, varnish, then blue sky, then more varnish, then more sky. So we’d establish that the topmost layer of blue was overpaint.”

    In its materials, an artwork holds its biography, so inevitably, Martin became an arbiter of authenticity. Nearly all of the privately owned art labs in Europe and the US have been founded in the past decade – not coincidentally, around the time that the world’s multi-millionaires realised how hollow their lives had been without art. But in the 1990s, at Clark, and then again at Orion, which he founded in 2000, Martin was often the sole resource for collectors and merchants.

    Some of his stories from these years have the baroque pulpiness of Elmore Leonard plots. Martin narrates these with care; he is alive to the sensational aspects of his work, but by default, he wears an air of studious detachment. There were the two questionable gentlemen from Tel Aviv, who slipped a pair of paintings out of architects’ tubes, shook them open as if they were rugs, and asked him to confirm that they were Modiglianis. (They weren’t.) There was the client who sent Martin to test a painting at an auction house, claiming he wished to bid on it, but then also had Martin stop by a warehouse to assess “a horrible copy” of the same painting. (Martin now thinks the client wanted to know how close the fake was to the genuine work.) There were the two ferocious dogs chained near the front door of a house in Los Angeles, guarding the stolen Chinese sculptures held within. There was the collector who offered to fly Martin to an undisclosed location, have him picked up by a security detail, and bring him in to examine an old Mexican stele, a stone carving supposedly worth $50m. The night before his flight, Martin was unable to sleep, so he Googled the collector and found that he had recently been released from federal prison after serving time on weapons charges.

    Next morning, Martin called the collector and turned down the case.

    “Oh,” the collector said. “Did you read about the murders?”

    “No,” Martin said. “What murders?” The collector, it turned out, had once been implicated in the killings of two people over a matter of Mexican steles. Martin never got on that plane.

    The FBI first came to Martin in 1994. A suspicious number of works ascribed to the 19th-century artist William Aiken Walker, who often painted black sharecroppers in the American south, were emerging in the market. “They’d sell at really small country auctions for $5,000 or $10,000 – so low that nobody would pay for analysis,” Martin said. From the paintings, Martin sampled a yellow pigment called PY3, which had been manufactured in Germany and was not available to American artists until the late 1940s, decades after Walker died. Walker also used lead white paint, Martin found; the forger used zinc white. A former vitamin salesman named Charles Heller was eventually indicted for a spree of counterfeiting, but he pleaded guilty to lesser charges and served one year in prison.

    With even a little study, a con artist would know not to use zinc white; some forgers go on to become diligent researchers, accessing technical journals and case studies to learn what experts search for. Martin recalled a painting once referred to him, around 3.5 sq metres in size and dated to 1932. In a first round of study, he discovered nothing amiss. But the work’s provenance – its documented history of ownership – was shaky, so he ran a second pass under a microscope. For most of a day, he scanned the painting in dime-sized increments, until his eyes dried up. Was anything embedded in the paint: dust, or hair, or an insect wing? Did the dirt look as if it had been smeared on deliberately? Finally, embedded in a speckle of blue, he found a slim fibre; with a scalpel, he snipped it off and subjected it to infrared spectroscopy. The fibre turned out to be polypropylene. Perhaps someone had worn a polar fleece while painting the forgery?

    For a while, Martin cited this example in a two-day course he taught. Last year, though, he read a translation of Faussaire (or Forger), a French novel written in 2015 and containing a wealth of sound wisdom for forgers. “If you want to get hold of antique lead,” one character advises another, for instance, “then you can just pick up bits of it from the old buildings in Rome.” The same character warns of the dangers from “microparticles from your clothes … You must always work in an old smock. Never nylon or a modern apron.” Martin is convinced the detail came from his anecdote; it was one reason he decided to stop teaching his course altogether.

    As a crime, art forgery can seem trifling – less a sinister outrage than a half-complete Robin Hood jape that merely robs the rich. After Beltracchi’s arrest in 2010, the Frankfurter Allgemeine called art forgery “the most moral way to embezzle €16m”; Der Spiegel noted that, unlike crooked bankers, Beltracchi hadn’t swindled the common man. But the crime can have real victims, and Martin has met so many of them that he has developed a gentle bedside manner to break bad news. He has seen people who used the money set aside for their children’s education to buy a painting, only to find it to be fake. “So we aren’t just talking rich people. In some situations, it’s a person’s whole life.”

    The inflation of the art market, and its attendant litigiousness, imposes fierce pressures upon anyone called to judge the authenticity of an artwork. Martin’s harshest experience of this came during the bitter legal battle over the fate of the Knoedler gallery. The Knoedler, once New York’s oldest gallery, closed in 2011, days after Martin issued a report concluding that a Jackson Pollock it had sold for $17m was fake.

    The bogus Pollock was only the inauguration of a scandal. Over 15 years, Knoedler had sourced and sold 40 paintings ascribed to a range of leading modern artists: Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell, among others, earning roughly $80m in the process. When the ambiguity of the works’ provenance raised needles of suspicion, 10 buyers sued Knoedler and its director, Ann Freedman; all but one of these lawsuits have been settled out of court. In 2013, investigators learned that the forgeries had been painted by a Chinese immigrant, who was by then 73 years old, in his garage in Queens, and placed with Knoedler by an art dealer who pleaded guilty. Knoedler’s executives claimed they had no knowledge of the fraud, and argued that scholars had verified the works before sale.

    In at least four of the lawsuits, which carried on for years, the plaintiffs hired Martin to test the paintings they had purchased. He found them all to be forgeries. A purported Rothko from 1956, which sold for $8.3m, used a ground layer of white paint between the canvas and the oils; through that decade, though, Rothko had used a transparent ground layer. In an apparent Pollock, the artist seemed to have misspelled his own signature as “Pollok”. Further, in 16 Knoedler paintings he analysed, Martin found the same ground layer of white paint and other anachronistic pigments repeating themselves across the works of several artists, as if Motherwell, De Kooning and Rothko had all travelled forward in time, met in a bar, and swapped tubes of paint.

    Eventually, Martin was proved right; when the FBI raided the Queens garage, it even found the tubs of white that had coated the canvas in the fake Rothko. But, until then, the trials were a torrid experience. Knoedler recruited experts to attack Martin in court. “They went after him with a vengeance, saying he’d soiled the evidence, accidentally or on purpose,” said the lawyer John Cahill, who represented some of Martin’s clients. Knoedler’s attorneys served six subpoenas on Martin, to extract more than 8,000 documents and emails related to the case. Instead of being an expert witness, he was forced to defend himself – the care and soundness of his methods, his very character – in court.

    When Martin talks about the Knoedler trials, even the memory of the ordeal draws a look of horror on his face. “He’s a real boy scout, and his integrity means a lot to him, so he suffered,” Cahill said. It was an attempted impeachment of Martin’s whole career. “His entire power relies on being objective, on not being part of the party,” said Narayan Khandekar, who runs Harvard’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. “He comes under a lot of pressure, because people have a lot of money at stake on the outcome of his analyses. But he’s been very, very brave to stand up and stay stolidly on track with what he does.”

    Martin had always loved science for its ability to guide him in pursuit of truth, and he felt a deep distress when his objective facts were countered with dirty tricks and personal vilification. In 2016, after his clients settled with Knoedler, Martin found it difficult to return to work. He wanted to never have to provide expert testimony again, and to go away to paint for a while; he’d already primed a set of boards.

    “It was surreal, what happened to me,” he said. “No scientist should have to go to through this.” When, later that year, negotiations began for Sotheby’s to buy Orion, Martin was ready to be cocooned within a larger institution. He’d rather probe works before they hit the market, he decided, than go through the acrimonious aftermath of a sale even once more. Above his desk in Sotheby’s, Martin keeps pinned a pair of sketches of himself from his time in the Knoedler courtroom, as if to remind himself of what he has gratefully left behind.

    In conversation, Martin uses many homespun metaphors, but his favourite is that of the three-legged stool. Deciding the authorship of artworks, he says, relies on connoisseurship, technical analysis and provenance. He values the opinions of connoisseurs, considers them complementary to his own skills; his tests can definitively reveal if a painting is not by Da Vinci or Modigliani, but they are unable to affirm authorship, except in rare cases.

    Science has a habit, though, of showing up the sagacity of scholars. In a 1932 trial in Berlin – the first in which a forensic exam was used to scrutinise art – two connoisseurs squabbled about the authenticity of a set of 33 canvases, all purportedly by Vincent van Gogh, all sold by an art dealer named Otto Wacker. It took a chemist, Martin de Wild, to trace resins in the paint that Van Gogh had never used, and to prove the paintings fake. Since then, the science has improved, even as human judgment has remained the same, vulnerable to the potential thrill of discovering new work, and to market pressures. During the Knoedler trial, Cahill remembered, one expert admitted that he couldn’t tell one Rothko canvas from another, or indeed whether a Rothko had been hung upside-down or right side up.

    In any case, however fond he is of the three-legged stool, Martin may have to think soon of a different item of furniture. The humanities are in decline everywhere; in England, the last art history A-level was cut in 2016. The populace of connoisseurs is thinning out. “In British art now, for a major artist like George Stubbs, there’s no recognised figure that we can all go to and say: ‘Is this by George Stubbs or not?’ Because various specialists have died recently, and there’s no one to replace them,” Bendor Grosvenor, the art historian, said. Meanwhile, researchers at Rutgers University have developed an AI system that, in tests, detected forged paintings with 100% accuracy by scanning and comparing individual brushstrokes. One leg is growing longer, another growing shorter, the stool becoming decidedly imbalanced. And so, if the art market wants to beat back the threats posed by sophisticated forgeries – if it wants to preserve its financial vigour, rooted as it is so absolutely in the notion of authenticity – it will have to turn more and more to the resources of science.

    As a thought experiment, it is possible to envision the immaculate forgery – the one that defeats scientist and connoisseur alike. Our villain is a talented copyist, well practised in the style and the themes of his chosen artist. He is also a resourceful procurer of materials, able to rustle up every kind of age-appropriate canvas and frame, pigment and binder. He fits his forgery neatly into a chain of provenance – giving it the title of a now-lost work, or providing false documents to claim that it had been part of a well known private collection.

    In theory, if each of these steps is perfectly performed, there should be no way to expose the painting as fake. It will be a work of art in every way save one. But the world of today, the world in which the forgery is being created, is likely to fix itself in some form within the painting – as radioactive dust, perhaps, or as cat hair, or a stray polypropylene fibre. When that happens, only the scientist can hope to nab it.

AI art

    Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything.

    PICTURE LEE UNKRICH, one of Pixar’s most distinguished animators, as a seventh grader. He’s staring at an image of a train locomotive on the screen of his school’s first computer. Wow, he thinks. Some of the magic wears off, however, when Lee learns that the image had not appeared simply by asking for “a picture of a train.” Instead, it had to be painstakingly coded and rendered—by hard-working humans.

    Now picture Lee 43 years later, stumbling onto DALL-E, an artificial intelligence that generates original works of art based on human-supplied prompts that can literally be as simple as “a picture of a train.” As he types in words to create image after image, the wow is back. Only this time, it doesn’t go away. “It feels like a miracle,” he says. “When the results appeared, my breath was taken away and tears welled in my eyes. It’s that magical.”

    Our machines have crossed a threshold. All our lives, we have been reassured that computers were incapable of being truly creative. Yet, suddenly, millions of people are now using a new breed of AIs to generate stunning, never-before-seen pictures. Most of these users are not, like Lee Unkrich, professional artists, and that’s the point: They do not have to be. Not everyone can write, direct, and edit an Oscar winner like Toy Story 3 or Coco, but everyone can launch an AI image generator and type in an idea. What appears on the screen is astounding in its realism and depth of detail. Thus the universal response: Wow. On four services alone—Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Artbreeder, and DALL-E—humans working with AIs now cocreate more than 20 million images every day. With a paintbrush in hand, artificial intelligence has become an engine of wow.

    Because these surprise-generating AIs have learned their art from billions of pictures made by humans, their output hovers around what we expect pictures to look like. But because they are an alien AI, fundamentally mysterious even to their creators, they restructure the new pictures in a way no human is likely to think of, filling in details most of us wouldn’t have the artistry to imagine, let alone the skills to execute. They can also be instructed to generate more variations of something we like, in whatever style we want—in seconds. This, ultimately, is their most powerful advantage: They can make new things that are relatable and comprehensible but, at the same time, completely unexpected.

    So unexpected are these new AI-generated images, in fact, that—in the silent awe immediately following the wow—another thought occurs to just about everyone who has encountered them: Human-made art must now be over. Who can compete with the speed, cheapness, scale, and, yes, wild creativity of these machines? Is art yet another human pursuit we must yield to robots? And the next obvious question: If computers can be creative, what else can they do that we were told they could not?

    I have spent the past six months using AIs to create thousands of striking images, often losing a night’s sleep in the unending quest to find just one more beauty hidden in the code. And after interviewing the creators, power users, and other early adopters of these generators, I can make a very clear prediction: Generative AI will alter how we design just about everything. Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology.

    What AIGenerated Art Really Means for Human Creativity

    IT IS NO exaggeration to call images generated with the help of AI cocreations. The sobering secret of this new power is that the best applications of it are the result not of typing in a single prompt but of very long conversations between humans and machines. Progress for each image comes from many, many iterations, back-and-forths, detours, and hours, sometimes days, of teamwork - all on the back of years of advancements in machine learning.

    AI image generators were born from the marriage of two separate technologies. One was a historical line of deep learning neural nets that could generate coherent realistic images, and the other was a natural language model that could serve as an interface to the image engine. The two were combined into a language-driven image generator. Researchers scraped the internet for all images that had adjacent text, such as captions, and used billions of these examples to connect visual forms to words, and words to forms. With this new combination, human users could enter a string of words—the prompt—that described the image they sought, and the prompt would generate an image based on those words.

    Scientists now at Google invented the diffusion computational models that are at the core of image generators today, but the company has been so concerned about what people might do with them that it still has not opened its own experimental generators, Imagen and Parti, to the public. (Only employees can try them, and with tight guidelines on what can be requested.) It is no coincidence, then, that the three most popular platforms for image generators right now are three startups with no legacy to protect. Midjourney is a bootstrapping startup launched by David Holz, who based the generator in an emerging community of artists. The interface to the AI is a noisy Discord server; all the work and prompts were made public from the start. DALL-E is a second-gen product of the nonprofit OpenAI, funded by Elon Musk and others. Stable Diffusion appeared on the scene in August 2022, created by Emad Mostaque, a European entrepreneur. It’s an open source project, with the added benefit that anyone can download its software and run it locally on their own desktop. More than the others, Stable Diffusion has unleashed AI image generators into the wild.

    Why are so many people so excited to play with these AIs? Many images are being created for the same reason that humans have always made most art: because the images are pretty and we want to look at them. Like flames in a campfire, the light patterns are mesmerizing. They never repeat themselves; they surprise, again and again. They depict scenes no one has witnessed before or can even imagine, and they are expertly composed. It’s a similar pleasure to exploring a video game world, or paging through an art book. There is a real beauty to their creativity, and we stare much in the way we might appreciate a great art show at a museum. In fact, viewing a parade of generated images is very much like visiting a personal museum—but in this case, the walls are full of art we ask for. And the perpetual novelty and surprise of the next image hardly wanes. Users may share the gems they discover, but my guess is that 99 percent of the 20 million images currently generated each day will only ever be viewed by a single human—their cocreator.

    Like any art, the images can also be healing. People spend time making strange AI pictures for the same reason they might paint on Sundays, or scribble in a journal, or shoot a video. They use the media to work out something in their own lives, something that can’t be said otherwise. I’ve seen images depicting what animal heaven might look like, created in response to the death of a beloved dog. Many images explore the representation of intangible, spiritual realms, presumably as a way to think about them. “A huge portion of the entire usage is basically art therapy,” Holz, the Midjourney creator, tells me. “The images are not really aesthetically appealing in a universal sense but are appealing, in a very deep way, within the context of what’s going on in people’s lives.” The machines can be used to generate fantasies of all types. While the hosted services prohibit porn and gore, anything goes on the desktop versions, as it might in Photoshop.

    AI-generated pictures can be utilitarian too. Say you are presenting a report on the possibility of recycling hospital plastic waste into construction materials and you want an image of a house made out of test tubes. You could search stock photo markets for a usable image made by a human artist. But a unique assignment like this rarely yields a preexisting picture, and even if found, its copyright status could be dubious or expensive. It is cheaper, faster, and probably far more appropriate to generate a unique, personalized image for your report in a few minutes that you can then insert into your slides, newsletter, or blog - and the copyright ownership is yours (for now). I have been using these generators myself to cocreate images for my own slide presentations.

    In an informal poll of power users, I found that only about 40 percent of their time is spent seeking utilitarian images. Most AI images are used in places where there were no images previously. They usually do not replace an image created by a human artist. They may be created, for example, to illustrate a text-only newsletter by someone without artistic talent themselves, or the time and budget to hire someone. Just as mechanical photography did not kill human illustrations a century ago, but rather significantly expanded the places in which images appeared, so too do AI image generators open up possibilities for more art, not less. We’ll begin to see contextually generated images predominately in spaces that are currently blank, like emails, text messages, blogs, books, and social media.

    This new art resides somewhere between painting and photography. It lives in a possibility space as large as painting and drawing—as huge as human imagination. But you move through the space like a photographer, hunting for discoveries. Tweaking your prompts, you may arrive at a spot no one has visited before, so you explore this area slowly, taking snapshots as you step through. The territory might be a subject, or a mood, or a style, and it might be worth returning to. The art is in the craft of finding a new area and setting yourself up there, exercising good taste and the keen eye of curation in what you capture. When photography first appeared, it seemed as if all the photographer had to do was push the button. Likewise, it seems that all a person has to do for a glorious AI image is push the button. In both cases, you get an image. But to get a great one - a truly artistic one - well, that’s another matter.

    What AIGenerated Art Really Means for Human Creativity

    ACCESSIBLE AI IMAGE generators are not even a year old, but already it is evident that some people are much better at creating AI images than others. Although they’re using the same programs, those who have accumulated thousands of hours with the algorithms can magically produce images that are many times better than the average person’s. The images by these masters have a striking coherence and visual boldness that is normally overwhelmed by the flood of details the AIs tend to produce. That is because this is a team sport: The human artist and the machine artist are a duet. And it requires not just experience but also lots of hours and work to produce something useful. It is as if there is a slider bar on the AI: At one end is Maximum Surprise, and at the other end Maximum Obedience. It is very easy to get the AI to surprise you. (And that is often all we ask of it.) But it is very difficult to get the AI to obey you. As Mario Klingemann, who makes his living selling NFTs of his AI-generated artwork, says, “If you have a very specific image in mind, it always feels like you are up against a forcefield.” Commands like “shade this area,” “enhance this part,” and “tone it down” are obeyed reluctantly. The AIs have to be persuaded.

    Current versions of DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney limit prompts to about the length of a long tweet. Any longer and the words muddle together; the image turns to mush. That means that behind every fabulous image lies a short magic spell that summons it. It begins with the first incantation. How you say it matters. Your immediate results materialize in a grid of four to nine images. From that batch of pictures, you variate and mutate offspring images. Now you have a brood. If they look promising, begin to tweak the spell to nudge it in new directions as it births more generations of images. Multiply the group again and again as you search for the most compelling composition. Do not despair if it takes dozens of generations. Think like the AI; what does it like to hear? Whisper instructions that have worked in the past, and add them to the prompt. Repeat. Change the word order to see whether it likes that. Remember to be specific. Replicate until you have amassed a whole tribe of images that seem to have good bones and potential. Now cull out all but a few select. Be merciless. Begin outpainting the most promising images. That means asking the AI to extend the image out in certain directions beyond the current borders. Erase those portions that are not working. Suggest replacements to be done by the AI with more incantations (called inpainting). If the AI is not comprehending your hints, try spells used by others. When the AI has gone as far as it can, migrate the image to Photoshop for final tailoring. Present it as if you have done nothing, even though it is not uncommon for a distinctive image to require 50 steps.

    Behind this new magecraft is the art of prompting. Each artist or designer develops a way of persuading an AI to yield its best by evolving their prompts. Let’s call these new artists AI whisperers, or prompt artists, or promptors. The promptors work almost as directors, guiding the work of their alien collaborators toward a unified vision. The convoluted process required to tease a first-rate picture out of an AI is quickly emerging as a fine-art skill. Almost daily, new tools arrive to make prompting easier, better. PromptBase is a market for promptors to sell prompts that create simple images such as emoticons, logos, icons, avatars, and game weapons. It’s like clip art, but instead of selling the art, they sell the prompt that generates the art. And unlike fixed clip art, it is easy to alter and tweak the art to fit your needs, and you can extract multiple versions again and again. Most of these prompts sell for a couple bucks, which is a fair price, given how much trouble it is to hone a prompt on your own.

    Above-average prompts not only include the subject but also describe the lighting, the point of view, the emotion evoked, the color palette, the degree of abstraction, and perhaps a reference picture to imitate. As with other artistic skills, there are now courses and guidebooks to train the budding promptor in the finer points of prompting. One fan of DALL-E 2, Guy Parsons, put together a free Prompt Book, jammed with tips on how to go beyond the wow and get images you can actually use. One example: If your prompt includes specific terms such as “Sigma 75 mm camera lens,” Parson says, then the AI doesn’t just create that specific look made by the lens; “it more broadly alludes to ‘the kind of photo where the lens appears in the description,’” which tends to be more professional and therefore yields higher-quality images. It’s this kind of multilevel mastery that produces spectacular results.

    For technical reasons, even if you repeat the exact same prompt, you are unlikely to get the same image. There is a randomly generated seed for each image, without which it is statistically impossible to replicate. Additionally, the same prompt given to different AI engines produces different images—Midjourney’s are more painterly, while DALL-E is optimized for photographic realism. Still, not every promptor wishes to share their secrets. The natural reaction upon seeing a particularly brilliant image is to ask, “What spell did you use?” What was the prompt? Robyn Miller, cocreator of the legendary game Myst and a pioneering digital artist, has been posting an AI-generated image every day. “When people ask me what prompt I used,” he says, “I have been surprised that I don’t want to tell them. There is an art to this, and that has also surprised me.” Klingemann is famous for not sharing his prompts. “I believe all images already exist,” he says. “You don’t make them, you find them. If you get somewhere by clever prompting, I do not see why I want to invite everybody else there.”

    It seems obvious to me that promptors are making true art. What is a consummate movie director—like Hitchcock, like Kurosawa—but a promptor of actors, actions, scenes, ideas? Good image-generator promptors are engaged in a similar craft, and it is no stretch for them to try and sell their creations in art galleries or enter them into art contests. This summer, Jason Allen won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair Fine Art competition for a large, space-opera-themed canvas that was signed “Jason Allen via Midjourney.” It’s a pretty cool picture that would’ve taken some effort to make no matter what tools were used. Usually images in the digital art category are created using Photoshop and Blender-type tools that enable the artist to dip into libraries of digitized objects, textures, and parts, which are then collaged together to form the scene. They are not drawn; these digital images are unapologetically technological assemblages. Collages are a venerable art form, and using AI to breed a collage is a natural evolution. If a 3D-rendered collage is art, then a Midjourney picture is art. As Allen told Vice, “I have been exploring a special prompt. I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine-tuning and curating my gens, I chose my top 3 and had them printed on canvas.”

    Of course, Allen’s blue ribbon set off alarm bells. To some critics, this was a sign of the end times, the end of art, the end of human artists. Predictable lamentations ensued, with many pointing out how unfair it felt for struggling artists. The AIs are not only going to take over and kill us all—they are, apparently, going to make the world’s best art while doing so.

    What AI Generated Art Really Means for Human Creativity

    AT ITS BIRTH, every new technology ignites a Tech Panic Cycle. There are seven phases:

    Don’t bother me with this nonsense. It will never work. OK, it is happening, but it’s dangerous, ’cause it doesn’t work well. Wait, it works too well. We need to hobble it. Do something! This stuff is so powerful that it’s not fair to those without access to it. Now it’s everywhere, and there is no way to escape it. Not fair. I am going to give it up. For a month. Let’s focus on the real problem—which is the next current thing.

    Today, in the case of AI image generators, an emerging band of very tech-savvy artists and photographers are working out of a Level 3 panic. In a reactive, third-person, hypothetical way, they fear other people (but never themselves) might lose their jobs. Getty Images, the premier agency selling stock photos and illustrations for design and editorial use, has already banned AI-generated images; certain artists who post their work on DeviantArt have demanded a similar ban. There are well-intentioned demands to identify AI art with a label and to segregate it from “real” art.

    Beyond that, some artists want assurances that their own work not be used to train the AIs. But this is typical of Level 3 panic—in that it is, at best, misguided. The algorithms are exposed to 6 billion images with attendant text. If you are not an influential artist, removing your work makes zero difference. A generated picture will look exactly the same with or without your work in the training set. But even if you are an influential artist, removing your images still won't matter. Because your style has affected the work of others—the definition of influence—your influence will remain even if your images are removed. Imagine if we removed all of Van Gogh’s pictures from the training set. The style of Van Gogh would still be embedded in the vast ocean of images created by those who have imitated or been influenced by him.

    Styles are summoned via prompts, as in: “in the style of Van Gogh.” Some unhappy artists would rather their names be censored and not permitted to be used as a prompt. So even if their influence can’t be removed, you can’t reach it because their name is off-limits. As we know from all previous attempts at censoring, these kinds of speech bans are easy to work around; you can misspell a name, or simply describe the style in words. I found, for example, that I could generate detailed black-and-white natural landscape photographs with majestic lighting and prominent foregrounds—without ever using Ansel Adams’ name.

    There is another motivation for an artist to remove themselves. They might fear that a big corporation will make money off of their work, and their contribution won’t be compensated. But we don’t compensate human artists for their influence on other human artists. Take David Hockney, one of the highest-paid living artists. Hockney often acknowledges the great influence other living artists have on his work. As a society, we don’t expect him (or others) to write checks to his influences, even though he could. It’s a stretch to think AIs should pay their influencers. The “tax” that successful artists pay for their success is their unpaid influence on the success of others.

    What’s more, lines of influence are famously blurred, ephemeral, and imprecise. We are all influenced by everything around us, to degrees we are not aware of and certainly can’t quantify. When we write a memo or snap a picture with our phone, to what extent have we been influenced—directly or indirectly—by Ernest Hemingway or Dorothea Lange? It’s impossible to unravel our influences when we create something. It is likewise impossible to unravel the strands of influence in the AI image universe. We could theoretically construct a system to pay money earned by the AI to artists in the training set, but we’d have to recognize that this credit would be made arbitrarily (unfairly) and that the actual compensatory amounts per artist in a pool of 6 billion shares would be so trivial as to be nonsensical.

    In the coming years, the computational engine inside an AI image generator will continue to expand and improve until it becomes a central node in whatever we do visually. It will have literally seen everything and know all styles, and it will paint, imagine, and generate just about anything we need. It will become a visual search engine, and a visual encyclopedia with which to understand images, and the primary tool we use with our most important sense, our sight. Right now, every neural net algorithm running deep in the AIs relies on massive amounts of data—thus the billions of images needed to train it. But in the next decade, we’ll have operational AI that relies on far fewer examples to learn, perhaps as few as 10,000. We’ll teach even more powerful AI image generators how to paint by showing them thousands of carefully curated, highly selected images of existing art, and when this point comes, artists of all backgrounds will be fighting one another to be included in the training set. If an artist is in the main pool, their influence will be shared and felt by all, while those not included must overcome the primary obstacle for any artist: not piracy, but obscurity.

    AS SOON AS 2D generative algorithms were born, experimenters rushed to figure out what was next. Jensen Huang, the ambitious cofounder of Nvidia, believes the next generation of chips will generate 3D worlds for the metaverse—“the next computing platform,” as he calls it. In a single week this past September, three novel text-to-3D/video image generators were announced: GET3D (Nvidia), Make-A-Video (Meta), and DreamFusion (Google). The expansion is happening faster than I can write. Amazing as frameable 2D pictures produced by AI are, outsourcing their creation is not going to radically change the world. We are already at peak 2D. The genuine superpower being released by AI image generators will be in producing 3D images and video.

    A future prompt for a 3D engine might look something like this: “Create the messy bedroom of a teenager, with posters on the wall, an unmade bed, and afternoon sunlight streaming through closed blinds.” And in seconds, a fully realized room is born, the closet door open and all the dirty clothes on the floor—in full 3D. Then, tell the AI: “Make a 1970s kitchen with refrigerator magnets and all the cereal boxes in the pantry. In full volumetric detail. One that you could walk through. Or that could be photographed in a video.” Games crammed with alternatively rendered worlds and full-length movies decked out with costumes and sets have eternally been out of reach for individual artists, who remain under the power of large dollars. AI could make games, metaverses, and movies as quick to produce as novels, paintings, and songs. Pixar films in an instant! Once millions of amateurs are churning out billions of movies and endless metaverses at home, they will hatch entirely new media genres—virtual tourism, spatial memes—with their own native geniuses. And when big dollars and professionals are equipped with these new tools, we’ll see masterpieces at a level of complexity never seen before.

    But even the vast universes of 3D worlds and video are not vast enough to contain the disruption that AI image generators have initiated. DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are just the first versions of generative machines of all types. Their prime function, pattern recognition, is almost a reflex for human brains, something we accomplish without conscious thinking. It is at the core of almost everything we do. Our thinking is more complex than just pattern recognition, of course; dozens of cognitive functions animate our brain. But this single type of cognition, synthesized in machines (and the only cognition we have synthesized so far), has taken us further than we first thought—and will probably continue to advance further than we now think. When an AI notices a pattern, it stores it in a compressed way. Round objects are placed in a “roundness” direction, red objects in another direction for “redness,” and so on. Maybe it notices “treeness” and “foodness” too. It abstracts out billions of directions, or patterns. Upon reflection—or training—it notices that the overlap of these four qualities produces “appleness,” yet another direction. Furthermore, it links all these noticed directions with word patterns, which can also share overlapping qualities. So when a human requests a picture of an apple via the word “apple,” the AI paints an image with those four (or more) qualities. It is not assembling bits of existing pictures; rather, it is “imagining” a new picture with the appropriate qualities. It sort of remembers a picture that does not exist but could.

    This same technique can be used—in fact, is already being used, in very early forms—to find new drugs. The AI is trained on a database of all the molecules we know to be active medicines, noticing patterns in their chemical structures. Then the AI is asked to “remember” or imagine molecules we have never thought of that seem to be similar to the molecules that work. Wonderfully, some of them actually do work, just as an AI image of a requested imaginary fruit can look remarkably like a fruit. This is the real transformation, and soon enough, the same technique will be used to help design automobiles, draft laws, write code, compose soundtracks, assemble worlds to entertain and instruct, and cocreate the stuff we do as work. We should take to heart the lessons we’ve learned so far from AI image generators because there will soon be more pattern-seeking AIs in all realms of life. The panic cycle we presently face is simply a good rehearsal for the coming shift.

    What we know about AI generators so far is that they work best as partners. The nightmare of a rogue AI taking over is just not happening. That vision is fundamentally a misreading of history. In the past, technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do. For instance, the automatic generation of pictures by a machine - called a camera - was feared in the 1800s because it would surely put portrait painters out of business. But the historian Hans Rooseboom could find only a single portrait painter from that time who felt unemployed by photography. (Photography actually inspired a resurgence of painting later in that century.) Closer to our time, we might have expected professional occupations in photography to fall as the smartphone swallowed the world and everybody became a photographer—with 95 million uploads to Instagram a day and counting. Yet the number of photography professionals in the US has been slowly rising, from 160,000 in 2002 (before camera phones) to 230,000 in 2021.

    Instead of fearing AI, we are better served thinking about what it teaches us. And the most important thing AI image generators teach us is this: Creativity is not some supernatural force. It is something that can be synthesized, amplified, and manipulated. It turns out that we didn’t need to achieve intelligence in order to hatch creativity. Creativity is more elemental than we thought. It is independent of consciousness. We can generate creativity in something as dumb as a deep learning neural net. Massive data plus pattern recognition algorithms seems sufficient to engineer a process that will surprise and aid us without ceasing.

    Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is the stunning, field-changing, world-altering rearrangement that a major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, the discovery of DNA, or Picasso’s Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special, and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way, far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.

    To connect with a human deeply will always require a Creative human in the loop. This high creativity, however, should not be confused with the creativity that most human artists, designers, and inventors produce day to day. Mundane, ordinary, lowercase creativity is what we get with a great new logo design or a cool book cover, a nifty digital wearable or the latest must-have fashion, or the set design for our favorite sci-fi serial. Most human art, past and present, is lowercase. And lowercase creativity is exactly what the AI generators deliver.

    But this is huge. For the first time in history, humans can conjure up everyday acts of creativity on demand, in real time, at scale, for cheap. Synthetic creativity is a commodity now. Ancient philosophers will turn in their graves, but it turns out that to make creativity—to generate something new—all you need is the right code. We can insert it into tiny devices that are presently inert, or we can apply creativity to large statistical models, or embed creativity in drug discovery routines. What else can we use synthetic creativity for? We may feel a little bit like medieval peasants who are being asked, “What would you do if you had the power of 250 horses at your fingertips?” We dunno. It’s an extraordinary gift. What we do know is we now have easy engines of creativity, which we can aim into stale corners that have never seen novelty, innovation, or the wow of creative change. Against the background of everything that breaks down, this superpower can help us extend the wow indefinitely. Used properly, we can make a small dent in the universe.

Paul Gauguin

    Paul Gauguin, who was born in 1848 and died in 1903 aged 54, is the giant of post-impressionism whose life is always understood as having been as adventurous as the art he created.But is it time for a reappraisal?

    The key to understanding this rebellious, charismatic man and his painting is knowing he spent his first seven years in Peru. His grandmother claimed to be descended from Inca kings. Gauguin’s consciousness was formed in the inky caverns of the family palace, lit by silver candlesticks as high and as heavy as a man. Outdoors he ran wild through a magical-realist Eden, prowled by jaguars and curlicued by snakes. Snow-topped volcanoes spewed fire. Earthquakes made the earth dance and the ships in the port of Iquique jump in the air. All his life he sought out the freedom of wild places to match his Peru-of-the-mind.

    His mother took him to France aged seven to be educated in a Roman Catholic seminary that was dedicated to training priests. Grey skies. Clothes. Rules. He couldn’t speak French. Small for his age, stocky and swarthy, he was bullied and teased. “I am a wild thing from Peru,” he yelled, hurling himself into fights. It pushed him into the role of misfit rebel for life.

    But my research discovered the profound effect the seminary had on his inner life. Every morning Gauguin recited the school catechism, beginning: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Forty years later in the depths of despair after a failed suicide attempt, he painted his enormous testamentary masterpiece, calling it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? He had been pondering those questions all that time. This connection between the school catechism and his most important painting has not to my knowledge been made before.

    His mother then enrolled the rebellious teenager into the merchant navy. He knocked about the world, lost his virginity to an opera singer in Brazil. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, his ship was used to transport prisoners of war. How could a self-declared wild thing partake in human imprisonment? He jumped ship in Toulon and made his way up war-torn France to Paris where his mother was dead and her house destroyed.

    Her lover fixed Gauguin up with a job in the Paris stock exchange. He was astonishingly successful at making money and became famous for taking taxis to work and keeping them ticking until he was ready to go home. But the outsider remained the outsider. He didn’t live on one of Haussmann’s grand new boulevards but in an artisan quarter. He spent all his wealth on impressionist paintings. Now, at last, in 1873, aged 25 and married to a Danish woman, he started to paint in his spare time, copying the impressionist canvases he bought. After six years he’d exhibited in the Salon and the fourth impressionist exhibition.

    But the stock market crash of 1882/3 wiped Gauguin out. His wife went back to Denmark, taking their five children plus Gauguin’s impressionist pictures. Selling them supported her and the family for years, with the surprising result that Scandinavia had some good early impressionist collections.

    Alone, down and out in Paris, Gauguin hit rock bottom. Pasting up posters for five francs a day got him a rail ticket to France’s wildest, and cheapest, corner: Brittany. “Authentic” is a word Gauguin used often and it’s no coincidence that he found his individual voice here, dropping impressionism’s formula of cosy subjects, realistic perspective and prismatic staccato brushstrokes, instead playing with colour and structure emotionally, constructing sweeping colour fields within non-realistic — indeed often impossible — perspective. Freed by this wild place, his pictures were taking on the quality of the dream.

    The Panama Canal Company offered labourers a paid passage to the continent he yearned for but within a fortnight the company went bust and he was out of a job. On the voyage home he paused for a time in Martinique, which recalled his childhood paradise in Peru. However, malaria and dysentery reduced him to “a skeleton too weak to whisper”. He borrowed money for a return passage to France.

    When Vincent van Gogh saw the Martinique paintings, he became obsessed with the idea of painting with Gauguin. Vincent’s brother, Theo, offered Gauguin 150 francs a month to live with Vincent in the Yellow House in Arles. Vincent painted his Sunflowers to decorate Gauguin’s bedroom “like a huge welcoming bouquet”.

    Nine weeks’ painting together (1888) was fruitful artistically but Vincent’s growing mania culminated in the severing of his ear. Gauguin is sometimes accused of cutting it off but the evidence doesn’t stack up: the first person Vincent asked for in hospital was Gauguin. His first letter, full of affection, was written to Gauguin. Up to Vincent’s death his many letters both to Gauguin and to his brother never blame Gauguin, only himself. Periodically Vincent’s letters propose they live together again. Gauguin had been terrified but let him down gently. Long after Vincent’s death, when Gauguin was living in Polynesia, he sent to France for sunflower seeds, planted them and painted them “in memory of my gentle friend Vincent”.

    Still skint, still dreaming of parrots and jungles, in 1891 Gauguin wangled a free passage to the French colony of Tahiti as its first official artist. On arrival he was shocked by the brutality of French colonialism. A few thousand indigenous people were subdued and exploited by some 400 soldiers, police and administrators while missionary priests destroyed their religion and culture.

    Soon Gauguin abandoned the linen-suited French community to live with the Polynesians as a Polynesian in Mataiea, a coastal hamlet. He wrote articles for the local newspaper that were critical of the French administration. This led to starting his own newspaper devoted to exposing the corruption and oppression by local officials. He petitioned the government in Paris for a fairer deal for the islanders.

    The French hated him, the islanders loved him. Journalism led to activism. Soon he was widely sought to represent Polynesians in the French colonial courts. His greatest legal victory was on the island of Hiva Oa, where all the island children were compelled to attend French Catholic boarding school until the age of 14. The students were only allowed to speak French and only taught western culture and religion, with the aim of erasing the Polynesian language, culture, familial ties and national identity in one generation. (Right now, Russia is doing this to kidnapped Ukrainian children and China is doing the same to the children of Tibet.)

    The children’s parents were distraught. Gauguin discovered a minor French law that only children living within 4km of a school need attend it. Mass relocation to the countryside ensued. Language, culture and family unity survived on the island, and Gauguin became a blood brother.

    Gauguin’s name today is overshadowed by his reputation as a bad boy who spread syphilis to under-age girls in the South Seas. The age of consent in France and the colonies at the time was 13. It varied in the US between 10 and 12, except in Delaware where it was 7; in Russia it was 10, Australia 12. Today in many European countries it is still 14. As I came to the end of writing my book in June 2023, Japan raised the age of consent from 13. I do not quote these statistics to excuse. They disgust me, but they provide context.

    Gauguin was not breaking the law or, indeed, doing anything unusual. He had three serious relationships. Tehemana, the best known, has long been supposed to be 13 but a recently discovered birth certificate shows she was 15. Within these relationships Gauguin followed local custom. Sexually experienced girls were offered by their families. No money changed hands.

    After a couple of weeks, the girl went home to decide if she wanted to return to her new husband. Tehemana came back. There was no great financial advantage: Gauguin in his beach hut was no richer than the average villager. There was no control or coercion: Tehemana, like his later lovers, was free to come and go, and to take other lovers. When Gauguin went to Paris to show his pictures, Tehemana remarried. On his return she went to live with him for a couple of weeks, for old times’ sake. It argues affection.

    There remains the question of syphilis. Gauguin died in 1903 on the tiny island of Hiva Oa where he spent the last three years of his life. In 2000 the mayor decided to restore Gauguin’s hut in time for the centenary of his death. Excavations turned up four teeth. Were they Gauguin’s? The teeth embarked on a global journey. The University of Illinois Chicago College of Dentistry tested pulpal tissue against samples from a known grandson of Gauguin’s and from the corpse of his father, who was buried in Tierra del Fuego and exhumed for the purpose. This established DNA both up and down the family tree.

    Strontium testing by the Human Genome Project, Cambridge, and the University of Cape Town proved consistent with early childhood in western Peru. The Field Museum, Chicago, tested for cadmium, mercury and arsenic, the standard treatment for syphilis at the time. No traces were found. The conclusion is that it is highly unlikely Gauguin had syphilis. Certainly, the doctors who treated him on Tahiti and Hiva Oa, where syphilis was rife and they knew the disease all too well, were of the opinion he did not.

    It has been 30 years since the last full biography of Gauguin was published and there have been many new discoveries since then. The teeth. Tehemana’s birth certificate. The resurfacing in 2020 of the 200-page manuscript of Gauguin’s biographical written work, Avant et après. Finally, in 2021, the long-awaited completion of the Catalogue raisonné of Gauguin’s work. After all that time, a new picture of the artist is emerging.



Other Resources

  • Books About Art
  • Anecdotes About Art
  • Quotations About Art

Go to Index page