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The Long Night is Coming
5 years ago
Friday, October 2, 2009
Courtauld “fake” exposed as a real Dutch period piece | The Art Newspaer
Not only can art experts be fooled by clever forgeries, sometimes they fail to recognize genuine masterpieces. A painting thought to be by notorious Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren, turns out to have been a genuine Vermeer.
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In a sane world this would be of interest only to art historians and the personal families of the painters involved. Even art students would not care who painted it, if that information held no prospect of teaching them to make better art. But in fact this made the papers because some Mammon-worshipper hopes to squeeze a few more pieces of silver out of it.
ReplyDeleteArt, which ought to enlighten the people, instead has been sold. The few existing works of genuine skill are traded about to facilitate money laundering, and the mass culture degrades and stupefies because it has been designed to do exactly that.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/234.html
Poets have an easier time of it than painters, of course, because all men in the throes of passion can be overshadowed by the Muse, and speak poetry. Note that Gustav Hasford, who might have been a common murderer and thief, was the defining poet of late 20th century America, because the passions induced in him by war -- and of course, he hated the slimy Kubrick who swindled him out his proper rewards.