Tags:
Journalism of Courage
There’s something about fake art works that has gripped our imagination. Artists are getting more column space than serious analysis of their work ever did, after the recent revelation of large-scale production of fakes, all paintings. What’s it about fakes? Do they give us a vicarious thrill?
Let me begin with my first foray into one of Delhi’s dens of forgery, a framer’s basement shop. The shop echoed with the blaze, cock-a-snock nature of the activities. On the walls, cheerfully hung for everyone to see, were works, so to say, from Somnath Hore, Arpita Singh and Paresh Maity, amongst others. The green-room specialists had diversified into drawings as well. Its walls were a bit like a test for colour-blindness, when the patient has to pick and choose dots of blue and green. The faux masterpieces were surrounded by the faux offerings of many lesser-known persons, dead or alive, real or fictitious. You got to identify who was who, apart from the signatures. I am almost inclined to suggest it was all created by a skilled human colour Xerox machine. It was probably one of the most fascinating moments I have spent anywhere looking at art. The impact of this cottage industry depends on where you stand in the long chain of makers, buyers and sellers.
For the artist, it’s like belonging to an exclusive club, given how few painters’ works are ever forged. Of course, the first reaction would be to fight and claim back the images. Some painters, like Anjolie Ela Menon, have been putting their thumbprints on the back of their works to authenticate it, while others have been encouraging buyers to directly approach them or the few galleries sanctioned by them. As yet, no one seems to have moved away from painting to other media which may be less attractive in the market.
Yet, within the recesses of the human mind, is it flattering to receive this kind of cocky adulation? Surely, artists can’t be completely devoid of satisfaction to note the popular demand for their work. How would any artist, 10 years later, react to having breached the glass wall between art making and the wider masses, and having forged (no pun) a connection? If one painter saw her work minutes apart as a prop in a TV serial and in her own home, then surely she could not escape the high of knowing her painting had begun to symbolise some kind of connoisseurship? How does that feel?
If by some terrible stroke of bad luck, someone has bought the works at their original market prices, taking them to be real, it’s pure heartbreak. And for a gallery that genuinely got conned, it’s a loss of credibility.
But if paintings have been bought knowing they are forgeries, at low rates, to show off to friends and peers, where does that leave the owners? Now that forging art is widely reported, do they feel worried that they will be caught, or that one of their friends will be skilled enough to compare it with the originals and smell a rat? It is really the owners who have consciously held works of forgery that draw my curiosity. What are such people actually telling us? Perhaps that art is much more a part of upward mobility than ever before.
