It feels good to watch a documentary about problems one cares nothing about. This one is about the biggest fraud in the art world, perpetrated by a snake-eyed dealer named Ann Freedman, with the support of the gallery owner for whom she worked.
According to Freedman's version, she "believed" that an obscure woman, totally new to the elite NY art world, could get hold of a truckload of canvas by Rothko, Pollock and many others easily forgeable painters. The beauty of the fraud is that those artists were all deceased and painted abstract work, hence they could not refute any attribution and the material to forge their work was relatively easy to get, since it wasn't any obscure, sophisticated chemical paint, difficult to produce and to "age" believably. Besides, abstract work doesn't require the same level of skills one would need to paint a fake Rembrandt or even an Impressionist whatsoever.
Freedman was an expert dealer and yet she kept selling fakes for 10 years, managing to keep her ailing gallery afloat, making deals for 80 million $, until the day an irate buyer discovered that his precious Pollock was actually a fake and the s*it hit the fan. The most grotesque part of the story was the trial about a fake Rothko, described as "beautiful" and totally undistinguishable from a real one, given Rothko's style, which proves the point that modern, abstract "art" is just a cult object, used by the mega rich to show off and devoid of any artistic value.
The fake Rothko was just as "beautiful" and even more so of other real ones, but turned to be totally worthless not because of lack of artistic qualities, since it was acknowledged as having the same of an original. It's not a matter of beauty, but exclusivity.
The Freedman woman unbelievably got scot free and she's still working in the NY art world, where she's probably conning people too stupid to even know what she did, how she lied and how totally untrustworthy she is... and since they're that stupid, they probably deserve to be conned.
According to Freedman's version, she "believed" that an obscure woman, totally new to the elite NY art world, could get hold of a truckload of canvas by Rothko, Pollock and many others easily forgeable painters. The beauty of the fraud is that those artists were all deceased and painted abstract work, hence they could not refute any attribution and the material to forge their work was relatively easy to get, since it wasn't any obscure, sophisticated chemical paint, difficult to produce and to "age" believably. Besides, abstract work doesn't require the same level of skills one would need to paint a fake Rembrandt or even an Impressionist whatsoever.
Freedman was an expert dealer and yet she kept selling fakes for 10 years, managing to keep her ailing gallery afloat, making deals for 80 million $, until the day an irate buyer discovered that his precious Pollock was actually a fake and the s*it hit the fan. The most grotesque part of the story was the trial about a fake Rothko, described as "beautiful" and totally undistinguishable from a real one, given Rothko's style, which proves the point that modern, abstract "art" is just a cult object, used by the mega rich to show off and devoid of any artistic value.
The fake Rothko was just as "beautiful" and even more so of other real ones, but turned to be totally worthless not because of lack of artistic qualities, since it was acknowledged as having the same of an original. It's not a matter of beauty, but exclusivity.
The Freedman woman unbelievably got scot free and she's still working in the NY art world, where she's probably conning people too stupid to even know what she did, how she lied and how totally untrustworthy she is... and since they're that stupid, they probably deserve to be conned.