"The whole art world is a fraud." One can always count on that theme to sell a few books or magazines.
It appeals to a public unease with art since Modernism, even while people pack the modern museum. It appeals to qualms about soaring prices, even as auctions only add to a work's aura and the public's reverence. It appeals to a phony right-wing populism that still plays politically, directed perversely at artists, scholars, and others on the outside of real wealth and power. No wonder it appeals, too, to The New York Times.
Twice in about a week, the paper reports on a painting that may or may not pass for the work of a great American artist. Teri Horton, whom I quoted at the outset, bought it for five bucks at a California thrift shop, and she has been trying to validate it ever since. 
Her story pits a gutsy woman against art historians, who dismiss it as worthless. It also makes her the star of a new movie, Who the $#%& is Jackson Pollock? The film neatly aligns her contest with another, between "the connoisseurs, who insist that a refined eye is the ultimate judge of authenticity," and "the scientific side." Thomas Hoving, former director of the Met, stands in for the former, while the forensic evidence comes from fingerprints.
The director, Harry Moses, leaves no doubts where his sympathies lie, and The Times obviously shares them. I can see a case for them, too. In a newspaper thumbnail, the paint looks far too flat, dense, even, close the canvas edge, matte, and simply boring for Pollock's. An unsigned drip painting does not yield its secrets easily, however, and prints may sound convincing. According to a Canadian investigator, they match those on a Pollock in Berlin and others from Pollock's Long Island studio. Still, alarms should be sounding loud and clear.
As in politics, one should be questioning the populism alone. The Times would not be covering this twice in one week unless a bigger business than the art world were promoting a movie. Ironically, too, Hoving made his reputation, both as New York parks commissioner and at the Met, by opening Central Park and the museum alike to a larger public. Not surprisingly, then, the film's scenario sounds like a market-tested formula. Both a woman and a former truck driver with an eighth-grade education—one who hated the "ugly" mess at first and could not give it away? One can hear audiences cheering already.
Michael Moore at least takes on real private interests. No one else's Pollock drops in price if this one sells. Conversely, the movie depends on buying into the worth of a Pollock, and by denigrating visual examination it effectively detaches that worth from anything like, well, meaning.
One also wonders about the credentials of the investigator, about how he obtained the prints, and about whether any museum lab got a look. Real science is open and replicable, and anyway art forgers often begin by scraping away a canvas from the right time and place.
Finally, just who neatly aligned those two conflicts? Art attribution always relies on scientific examination, because inspection, knowledge, and understanding go together: they are about developing an informed eye and a receptive mind.
A museum like Hoving's would be testing the pigments against Pollock's, using microscopes, radiography, and maybe even fractal analysis to compare the density and weave of paint. It would also be researching how a painting worth a fortune would have left Lee Krasner's estate, crossed the United States, and landed in a thrift store—a narrative that historians call the painting's provenance. And when all that examination does pay off, in what I see and know, it may not have anyone cheering.
I pursue many of these themes further on my own Web site, http://www.haberarts.clom/, including art attributions, why they matter, when science and art intersect, and the overblown art scene.
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