In this week’s New Yorker David Grann does some serious sleuthing in order to expose art “expert” Peter Paul Biro. The article is a fantastic piece of investigative journalism, and it reads like a (well-written) Dan Brown novel. If you’ve seen the documentary Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?, you'll remember Biro as the champion of forensic science who takes on the art connoisseur bullies in order to authenticate a Jackson Pollock discovered by a retired truck driver, Teri Horton. Biro swoops in with fingerprinting and fancy imaging techniques to prove that a print on Horton’s piece matches one found in his studio—indisputable evidence that Horton’s canvas is a Pollock. Biro is a populist with the authority of hard fact on his side, leaving the curators and scholars looking like stubborn elitist snobs.
Grann sets out to profile Biro for the magazine—he just keeps on stumbling on Leonardos, Turners, and more Pollocks! — but in the course of the investigation Grann gets suspicious about his subject’s story. Some of the details seem too perfect or serendipitous, and, upon inspection, they are. I don’t want to give too much away because the piece is so smart and well crafted. (And I should note that Biro vehemently denies any wrongdoing.)
As Grann says, what’s so fascinating about the whole episode is the way Biro took advantage of the public’s desire to debunk the cult of connoisseurship that dominates the entire art world, making art a kind of knowledge available to the few who have the money and time for intensive study. In the documentary a Pollock scholar declares that Horton’s drip canvas just doesn’t have the “energy” of a Pollock, which, in the context of the film, sounds absurd. But of course that scholar is right.
More than just a triumph of connoisseurship, this whole episode reminds us why art is art and why it’s not science. I mean: there’s something irreducibly emotional, new, and almost magic about great art—an “energy”—that can’t be captured by x-rays or fingerprints and must be experienced through careful and patient looking. Rather than putting an end to a discussion by naming a work “a Pollock” or “a Leonardo,” that something begins a conversation, a struggle to articulate what couldn’t be said in words in the first place.
Now, there’s plenty of elitism (and worse) in the art world, but Grann’s article shows how Biro’s supposed populism is actually just the worst kind of elitism masquerading as populism. Even if he were the real deal and not a con artist, his business of naming artworks without attention to their “energy” or technical accomplishment puts a premium on the artist’s name, telling us to see a work for “who” it is not what it is—or what it can tell us. He makes a Pollock into nothing more than an expensive artifact of celebrity.
We’ve all been in a museum and heard, “I could do that.” Or better yet, “My 3-year-old could do that.” No, it turns out, she couldn’t. And thank goodness.
