Reproductions of paintings, whether in books or on your screens, are all reduced to the same size, more or less. As well as being difficult to judge the scale of any picture it is also hard to discern the qualities which make great art great art.
This is very useful for forgers because most people have never seen great art in the galleries of the world and most people, if truth be told, cannot tell the difference between an original and a copy.
It may surprise you to know that art experts very often cannot tell the difference either.
During the 1980s, John Myatt became involved in “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century” after he had advertised in Private Eye offering ‘Genuine Fakes for £150 and £200’.
This turned into a legitimate business until Professor Drewe turned up……
After spending time in prison, Myatt continued painting in the styles of famous painters and has been rewarded with his own TV shows ‘A Brush With Fame’ and ‘Mastering The Art’.
The message is clear- never trust an ‘expert’!
A more important message is: if you buy art as an investment, you are buying it for the wrong reason; remember that investments can go down as well as up. And if you lose money as a result of fraud then you were a willing accomplice in that fraud, as with any fraud, believing that you were somehow going to be enriched from your ‘investment’.
If John Myatt deserved a prison term for his ‘crime’ then the ‘experts’ who authenticated his work should also have been imprisoned alongside him.
The greatest forger of them all was Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989).
He was a forger of paintings and prints by none other than Salvador Dalí. The Artexperts website explains how two Spanish painters, Manuel Pujol Baladas and Isidor Bea, worked for Dalí and his wife Gala in creating many of his paintings from 1955 onwards.
They also attempt to explain the difference between a forgery and a fake:
'The difference between a forgery and a fake in the case of Dali is quite simple…in the case of the forgeries, Dali did not consent for the art piece to be made, and most likely knew nothing about it. In the case of fakes, Dali most likely approved of or requested that they be made in his name. Neither are as valuable as a genuine Dali, however, a fake may hold some significant value if it was created under his direction and bears his authentic signature.'
But they are using the signature as a validation. They are not evaluating the artwork itself and are assessing artistic value, and hence financial value, on the basis of the signature alone.
So, are art collectors nothing more than very rich autograph hunters?
The question that is often asked is why would Dalí do such a thing and the answers most commonly given are his greed and vanity. It was a fellow surrealist, the poet André Breton who gave him the name Avida Dollars, an anagram of his name.
But I believe the answer is much simpler than that: what could be more surrealistic than colluding in the forgery of your own artworks? Is that not exactly what a Surrealist artist would do, it being perfectly in tune with the spirit of Surrealism!
Footnote:
I have a Renoir for sale. It is unfinished but you can make me an offer.
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (15 May 1567 (baptized) -- 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.
Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition -- the heritage of Renaissance polyphony and the new basso continuo technique of the Baroque. Monteverdi wrote one of the earliest operas, L'Orfeo, an innovative work that is still regularly performed. He was recognized as an innovative composer and enjoyed considerable fame in his lifetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudio_Monteverdi
Norman Cornish was the last of ‘The Pitmen Painters.’
In order to understand how and why a humble coalminer with very little in the way of formal education would think of taking up painting after retiring from work, you should read the post I did about the Pitmen Painters. (The pictures have disappeared from that post also but it is the text which is important): http://www.nourishingobscurity.com/2011/08/pitmen-painters-and-the-big-society/
It was a very different world back then before the two world wars, a world which is completely ignored by historians. It doesn’t fit into their cosy politicised view of history.
Norman Cornish, 'Miners on the Pit Road', ca. 1964
Norman Cornish was born in 1919 in Spennymoor, Co. Durham. He began his working life as a miner at the age of fourteen in the nearby Dean and Chapter Colliery at Ferryhill. All his life Norman drew and painted, winning his first art prize at the age of four, and away from the pits he was a member of The Spennymoor Settlement project which provided educational support for working people.
In 1966, after 33 years of working underground, Norman left the pits. With the continuing decline of the industry, and partly because he was suffering from a worsening back complaint, he took the great risk of living by his painting.
That it was a successful move is irrefutable. He was the subject of several television films, had countless exhibitions, received and carried out numerous commissions, (notably the County Hall, Durham, mural of the Miners’ Gala) and was the last survivor of the Spennymoor Settlement project.
It’s not about how the infection started, but how it can be stopped, and what happens if it can’t. A new study says that the Wuhan virus is around three times more contagious than influenza: on average, each person infects 4.1 others. Mathematically, if this cycle were repeated 17 times, it would cover the whole population of the planet. Hawaii-based writer Charles Hugh Smith offers reasons for thinking that a pandemic is virtually inevitable and that, because of the globalised economy, it could trigger a world economic depression.
How lethal is it? It’s too early to say: at last count (5 February, 06:23), the tracker at Johns Hopkins University says there are 24,551 cases (99% of them in China) and so far 910 people have recovered versus 493 who have died. If it’s like SARS, the mortality rate will be under ten per cent, possibly far lower. However, in Hubei province, where the outbreak began, while 520 have recovered, 479 have died (i.e. most of the total victims to date). The New York Times reports that Wuhan residents blame the high toll there on the fact that many sufferers have had to be turned away by overstretched clinics; hence the frantic hospital-building program.
Can we protect ourselves? The demand for face masks is so high that rogue traders are offering dud copies and some people are using whatever they can find to cover their mouths and noses. Yet even the real thing offers limited protection: viruses are far smaller than bacteria – in the case of coronaviruses, about one-eighth the size – so some may slip through the fibre barrier. Having said that, a paper published in Nature three years ago says that coating the mask in salt greatly improves its filtering power; if that really does work, it offers a quick and cheap improvement – though we must remember that the virus can also be transmitted by contact with infected surfaces, or float into the eyes. Other than that, we’re left with the usual precautions – quarantine, reducing public interaction to a minimum, regular cleaning of hands and so on.
So far the 2019-nCoV virus has infected three times as many people as SARS, killing more on the Chinese mainland in number than last time, although a smaller proportion of cases than with SARS. The real threat is not the mortality rate but the potentially much greater number of cases, not only because of the higher infectivity combined with the longer asymptomatic incubation period that fosters unwitting transmission by carriers, but also because of the initial cover-up and delay in Wuhan. One would have thought that the lesson of 2002-3 was to act fast and decisively to contain the epidemic. On the other hand, if it had begun in a Manhattan street market just as the population was gathering to celebrate Thanksgiving, would the Mayor of New York have had the nerve – and the capacity - to put the whole city in lockdown for weeks? We may yet find out, of course.
The economic effects are already beginning to manifest themselves. The New York Times reports (£) that the virus-preventive shutdown of Chinese parts suppliers is hitting Hyundai car plants in South Korea; the LA Times notes that the US has become far more linked to China since the disruption caused by SARS: ‘China’s economy today is 8½ times larger than it was in 2003. Trade with the U.S. is nearly four times bigger.’ American computer manufacturers are running out of circuit boards; middle-class Chinese tourism, already affected by the trade war, will drop further, as will sales of luxury goods to those visitors. The UK will be similarly afflicted; even with pork exports and fashion imports.
We’d better make sure that our borders are an effective firebreak in the fight against this disease, and render every assistance we can to the Chinese to facilitate a return to the normality on which we have all come to depend.
It’s not just social media that start rumours. A week ago, the Washington Times published a story linking the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan to the highest-category bioresearch lab in that city. An Israeli expert emailed the WT with the allegation – or speculation, shall we say – that the Wuhan facility was part of the Chinese government’s clandestine biological weapons program, though only indirectly: what he called ‘dual civilian-military research.’ According to the WT article, the US State Department issued a report last year echoing such suspicions.
Chinese scientists uploaded the results of their analysis of the new virus’ genetic code on 22 January, which to some may seem suspiciously fast, bearing in mind the first case of infection was identified in December. Nevertheless, in itself this timing is not sinister: when SARS broke out 18 years ago US and Canadian scientists unravelled the code in little over a month. Since then a range of bat-related coronaviruses have been studied and the Chinese findings are that the latest one is 79.5% identical to SARS. So, no smoking gun there.
Why would an Israeli intelligence officer break cover with a story like this, at this time? Is it a move to help sustain funding for the military at a time when President Trump’s detailed ‘two-state’ plan to settle the Palestinian issues threatens to bring some kind of peace to the region? We can all play at conspiracy theories.
However, raising the biowarfare issue may prove an embarrassment to this informant’s side, if he has one. Unlike China and the USA, Israel is not a party to the Biological Weapons Convention, whereas Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Libya are, and Egypt is a signatory awaiting ratification. Naturally determined to defend itself when surrounded by mortal enemies, Israel is alleged to have not only numerous nuclear weapons but an offensive biological warfare capability.
Biowarfare is one of the horrors to come out of Pandora’s box, and no-one knows how to stuff it back in again. As though humanity hasn’t enough ways to torment itself! We must suspect that a number of countries are saying one thing and secretly doing another but let’s remember that the last gift in the box was Hope.
A related – and topical - issue is disinformation, of which the Chinese lab one may be an example. Topical, because one of the undertakings in the 2019 version draft Political Declaration between the EU and the UK is a ‘security partnership’ to tackle ‘disinformation campaigns’ (paragraph 78). The term is not defined there and given both parties’ love of secrecy could mean ‘attempts to discover and reveal what our horrid leaders are up to.’
Julian Assange is still in jail. Unlawfully, according to his friend and veteran investigative journalist John Pilger. Shhh…
In defence of the BBC and public service broadcasting
The first director general of the BBC was John Reith (later to become Lord Reith). Reith summarised the BBC's purpose in three words: inform, educate, entertain; this remains part of the organisation's mission statement to this day.
The term "Reithianism" describes certain principles of broadcasting associated with Lord Reith. These include an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service. These traditional values became synonymous with the BBC and were a template copied by national broadcasters around the world.
Reith was Scottish and his idea of 'traditional values' would most likely have been based upon Thomas Reid's 'Scottish Common Sense Realism.' (Reid's 'common sense' was adopted and adapted by Thomas Jefferson for America's Declaration of Independence and their Constitution.)
My own view of life is also, I hope, one of common sense and so here are my own personal memories of TV past and present, with a side track or two into the social context of the TV age.
The first TV my family acquired was in 1954 or maybe 1955, I'm not exactly sure but I recall walking home from school and, seeing the distinctive 'H' shaped aerial above the chimney pot. I ran the last 100 yards or so into the house. We had a telly! A large wooden mahogany cabinet which housed a tiny 9" screen. Just one channel, the BBC.
Our household had entered the new television age and because my father was the first in the street to have a TV it meant that we had a crowded house for the 1955 FA Cup Final between Newcastle United and Manchester City. I can remember sitting cross-legged atop the dining table staring at the tiny screen and its fuzzy picture. Fuzzy it may have been but it didn't matter because it was, or seemed to us, a magical miracle.
Obviously I soon became familiar with the children's programmes and my favourite from the early days was The Bumblies, a very imaginative and surreal show from 'Professor' Michael Bentine.
There were also several American western series, the most famous being The Lone Ranger with his 'faithful' Indian companion, Tonto. (This was clearly an in-joke by the producers and writers; look it up in your Spanish/English dictionary.)
But among the many western series the best for me was The Cisco Kid; his sidekick was called Pancho who was adept at mangling the English language. At the end of each half hour episode the pair would 'ride off into the sunset' with Pancho shouting "Let's went!" That particular phrase appealed to me for some reason and many years later I would try to explain/translate to Spanish friends.
And then in 1958 (I think) the ITV channel was added in our region. My mother's reaction to the programme listing in the newspaper was "They are all half-hour programmes." But she and my father came from a generation who were used to 90 minute feature films at the cinema and chopping that into half-hour segments to accommodate advertising breaks would have been annoying. They and most other people were perfectly capable of concentrating for such a short time but advertising breaks would inevitably, eventually weaken and fragment people's attention span.
At school the classroom wit declared that it was a shame how the programmes interrupted the adverts. Probably without realising it, he was on to something: It was the showman P.T. Barnum who famously said “Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public.” The bosses of commercial TV clearly agreed with that sentiment!
The radio continued to be the source of home entertainment for a few more years and there were a lot of extremely good comedy shows: the Goons of course (or the Go-On show as one mystified BBC executive described it); there was also Beyond Our Ken and Round The Horne, The Navy Lark, Hancock's Half Hour, Ken Dodd and his Diddy Men, Al Read, and many more.
Most of those comedy shows on radio continued well into the 1960s but there was a gradual shifting of the audience from radio to TV and with the appointment of Hugh Carleton-Greene as Director General in 1960, television began to reflect the changes in society and audiences grew; helped along by the introduction of a third channel, BBC 2 plus the colour TV in 1968 as well as new and different programmes such as -
: That Was The Week That Was (1962)
: Dr Who (1963)
: Match of The Day (1964)
William Hartnell (right) as the first incarnation of Doctor Who
'Reflecting the changes in society' is not strictly accurate; it is more that the BBC began to reflect the attitudes of the Director General and his social milieu which would have been that of perhaps a few thousand or so in the metropolis which did not reflect, in my experience, the culture of the provinces. The provinces and the capital are two very different peoples as pointed out in a rather acerbic aphorism of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: "The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease."
And so the Beeb gradually reflected the so called 'swinging sixties' and current received wisdom is that it was the start of the decline of the moral standards of the established order and the beginning of a rebellious youth culture; but the reality is rather different.
The disaffection with the 'establishment' began immediately after the Second World War with the shock election of Clement Attlee's government when everyone had expected a grateful nation to elect the war leader Winston Churchill. The late forties and the fifties brought the first rebels (with or without a cause.) In Britain there was the rise to prominence of writers who became known as Angry Young Men. In the USA their 'angry young men' were in the cinema: Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953); James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Blackboard Jungle (1955); and Rock Around The Clock (1956).
During the sixties TV expanded rapidly and colour brought new possibilities such as the televising of snooker, which produced its own inadvertent comedy when commentator Ted Lowe said "and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green."
That is one of the reasons so many sports commentators endeared themselves to the viewing public. They had no guidelines to follow and there was no 'correct' way to do what they did, so they relied on their own enthusiasm for their sport: Bill McLaren for rugby, Eddie Waring for rugby league, Peter O'Sullivan for racing, Harry Carpenter for boxing, David Coleman for football and athletics, and who could not love motor racing's excitable Murray Walker, sometimes known as Muddly Talker?
In many ways the sixties and seventies were a golden age for TV with the breadth of programmes reflecting the Reithian ideal to "inform, educate, entertain" and there were occasonally audiences of up to 20 million for some programmes.
As with most things in life, it couldn't last. The decline in quality of the programmes probably began in the eighties with a noticeable withering away of those three ideals. And with the increase in the number of channels available there was a need to fill those channels with something, anything no matter the quality. TV companies were, after all, in the business of selling their audiences to their advertisers. The formulaic repetitiveness of the programmes on offer means we have now arrived at a situation where the only place we see anything really creative or imaginative on our televisions is during the adverts.
Bruce Springsteen in 1992 released a song called "57 channels and nothin' on." That title and the reason for it are self evident.
The current hostility to the BBC is based on a perceived 'lefty' bias within its programmes. A quick scan through the schedule reveals not so much a bias as a kind of schizophrenia. I don't see any socialist propaganda in these from the BBC -
: Dragon's Den
: The Apprentice
: Bargain Hunt; Cash in the Attic; Antiques Roadshow
: Homes Under The Hammer
: Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert hall
: Trooping of the colour
: State opening of Parlaiment
: The Proms
And does that perceived bias have any influence on viewers/listeners; do they even notice it? The 2016 referendum result suggests not and the recent election result must have come as an even bigger shock to the 'lefties', whoever they are (I have never been very sure who is to be defined as a 'lefty' and who is not. A clear definition would be helpful; slur by slogan is not a great deal of use to anyone except perhaps those who use slogans as an alternative to thinking.) To suggest that TV has such a powerful influence on its audience is an insult to the people of this country and those who continually carp on about left-wing bias really ought to get out more and meet some 'ordinary' people for a change, a refreshing change in fact.
The BBC is still the best and usually the only place to see excellent Arts programmes; it offers very good travel shows; I am not so sure about its science output, the last good science presenter was Sir Patrick Moore. The BBC has zero competition when it comes to the excellence of their music programmes both on Radio3 and on TV. The commercial channels are a wasteland without music in my view!
The BBC is so much a part of our culture perhaps we do not realise how important it is as our national broadcaster. The great State occasions are always covered by the BBC, part of their public service remit. At Christmas and Easter it is the BBC which gives us the annual carols from King's College, Cambridge as well as the appropriate church services during the two major events in the Christian calendar. And they still show Songs of Praise every week, however diluted it seems to be at times. The commercial channels pay little or no attention to any of those things.
So to all the siren voices calling for the abolition of the BBC, I would say: be careful what you wish for, it might come true and you will regret and miss it, if or when it disappears!
This could be worse than the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak of 2002/3. Vlogger and former China-based businessman Matthew Tye (aka ‘laowhy86’) says that the new strain of coronavirus seems to be more transmissible than SARS; and early indications are that more people are dying than recovering. That makes the need for containment even more urgent.
Yet officials have been slow to admit the problem and respond accordingly, so exacerbating the spread of the disease. The first case appeared in Wuhan on 8 December, but a planned food-sharing public banquet for 100,000 people there went ahead on 18 January, by which time 49 cases had already been made public, and the next day the populace was assured that the sickness was not very infectious. When a number of performers fell ill during the Government’s New Year celebrations on 21 January the State media merely praised them for carrying on with the show and showing great spirit. The following day came the order to wear masks (not enforceable with fines until a week later), and on 23 January Wuhan was finally quarantined and the airport closed. However, by this time five million people had already left the area and passengers had been allowed onto planes if they showed no symptoms, which unfortunately in the case of this virus take a long time to manifest themselves – as the authorities already knew - so many infected persons may have travelled out by air.
As China urbanises, many millions of people are moving around the country in pursuit of work. For example in Wuhan’s province of Hubei, the 2000 national census showed 2.8 million migrants moving north to Beijing and south to Guangdong (both c. 700 miles distant) and to other coastal cities. This central region is well served with modern rail and road networks, and although Wuhan’s airport is now shut, there are huge numbers of other aviation routes in China, both internal and international, so air travel threatens to be an especially powerful disease vector.
The initial concern of officials, says Tye, was to suppress news of the outbreak. Eight people were arrested on 1 January for talking about the existence of the virus, and on 14 January media reporters were detained and their phones and cameras searched for information. By the end of the month the government was still arresting those who spoke out, and (26 January) banning articles on the internet.
Fellow vlogger and Tye associate Winston Sterzel (aka ‘serpentza’) reports on a doctor who treated the first cases and informed his clinical WeChat messaging group on 30 December, telling them not to make it public for fear of being closed down, but to warn family and friends. The authorities picked up on this and made him sign an undertaking not to spread rumours: ‘If you continue to be stubborn and don’t repent […] you will be punished to the full extent of the law! Do you understand?’ Subsequently he contracted the virus himself and is still fighting for his life.
Seeing the intensive preparations now ongoing (e.g. new hospitals being set up in days), it seems that the government’s media are under-declaring the number of cases. Sterzel says he receives feedback from Chinese followers saying more people die of the flu in the USA; but he points out that with coronavirus a higher proportion are hospitalised and there is no vaccine. Further, although China reports improbably few cases of flu annually, Sterzel’s doctor wife tells him that this is because their method of recording causes of death is different than in the West. Rather than report the immediate cause, they will write down any pre-existing condition (e.g. a heart problem) and attribute the death to that. That is the opposite approach to that used by the USA and UK (for an example of ours see page 5 here). So, this is a way in which the true state of affairs can be disguised.
The crisis management has moved on to scapegoating since (says Tye) the Chinese Communist Party’s focus is on maintaining its power and the confidence of the populace. The mayor of Wuhan resigned on 27 January, becoming a target for public shaming and hatred, but later laid part of the responsibility on the central government in Beijing, which in turn seeks to blame the local administration in Hubei, which had been downplaying the scale of the emergency.
The Chinese strongly resent critical comments from outsiders, says Sterzel, and are quick to accuse the latter of racism. It’s understandable, given China’s treatment by foreigners in past times; but it encourages a culture of denial and disinformation.
Some may say that Tye and Sterzel may not be entirely unbiased, since they have abandoned their businesses in China because of difficulties with the authorities. For his part Sterzel says that since President Xi came to power attitudes to foreigners have hardened and the ‘golden age’ of opportunity there for non-Chinese is over.
It is also most unfortunate that this epidemic, which needs close international cooperation, has come during a developing trade war. In 2018 President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, and China has retaliated with a reduction and then a total ban on US agricultural products, which were worth $19.5 billion to the US in 2017. This, added to other factors, is causing American farmers to suffer terribly. Trump is trying to protect US employment and Americans' standard of living, but the path down from globalisation is far more difficult than the way up and at the same time international relations are souring.
Perhaps, as this potential pandemic looms over us, we will start to work together again for the common good.
