The Forger's Place in Art History

I can't think of any topic that could tell us more about aesthetics and the nature of what's good versus what's not than art forgery. For example, that the value of a painting could go from almost $12 million to zero in a single year is astounding, and filmmaker/essayist Errol Morris tells that whole story in seven installments, complete with fantastic graphics, on his blog. The article's springboard is the fact that two authors both published books on Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren earlier this year, with no relation to or awareness of each other. Comparing and contrasting their two distinct approaches by interviewing each author, while supplying relevant information from the books and even supplementing it all with his own research, the article is far more interesting than either book, both of which I found boring and decided not to finish. Morris' article traces the various strands that allowed van Meegeren's fake Vermeers to find a virtually unquestioned place in art history. These include a respected, aging art critic in need of a last big find, a Nazi-busting cop with a debt to settle, the cultural self-image of the Dutch people, and the artistic zeitgeist during the Third Reich.

The most fascinating aspect of the story is the fact that to almost everyone today van Meegeren's fakes appear both bad and without the slightest resemblance to Vermeer, while at the time the collective perception was exactly the opposite. How were they fooled when it seems so obvious to us? van Meegeren was using the zeitgeist; he was making Vermeer a Nazi. More significantly, how do we know we can't be taken in the same way; that we aren't?

The whole article is long but very worth it for anyone concerned with aesthetic ideals/standards and how/why they change.

Free Flex Fables

I don't cruise blogs often, which is why I have been long oblivious to Comicsworld, where you can download a wide variety of comic books as PDF files for free.

A lot of the material available here is out of print, expensive, and very hard to come by, so the site is a boon to people who want to read certain issues for whatever reason, for instance Alan Moore's take on the UK's Marvelman, here called Miracleman, which will supposedly soon be available from Disney-owned Marvel.

I'd recommend even more highly the fantastic "mainstream psychedelic" miniseries Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. In many ways the work is both a reaction to and an extension of the comics climate of the time, in the aftermath of the psychologically analyzed heroes and pushed-to-the-max stories of the 1980s. Anyone interested in superhero subversion of the Watchmen variety should check this out; it definitely goes one or two steps beyond by ultimately offering a rewarding portrait of the phenomenon and reminding readers that the original point of superheroes was not to offer something to deconstruct but to provide us with personifications of ideas, models for ideals. The series is famously out of print because of legal disputes with the Charles Atlas company, despite the obvious interest of fans and Morrison's own plugs (he has even gone so far as to tell an interviewer it's his favorite of his own work).

This kind of thing is what makes the internet in general and this site in particular great, but the purveyors of Comicsworld take it a little too far for my comfort by posting things that are still in print or easily obtained, which is not as easily justifiable. Nothing, though, could ever diminish the value of this fantastic site (unless of course they started charging, which I guess shows my true colors).

Flex Mentallo originally appeared in the pages of Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, and any fan of the writer will be excited by this miniseries. A quick search for Flex images found me an annotated guide to the series that I haven't really looked at yet. Maybe it's great.