Article about FAKE on Fine Art Registry

Fine Art Registry, an art registration website that publishes original articles of interest to the art world, posted a detailed piece about FAKE last week, and allowed me to weigh in on the current state of online art fraud.

The site is a pretty ambitious undertaking, and seems to have a lot of energy and money behind it. Anyone who owns a valuable painting may register it with the site, which will then track the piece's ownership over time and issue an alert if it is ever stolen or lost. If enough people use this service, art theft and fraud will become much more difficult.

Article about FAKE on Fine Art Registry

Fine Art Registry, an art registration website that publishes original articles of interest to the art world, posted a detailed article about FAKE last week.

The site is a pretty ambitious undertaking, and seems to have a lot of energy and money behind it. Anyone who owns a valuable painting may register it with the site, which will then track the piece's ownership over time and issue an alert if it is ever stolen or lost. If enough people use this service, art theft and fraud will become much more difficult.

Goodwill painting fetches $165,000

In FAKE I describe how my business partner Ken Fetterman once found an authentic painting by Oscar Berninghaus at a Goodwill store in Sacramento, and eventually sold it for $18,500. While this was one of the most memorable treasures we unearthed, it wasn't the only one. I was regularly amazed by the things people tossed into donation bins.

Someone recently sent me this story about a watercolor by Frank Benson that was donated to Goodwill and auctioned for $165,000. Had it not been for the keen eye of a Goodwill employee, this donation might have gone unnoticed, and ended up in a store priced at $40.

Article about FAKE in the Burlington County Times

This article appeared back in August, but I only recently discovered it. It's no longer available on the newspaper's website, so I've linked to a copy of it on InsideCollecting, the website of the reporter, Dan Taylor.

Man accidentally pokes hole in $139 million Picasso

Casino magnate Steve Wynn is an avid art collector who owns a museum-worthy collection of works by European post-impressionists. He recently struck a deal to sell a piece by Picasso for $139 million, which would have been the most ever exchanged for a single canvas.

Before buyer took possession of the painting, Wynn accidentally punctured it with his elbow while showing it to some friends. "Oh shit," he said. "Look what I've done."

This doesn't really surprise me. People who handle valuable paintings on a regular basis toss them around more cavalierly than you might think. It's not as if they don't care -- they've just become accostomed to being around expensive paintings, which, in general, really aren't all that fragile. A Ferrari mechanic doesn't tip-toe around a car he's fixing any more than a Ford mechanic, even though the damage to be caused by dropping a wrench and scratching the paint is much greater.

Slate followed up with an interesting article about how paintings like this are repaired (it doesn't involve duct tape).

My hero died last week

In the fifteenth part of my book I write about my grandfather, and how he inspired me to keep working even after I'd made a mess out of my life, and my prospects seemed pretty bleak. My grandfather was my hero, a person who, to me, represented everything it means to be a good man. He spent his whole life helping others.

One of my great regrets about what I did was how I disappointed him, how miserably I failed to live up to the example he set for me. I will never forget the day I had to tell him the truth about my actions, after he'd been so sure I couldn't have done thing the things I'd been accused of.

On Wednesday we buried him. He lived a long and fruitful life and his passing was expected, the result of an extended illness, but it didn't make it any easier for me. I will miss him very much.

The section about him in the book was shortened during the editing process. Today I looked up the original version of it and wanted to share it with you:

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My grandfather, my mother’s father, built his first house with his own hands. He served in the Army during World War II, then lived with his wife and two young children in a rented house in Southern California and, within a couple of years, saved enough money to buy a small lot in Redondo Beach. He hauled concrete for a living by day and in the evenings, and on weekends, constructed a sturdy two-bedroom house out of supplies he bought each week after cashing his paychecks. During the final three months of construction, in the summer of 1947, his family moved into an Army tent on the back of the lot and waited for the house to be completed. They stored food in an icebox and cooked on a camp stove and my grandmother kept the tent spotless. It was California, and the weather was mild, and for my mother, who was about to start kindergarten, living in the tent was an adventure. When I’d ask my grandmother about it she would laugh, and share funny stories about the tribulations of life lived beneath olive-green canvas, and say “Well, that was how it was. We didn’t have much money and your grandfather wanted to take care of his family, so he built a house.”

Things were different then. There was a housing shortage, and living in a tent on the back of one’s lot while finishing up a house was no great shame. The neighbors didn’t complain. No social workers came around to inspect their living conditions and fret over the welfare of the children. City building inspectors didn’t loom over my grandfather’s work with clipboards in hand, looking for deviations from the Uniform Building Code. What my grandfather did then probably couldn’t be done today, but this has never made it any less heroic to me. The story of the built house and the tent behind it never failed to astonish me. I often wondered if the house was still there, or if it wasn’t, what sat in its place. No one seemed to know.

The house in Redondo Beach was merely the first of many things my grandfather built during his life. When he moved his family to Sacramento he built his second house (no tent this time). He built churches from the ground up. He bought dilapidated houses that he renovated and rented out. When he was in his mid-70s he installed central heating and air conditioning in his house, by himself. Building was never his occupation, but when he needed to draw upon the skill, he did.

I’d always hoped I inherited some of this fierce self-reliance from my grandfather, the quality that allowed him to look at a bare piece of land and envision something beautiful and sturdy and useful, and then build it. Sadly, unlike my brothers, who had impressive collections of power tools and were able to string electrical wiring and lay pipe and pour concrete and great aplomb, the genetic predisposition for constructing buildings seemed not to have been passed down to me. I could drill holes and install ceiling fans, but the very notion of building something from the ground up gripped me with fear. But still, when I remembered what my grandfather did, I longed for the same ability to forge something from nothing, coax structure from chaos under difficult circumstances.

Another Diebenkorn forgery scandal

Although I didn't express this adequately in my book, I've always felt as if I, by forging the initials of Richard Diebenkorn onto an unsigned painting and trying to pass it off as his work, dishonored the memory of a man I consider to be a great artist. This is one of the many things I regret about what I did.

My favorite works by Richard Diebenkorn are those he produced in the late fifties and early sixties, when he, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and other Northern California artists took a bold step away from non-representational work and returned to representational painting, drawing upon the things they learned they learned as abstract expressionists and applying them to landscapes, figures, and still life subjects. Their work is rich, striking, and in many cases, truly captivating. This movement, usually called the "Bay Area Figurative School," never got the attention it deserved. Had Andy Warhol and the New York pop artists not stolen the show, this may have been deemed the era's most important movement in American art. As it is, the heavy steps taken by these Bay Area pioneers continue to reverberate to this day, and their influence on subsequent generations of California artists is obvious.

On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee printed a sad and shocking article about what appears to be another case of someone forging Richard Diebenkorn's monogram onto unsigned paintings. Acording to this article, a former student of Diebenkorn who was influenced by his figurative works, and painted in a similar style, consigned some of his paintings to a prominent, well-respected Northern California art dealer. These works later left the gallery bearing Diebenkorn's signature, and were apparently sold for very large sums. Some of these pieces ended up in private collections and one of them (shown above) was even pictured and misattributed to Diebenkorn in a book published by the Crocker Art Museum.

I don't know what really happened, and the whole affair seems to have been settled out of court. Unfortunetly, it's yet another sad commentary on the state of the art market, and adds further fuel to a fire that I, in my own small way, very regrettably helped stoke.

A warm thanks to the Sacramento Book Collectors Club

On Friday I had the honor of speaking to the Sacramento Book Collectors Club. This venerable institution has been active since the 1930s, and the meeting I attended was the group's six hundred and sixty-sixth. One gentleman in attendance had been an active member since the very beginning. These are serious book collectors, people who seek out first-edition copies of rare of rare tomes published ages ago, and I admired their passion for, dedication to, and knowlege of their hobby.

Everyone was warm and kind and the croud presented me with an array of intelligent, thoughtful, insightful questions. I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you.

If you're in a book club and are intersted, I'd be happy to meet with you, either in person or by phone. Just get in touch.

Book clubs

I love meeting with book clubs who've read my book. There's nothing more enjoyable than facing a roomful of people who've read FAKE and have intelligent, insightful, challenging questions for me. Last week I met with Claudine's book club in Livermore, California (pic above) and had a great time.

On Friday the 13th (yikes) of this month I'm meeting with the Sacramento Book Collectors Club, and this event is open to the public, so if you're in the area and want to say hello, please come. It's at the Arden Dimnick Library (891 Watt) at 7:00 PM.

If you're in a book club I would be honored to hear that you're reading my book, and, if you'd like, I will do my best to meet with you, if not in person then by phone. Just get in touch.

Stop doing interviews like this, you spoon!

It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it could be. Here is the audio clip of my interview on Tim Shaw's Asylum on Kerrang Radio, in which I'm described as stupid, get called a "spoon," and am forced to admit my romantic preference for George Michael over Andrew Ridgeley.

Despite this stuff, it actually was a pretty decent interview. Shaw seems like a pretty bright guy whose job happens to require him to be controversial and confrontational, but it doesn't mean he's a jerk at heart. Maybe a spoon, though.