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A state-owned French art museum has discovered that more than half of its collection consists of worthless fakes and experts fear that other public galleries may also be stuffed with forgeries.
An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist's death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist's birthplace in southern France, were fakes.
Many of the forged oil paintings, watercolours and drawings were bought with £140,000 of municipal funds over the past few decades. Others were given to the museum by two local groups that raised money to buy them by appealing for donations. Some were bequeathed by a private collector.
Yves Barniol, the mayor of Elne, near the Spanish border, said: "It's a catastrophe. I put myself in the place of all the people who came to visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It's intolerable and I hope we find those responsible."
[...] Art experts estimate that at least 20 per cent of paintings owned by major museums across the world may not be the work of the purported artists.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 30 2018, @07:44PM (1 child)
I think there's a subtlety about the word "museum" here that we should remember. There's a difference (although it's not always adhered to) between an "art museum" vs. an "art gallery" or "collection" or whatever. "Museums" often aren't just about the aesthetic experience: they are also about showcasing important historical context or making cultural connections. You can have a "gallery" of art that you just like -- it "speaks" to you on an aesthetic level, and you put paintings or sculptures or whatever into the collection solely because you like them and want to expose them to other people who might also like them.
But often a "museum" has different goals. In this case, it appears the museum was specifically devoted to the work of an individual artist. It's no different from visiting the house of a famous historical figure. There may be little artistic value in the fact that such a house was kept in "original" condition, with original furnishings and other contents, etc. But it may be important to visitors to note what things are original and "authentically" connected to the historical figure, vs. which things are "reconstructions" or attempts to simulate.
I think that's an apt comparison in this case. Some people may not be interested in the history, but others find meaning in it. For those who cared less about each individual painting than they did about learning about the artist as a whole (or as a historical figure), this is a serious issue. For those who were treating this just as an "art gallery" and purely liked the paintings for their aesthetic qualities, this shouldn't make a huge difference. As I noted in another post, though, these elements get mixed in together for a lot of people nowadays -- and it is assumed that if art is "good" or connected to an artist who is "important," you SHOULD have an aesthetic experience. For a lot of people, it's hard to have just an individual opinion. Humans are social creatures, and like it or not, we all have our taste shaped by a lot of cultural factors around us.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 30 2018, @08:31PM
Which to me is just a classic "emperor has no clothes" phenomenon: Everyone thinks they're supposed to be amazed by, say, Andy Warhol's stuff, so they all act like they are even if they're really experiencing "Huh, why do I need to look at a painting of a soup can like it's something profound?"
I'm lucky in that one of the nation's largest free art museums happened to be near where I was working for a few years, so I'd sometimes drop in over lunch breaks and such. They had some really nifty pieces in their modern art section, really mind-bendy sorts of things that made you think if you took the time to look at them, and almost none of them were by big-name artists. And one of my favorite pieces of art I've ever had the privilege of enjoying was in a print I bought at a street fair for $10.
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