Produce a Perfect Faux Gerhard Richter Painting, and I'll Buy It | The ...

By Jerry Saltz | Vulture Magazine

I love art, but I hate the astronomical prices it sells for. My skin crawls when I read about auctions, and every year they get grosser. Last month, a living-artist record was set when a 1994 abstract Gerhard Richter painting was sold for $34.2 million. Like a lot of these purchases, the sale was about a collector trying to make art history by spending money. Or big-dick-waving. Ugh.

I want to own art like this, but I?m not rich, and I also think it?s a conflict of interest for a critic to own work that he or she may write about. (Reviews can affect market value.) So, last winter, I put out a call on Facebook. I?d pay anyone $155 plus the cost of materials to make me a perfect fake by Richter, Ryman, Flavin, Fontana, Du?champ, Hirst, Guyton, or Agnes Martin. (Why $155? It?s enough money to me that the painting had to be worth it, and 55 is a funnier number than 50.)

You can?t just call up a guy and order an ersatz Hirst or Richter?unless you are seeking a flat-out forger, but those folks don?t work for $155 and their numbers aren?t listed. Besides, in the art world, noncriminal fakes aren?t news. We don?t even call them ?fakes.? We prefer the term ?appropriation,? whereby a new artwork incorporates or reproduces another. Copyists lie on a continuum: At one end, you have extremely original artists (Richard Prince, Elaine Sturtevant) who use the old to make something new. At the other, you have people deceiving buyers. In between, you have artists who merely make covers, trying to get attention; slipstream behind the famous; and offer simplistic observations. Plus some who are just goofing around. Read More...

Source: http://artsinsociety.com/the-latest-news/produce-a-perfect-faux-gerhard-richter-painting-and-ill-buy-it

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