Why Forged Art Matters

Vermeer, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani. These are names that we all applaud for, tilt our heads and ears towards, and spend four years in a library cubicle writing about. We celebrate them so much that we are willing to queue up outside grand buildings, give away twenty quid just so that we can see them ourselves. 

So, what would happen if they were all fake? After all that effort,waiting, and yearning, you discover all those paintings, so-called masters, were in fact made by some unknown in a forgotten place, with perhaps an iota of artistic talent. 

Such was Elmyr de Hory. Birthed as Elemer Hoffman and later fashioned into Elmyr de Hory, he committed the biggest art fraud of the 20th century reportedly selling over 1000 fakes to galleries and collectors around the world. 

Everyone was fooled by Hory. His forgeries only came to light by his own accord when he spilled the secret to his neighbour. And those only speak to his artistic forgeries — his persona was an intricately spun web of tall tales. His death did not even bring the confession of his truth: his tombstone uses his made-up name and a birth year that made him five years younger. When alive, he didn’t hide away in an attic ashamedly making and profiting off his fakes. De Hory did the opposite entirely; he lived the life of a bon vivant. He was something of a socialite: eccentric and charismatic. 

So Elmyr de Hory was a fraud who should have been hauled from his home in Ibiza and locked away. But I don’t believe that. Hory’s forgeries achieved something brilliant. They showed up the art market for all its insipidity. He humiliated the ‘experts’ — those consecrated individuals and establishments who we allow to determine the attribution and value of our artworks. Experts whose opinions we blindly accept as truth. His  forgeries drew the curtains, turned off the music and exposed the art market for what it was: A performance of grandiosity and pretension. Blind faith and guessing dressed up as divine expertise, capable of assessing and analysing an artwork by simply looking at it with a squinted eye and magnifying glass. 

Hory makes a fool of this already foolish business His forgeries make us reassess. Do we value art, sing its praises, and experience it like a catholic knelt in a pulpit simply because it is housed in our institutions, fenced off and sheltered under glass shields? Have we lost so much of our critical thinking to the point that we blindly consume and revere anything with a verified tick? The success of Hory’s forgeries certainly seems to indicate that was the case. 

So these forgeries embarrassed us. And rightly so. 

They show that our necessity for ‘real, authentic’ art, that comes from a master, isn’t some shining example of our cultivated cultural capital. It comes from an incessant yearning for ‘clout’. It is part of an entrenched belief that value can only be given by something of value. Value, in the hard cold cash, pat on the back, fawning over, photograph splattered on the front cover way. If it isn’t worth something, what is the point?

Further, his fakes that were mindlessly displayed globally remind us to not leave our brains at home when we enter grand institutions of supposed infallibility. We should question and interrogate what is fed to us. We should be cynical. And we should rethink our relationship to art, being less concerned with names and money and more with emotion and the personal. 

Maybe this is all conjecture, and perhaps forgery is an absolute wrong. Perhaps Hory was a criminal, the artists he imitated are still turning in their graves, and art only actually has value if it has been auctioned at Christie’s and sits in a household art institution, or even better someone’s swanky, open plan concrete loft in East London. Only, I hope that’s not the case. 

Hory’s fakes teach us two things: to avoid blind trust in our institutions and their experts. And to connect with and appreciate art, from outside that inferno — the art market.

Image from Wikimedia Commons