This dialogue is spoken by one, Clifford Irving. Perhaps you are familiar with him, he was recently the main character in the biographic film adaptation The Hoax, starring Richard Gere. Clifford was, unfortunately, a very mundane writer, he had tried several times throughout his early career to be published. He lucked out and had a minor hit with a biography he wrote in 1967 about a painter who had forged many famous artist's work. So impressed with this book, an ailing Howard Hughes decided it was time to tell his story. He wrote numerous letters and gave hundreds of pages of correspondence for Irving to compile into book form. It was released, and Clifford looked to be on his way to the top.
The only problem was, it was absolutely bogus. Or was it?
The idea of truth and authorship is a very sticky one. In what is, perhaps my favorite movie F for Fake Orson Welles tackles this idea head on. I shall spare you the metaphysical quagmire that "nothing is real" and instead tackle the idea of authenticity and experts. An expert is somebody who is infallible, and the artist is a finicky creature. The relationship between these two beings is symbiotic, no doubt. If an expert is proved to be wrong, he could be wrong about a lot of things. Should experts like some artist's work, he becomes more valuable. The major dividing point between these two, is that only one of them really care about the "facts."
Remember that painter I was talking about earlier, the one Clifford Irving wrote about? His name was Elmyr de Hory. In 1968, he was jailed for being an artist. He had committed masterpieces. And like Orson says in F For Fake "...the only problem was the name he put on them." Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Modigliani and others. Of his own admission, apparently he sold more than a thousand works of art to major galleries. The art world erupted. The experts called for blood, revenge, and other nasty things. But, they should have just kept their mouths shut. By raising their voices, they allowed more people to see just how much they are irrelevant.
Let's break it down then.
Artists make art. Sometimes they become masterpieces. When does a work achieve this canonicity? When the Experts say it does, of course. But the Elmyr case indicates that the experts do not always know shit from shinola. Of course, not everybody believes that Elmyr committed quite as much great art as he gleefully confesses in the biography. Many experts claim F for Fake engaged in shameless bragging and exaggeration, to make Elmyr seem cleverer than the "facts" warrant. Unfortunately, these Experts had - many of them - authenticated some of the fakes that Elmyr undoubtedly did paint. As Elmyr's co-author, Cliff, says, these Experts do not want their cover blown -- they don't want us to know how often, and how easily, they have gotten duped by Elmyr and other skilled forgers. According to Clifford, all experts operate largely on bluff. Some of the Experts, however, have counter-attacked by suggesting that this alleged "co-author," Clifford Irving, may himself have functioned even more as a co-conspirator, which wouldn't be surprising due to the book he was just about to write.
No matter, I say! The deeds of Clifford and Elmyr have enriched this world more than if they hadn't bothered at all. And don't get messed up with the "facts" about whether he forged art, or books, or that their story itself was a work of art/lies. If you can understand that a fake is as good as the real thing, then perhaps you can understand more about art than the experts ever will.
I'll leave the last word to Orson-
Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life ... we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced – but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
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