The Art Forger Read Online Free PDF Page A

paintings on the walls were mine, there was someone else’s name on all the little white cards. Which scared me way more than the masked marauders.
    At about three a.m., I give up on the tossing and get up. I make a pot of coffee and wander over to my computer to play some solitaire and check my e-mail. A subject line jumps out of my inbox: “ ArtWorld Trans Contest Winners.” My heart pounds and my stomach clutches. Shit. I want this bad. Need this bad. My hand hesitates over the keyboard. I click and shut my eyes.
    When I can bring myself to open them, I scan down the screen for my name. No Roth. I page down to see if there are any more lists. No more lists. The familiar sick feeling twists my insides. I don’t know whether I didn’t win because of Isaac or because my submissions weren’t any good. And I don’t know which is worse.
    ArtWorld is to the arts what the New Yorker is to literature, and their judges are luminaries in the field. Luminaries who have been blackballing me—as Markel so aptly put it—since Isaac died.
    I page up to see who won. “Shit,” I say out loud and throw my cell phone at the couch. It misses and breaks into two pieces on the floor, as it always does when I throw it. That’s how it broke into two pieces in the first place.
    But I don’t care. This is almost worse than losing. The winner is Crystal Mack. Crystal, who sold three OTC paintings at the Local Artists at Work show at Markel G to a bunch of rich suburbanites who wouldn’t know a print from an original oil. Crystal, that no-talent phony in her trendy new clothes, sucking up to all her trendy new friends at the Oak Room. Crystal, who is going to elevate insufferable into a completely new realm. I delete the e-mail then remove it from my trash bin to make sure I never see it again.
    Fuck her and her derivative pastels.
    I think of Markel’s offer and imagine Crystal’s face as I tell her about my one-woman show at Markel G: disbelief, followed by anger, followed by raw, overpowering jealousy. Even in her deluded imagination, she has to see herself as years away from her own show. It would be sweet. Tequila shots would be flowing at Jake’s. Probably for a month.
    What if I did do it? What if it all worked out, and Markel and I did something good? What if I did get my own show? All of my windows, standing proud on the walls of the real Markel G. Me standing proud in the middle of them. All the little white cards with my name writ large. Lots of red dots denoting sales. No feathers.
    Although I’m a professional copier and have studied and mastered the techniques needed to create the illusion of authenticity, aside from a single Repro class, I’m no expert on actual forgery, about the ways to mislead experts, about how it all works. I hesitate, then Google “how art forgers make money.”
    The first article is titled, “Art Forgers Cash in by ‘Russifying’ Cheap Works.” Forgeries of Shishkin and Malevich are big, as is transforming mediocre nineteenth-century European landscapes into Russian paintings. Exactly why or how the latter is done isn’t explained, but evidently the gullible nouveau-riche types can’t get enough of it.
    There’s a post on the story about a dealer named Gianfranco Becchina who, in 1985, convinced the J. Paul Getty Museum to pay him almost $10 million for a forged Greek statue he claimed was from the sixth century BCE . The Getty hired antiquities experts, geologists, lawyers, and authenticators who used every high-tech technique, from electron microprobe to mass spectrometry, to verify Becchina’s claim. Everyone was fooled, and the museum purchased the fake.
    And then there’s John Myatt, who pulled off what is considered the greatest art con of the twentieth century by painting and selling over two hundred “undiscovered” works by well-known dead artists. But the con isn’t the best part. It turns out that after a short stint in jail, Myatt established a successful business