[Reader-list] Is painting a currency note which can not be forged unless you act illegally?

[indersalim]

sorry,
it is Jamini Roy fakes, instead of Bimal Roy

inder salim

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:47 AM, indersalim <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:
> on Fake and Art
>
> From introduction to The Piracy of Art by Sylvere Lotringer:
>
> "In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege
> attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for
> illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own
> vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of
> art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of
> insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial
> frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole".
>
> With the backdrop of the above thought piece on Art, I believe, we can
> seriously enter the debate on Faking, and its age old practice in Art.
> I guess we all would like to know different opinions on the subject,
> since a couple of days back, S.H Raza a noted Paris based Artist was
> invited to inaugurate his own show where he discovered Fakes, not one
> but many. As we know, this happened at one of the oldest gallery,
> Doomimal Art Gallery in New Delhi. Reports say that he is initiating
> legal action against those who are responsible for faking his art.
>
> Tintorrito, a Renaissance Master in Venice was notorious for lifting
> other's compositions, and yet J.P. Satre wrote highly about his
> genius, and not for nothing we have his paintings hung in Museums next
> to those who labelled him unethical once. Even if this does not fall
> under the category of faking, we have MonaLisa which was faked many
> times during Leonardo's time itself, and there is doubt if the piece
> hung in Louvre is the a real one or a fake . You may press the link to
> read and see more on it.
> http://www.mystudios.com/gallery/forgery/history/index.html.
>
>  Since ancient times, faking art is a practice, so Raza is not the
> first one to suffer. We have Bimal Roy fakes , Hussain fakes, Anjoli
> Menon fakes, Bawa faks, Arpana fakes  and even Subodh Gupta fakes. The
> list is long and I heard there  is some industry like thing near
> Bhopal, and ' faking art ' is thriving trade in India. The debate here
> is what is Fake in the first place? Is painting a currency note which
> can not be forged unless you act illegally?  But is there any
> significance of word 'legal/illegal' in art?
>
> The above artists and their like-minded brethren are anguished, but
> are they really? Or if yes, then do we need to join their anguish too,
> and if yes, what way it benefits society, art and life ? And if it is
> just about their market, why then we need to join the protest? Or is
> it high time to declare that Art is neither original nor duplicate;
> art is art, as long as its space-time is existentially breathing in
> 'the present'? And the present is all about quantum we signs we are
> dealing with on day to day basis. Who cares, if the  Mao Zedong by
> Andy Warhol sells for 17 million or whatever, and if its other silk
> screen versions don't even sell for a shilling. To disseminate is the
> conceptual urgency...
>
> Still, they have a point, and for that reason a senior artists Anjoli
> Menon found a way out by marking her paintings with her thumb
> impression which can be verified by a forensic expert if need arises.
> So why don't other artists imitate her. Ah, these artists, as we know
> are too egoistic. They will trace a photograph on their canvas and
> fill it with their own colours of fantasy without declaring it
> publicly, or lift anything from any forgotten composition or from any
> popular form, but they wont lift anything what is well known in the
> art domain. In the present case of faking their originals, they feel
> helpless. I am personally amused.
>
> Now, imagine, if a painting which depicts Indira Gandhi or Gandhi by
> MF Hussain is recommended by Govt. of India to be incorporated into a
> Currency Note, and after some time it is discovered that the said work
> of art was fake, would that currency be also declared as Fake?
> Obviously no,  because the value of the currency note is not measured
> by nuances of the line work or some details important in aesthetic
> world, but by the signature of the Reserve Bank Governer, who
> represents the State. Please note that how artist's signature on the
> canvas has often posited as the part of composition in the frame, and
> not merely as a sign to verify the rest around it. Here, the moment we
> attach a price tag to a painting it functions like a commercial
> object. It was perhaps inevitable. One can understand the compulsions,
> but what people in general have to say on the subject is quite
> important.
>
> I quote : "The  real is not threatened by its double today,  ( Clement
> Rosset ), it is threatened by its very idiocy".
>
> If the present is all about 'idiocy', then we need to  grapple the
> meaning of it rather than what is happening between Artists and
> her/his collector.  Any intensification of the debate on that account
> would eventually not rob the concerns of those artists who feel '
> threatened by the double'. I am somehow interested by 'the idiocy of
> art in life' and its long term effects in society.  Obviously, the
> collectors would offset such leanings in any art discourse and the
> artists who want to appease the collectors are likely to join the
> chorus. And if it becomes so black and white, I have no option but to
> be content with whatever 'idiocy' grants me.
>
> I quote Jean Baudrillard, from his book 'The System of Objects' : "
> The collector is never an utterly hopeless fanatic, precisely because
> he collects objects that in some way always prevent him from
> regressing into the ultimate abstraction of a delusional state, but at
> the same time the discourse he thus creates  can never for the very
> same reason- get beyond a certain poverty and infantilism. Collecting
> is always a limited,  a repetitive process, and the very material
> objects with which it is concerned are too concrete and too
> discontinuous ever to be articulated as a true dialectical structure.
> So if no-collectors are indeed ' nothing but morons,' collectors, for
> the part, invariably have something impoverished and inhuman about
> them".#
>
> Those who have seen the film 'The Moderns' ( 1988 ) know the story of
> a failed painter down on his luck in Paris in the 1920's who accepts a
> commission to forge a famous impressionist paintings. The film
> questions what is real versus what is perceived or subjective. The
> plot twists include a millionaire art collector publicly slashing
> priceless paintings, thinking it as forged, while the fake paintings
> are sent to hang in a New York museum.  By the account, what we see as
> best of impressionist works are in fact ' fakes'.
>
> Ah, what a relief.
>
> And for this reason alone, perhaps, we need to see Photography bereft
> of those faking fears.
>
> ( to be continued … )
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> http://indersalim.livejournal.com
>



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