Nom de Plume

Thomas Hoving is the former director of the glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I heard him on a podcast of Studio 360 a few weeks ago. He was actually talking about a new book he’s just written (detailing how to play a memorization-type game with famous paintings), but he mentioned this one, and I was riveted.

So. He talks about great art scams. Actually, his main point is that there are a lot more fakes out there than the average museum-goer ever realizes, and when it comes right down to it, the fakes themselves are antiques. Take the Romans, for instance. We all know that they weren’t creative enough to come up with their own gods. After all, Eros by any other name is still Eros. (Okay, okay, really bad pun, but only if you inflect it properly. If you don’t, it’s just incomprehensible. Look, it’s been a long day.) Fact is, they were good at building viaducts and expanding their Empire and stuff, but the creme de la creme of Roman society didn’t have viaducts and bloody heads in their living rooms. Nope. They had Greek art. And once real Greek art ran out, they had fake Greek art. Ditto everyone who came before them and after them — not Greek obviously, but whatever was old at the time. It’s kind of funny to think about, and it made me want to embrace popular art from Tar-jay and Ikea out of principle. Then I came to my senses.

Hoving isn’t that great a writer — and he certainly has a high opinion of himself — but this was a ravishing romp through the ages of art and the greatest scams of the past couple of centuries. Have a bit of fun; crack it open.