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Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist?
- spacebacon 3y agoSay less Salvador Dalle https://opensea.io/collection/salvadordalle https://opensea.io/collection/salvadordalle
- Croftengea 3y agoThat's an interesting take on Dali's art. The article portrays Dali as a greedy businessman first, an artist second: > Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> a greedy businessman first, an artist second: A reasonable description of every successful artist, or at least those who saw success during their lifetimes.
- mjhay 3y agoI doubt Dali ever had Warhol beat in that department. Warhol claimed that commercial success was an essential part of his art.
- saalweachter 3y agoDifferent medium, but I've always been impressed with the commercialism of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He pioneered the multimedia empire with Tarzan -- books, comic books, radio, movies... he was happy to make money off of any way he could.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoJust businessman. You can't be greedy if you're the only employee, you're already keeping everything for yourself. Trying to make more money off the market by increasing output is just "doing more business". Shrewd, sure, but definitely not greedy.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThis seems like a narrow technical definition that doesn't really align with how people use the word in common day-to-day speech.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilyt 3y agoMight not in general but in this case there is nothing greedy with just optimizing the process. Hell, arguably less time for menial stuff more time for art
- hzay 3y agoI think that commenter is quite aware of the popular stereotype of the "greedy businessman", and is countering exactly that.
- Retric 3y agoYou can be greedy in the same way companies can be greedy but providing poor value for the money in ways that aren’t obvious at the point of sale. Ie: Selling counterfeit goods at the full cost of the actual product in question.
- zamnos 3y agoI'd argue the other direction - it's requisite to be greedy in order to be a businessman, otherwise you'd take a vow of poverty, live off charity, and give away your work for free.
- explaininjs 3y agoDoes that really portray anything? All I get is that he was a fan of batched processing.
- Croftengea 3y agoDid you read the article? It's just one quote that shows the scale of his "art" production. It also shows he cared more about the output and money flow than what is actually printed and distributed under his name and signature. If it's not enough here is more: > “(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,” > The artist’s appetite for money ... made him a black sheep to many colleagues. His greediness is the main reason the market of the fake lithographs exists in the first place.
- vlunkr 3y agoOther artists calling him out isn't convincing to me. Every rock band that makes it big is a "sellout" to their unsuccessful colleagues. He had art that people wanted so he sold it widely and efficiently. Is that not the description of every monetarily successful artist? Or are you supposed to make poor business decisions and stumble into success on accident?
- explaininjs 3y agoIf an artist isn’t maniacal and going against the convention their colleagues demand, I don’t want them.
- vasco 3y agoAm I also very greedy for writing code once that gets executed millions of times and used to charge hundreds of thousands of customers?
- dguest 3y agoThis particular fact just sounds like good logistical sense. If I'm going to sign 2000 prints I might as well do it in one batch. Also might as well sign all them together, before mass production, rather than waiting for them to be differentiated into different prints: that way they are printed on demand from a central source rather than signed on demand from many different sources. I suspect it might be misleading to say he signed them "before he knew what would be printed on them". They were authorized with a specific set of prints (his work), it wasn't like they could just draw anything and sell it. Not to say he wasn't greedy. I would say the more direct point was > "(Dalí) was completely money obsessed, to the point of a mania,” said Noah Charney, an art historian and author of The Art of Forgery. but I'm not really sure being good at logistics makes you greedy.
- dml2135 3y agoI used to work in fine art printmaking. The weird thing about signing blank paper before the prints are done is that usually not every print in a run will make it into the final edition. If you are doing say an edition of 100 prints, you will maybe print 130-150 of them, and then choose the 100 best ones to actually publish. This gives leeway for misprints and imperfections. Prints are ususally numbered by the artist when signed, so presumably Dali would either have not been numbering these and having the printmaker number them once the final prints in the edition are determined. That, or he was numbering them and they just didn't have the same quality-control that a typical edition would have.
- ska 3y ago> The article portrays Dali as a greedy businessman first, an artist second: That's not a novel idea. It was claimed contemporaneously by other artists, if I recall correctly.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI can see how that happens When I started making surreal artwork as a teenager, I got a lot of compliments about being inspired by Salvador Dali, I had never heard of Salvador Dali, I played Japanese video games and watched anime. I'm sure its possible there is crossdrift, where those influences could have some inspiration from Dali, but I find that too far removed to matter. I eventually saw the melting clocks in my high school classes. I'm sure I looked it up on the internet before hand. The key takeaway is that people associate "surreal" with "Dali", no other name is recognized so I can see how one could be compelled to actually do work inspired by Dali or just say its a Dali because that's the only name the viewers and market recognizes
- fsckboy 3y ago> I'm sure its possible there is crossdrift, where those influences could have some inspiration from Dali, but I find that too far removed to matter. you learn language as a child by being exposed to adults and peers using it, and in a similar way you soak up your culture. Then in adolescence, rebel against it, whatever it is... All small children go through a phase when drawing where they put arms and legs coming out of a head with drawing a body. But all children do not draw melting clocks. These connections between things are all there is, to me so close and unremoved it is all that matters.
- codingdave 3y agoSurrealism also is a specific movement that didn't even start with painting, but with writing, with a goal of expressing the subconscious through creative works. It grew from there in numerous directions, with trippy paintings being just one path. (And anything that juxtaposes odd ideas together being labelled as surrealist regardless of the artist's intent) Many young people start off doing work that fits the 'surrealist' label without even realizing it, because the goal of "expressing your unconscious thoughts" is simply more mainstream now than it was 100 years ago. So you are 100% correct that people relating your work to Dali are probably noting the surrealist aspects of your work without knowing who else to compare it to. Also, even back in its heydey, the Surrealists adopted other artists who knew nothing about the movement and declared them to be Surrealists because their artwork looked like it.
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- aa_is_op 3y agoBecause his art is banale and easy to fake...aka not actual art
- dbspin 3y agoHis work appears banal because it's ubiquitous. It's a curse of extreme success, that your originality becomes de rigueur.
- RajT88 3y agoTo use another Spanish artist, it's like making the observation that Gaudi's work is very Gaudy.
- zamadatix 3y ago"Gaudi" isn't the source of the term "gaudy". They likely both came from an earlier root meaning but gaudy was in place with the modern meaning before Gaudi was even born and many would probably disagree with the assumption his work could even be seen as the related to the term in the first place.
- loganc2342 3y agoOn TVTropes this phenomenon is known as “‘Seinfeld’ is Unfunny”[1]. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...
- naremu 3y agoIncidentally, was Seinfeld ever funny? I mean I just suspect the people who don't like Seinfeld probably still didn't like it when it was new, and "being done before" sure never was the problem for me. Makes this trope feel a bit of a misnomer IMO
- beautifulfreak 3y agoYou didn't read to the end. "Not to be confused with honestly thinking that Seinfeld is not funny."
- azaras 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- beezlewax 3y agoSalvador Dalí played the part of an eccentric very well, sporting a ridiculous moustache and walking around Paris with an anteater but he was very clearly an astute businessman. Hell he even did brand design - chupa chups for example
- micromacrofoot 3y agoHis particular brand of eccentricism probably made it very easy to deviate from standard business practices — who's going to bother arguing in favor of the status quo with dali?
- pavlov 3y agoAlejandro Jodorowsky tried to get Dalí to play the Emperor in his mid-1970s film adaptation of “Dune.” Dalí wanted to be the highest-paid actor in history, so he asked for a salary of $100,000 / hour: ”Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. He wants to film in Cadaquès and to use as throne a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the "wee", the other to receive the "excrement". Dalí thinks that it is of terrible bad taste to mix the "wee" and the "excrement". ”It is said to him that I will need him for seven days... Dalí answers that God made the universe in seven days and that Dalí, while not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100,000 dollars an hour. Perhaps that while arriving at the set he will decide to film each day more than one hour for the same price. ”The only condition is to have the Emperor on the throne scatologic. He does not want to read script: "My ideas are better than yours". He wants to choose his court among his friends, wants to say what he wants and moreover, at the time to sign the contract, will condescend to make me gift of three ideas that I will have the right to use or not.” https://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/ https://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/jodorowsky/ The story of this unmade movie is very interesting on the whole. It led indirectly to “Alien” and other sci-fi classics by introducing European artists like Moebius and Giger to Hollywood.
- beezlewax 3y agoThe documentary about this is excellent. So many people were involved. I'm almost glad it just lives in my imagination because I don't know if they could have pulled it off with the sfx film/technology of the time. Insanely ambitious.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoI would perhaps suggest "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is the most faked? It was created in 1831 I think. There are no extant prints of the original in existence. Just copies and copies of copies, uncounted 'fakes' everywhere. And like a colossal game of telephone over the centuries, changes crept in until there are quite a few distinct prints purporting to be the most original.
- qingcharles 3y agoWikipedia says about 100 extant prints of the original survive, of approx. 9000 total that were made?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoHuh. That famous British antique show expert claimed no originals existed. Serves me right for believe what I heard on TV! Here's a wonderful discussion by an investigator specializing in the print: https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/great-wave-spot-difference https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/great-wave-spot-differenc...
- qingcharles 3y agoThat's a really great article that brings some solid facts to the question. That guy did his research.
- ccooffee 3y agoThanks for sharing. This is a well-written and well-presented account of how mass-produced woodprint paintings show noticeable change between early- and later-printings.
- BashiBazouk 3y agoThey kept running editions off the original wood plates but the plates slowly wear and because of that colors changed from edition to edition. My father bought a 3rd edition print in the 60's when he was in the navy stationed in Japan. It's a bit muted, especially in the sky compared to the first runs I have seen in museums.
- dvh 3y agoRealistically looking abstract art is IMHO most useful. Subject can be real or not (2 options) and painting can be realistic or not (2 options). That gives us 4 possible combinations: Real subject painted realistically - just use photographs, they are better. Real subject painted unrealistically, most modern art, as useful as blurry photos of UFOs or yeti. Unreal subject painted unrealistically. This is most useless, painter have novel vision or idea but is not good enough to convey it, in gamedev they call them "idea guy". And finally, unreal things painted realistically. Painter have novel vision or idea, and is skilled enough that you can see his vision, this is the only valuable art. And that's what Salvador Dali was.
- loganc2342 3y agoAn interesting thought, but I personally don’t consider art style based on how “useful” it is. A realistic painting has a certain quality that a photograph doesn’t. Also, an unrealistic art style does not signify a lack of skill and sometimes even takes more skill depending on the specific piece.
- dfxm12 3y agoWhen painting a soft or melting pocket watch, where is the line between it being a real subject (pocket watch) painted unrealistically (as soft or melting instead of hard) and an unreal subject (a soft or melty pocket watch) painted realistically?
- digitalianz 3y ago[dead]
- anonu 3y ago> It was the era of Reaganism and Wall Street greed, and art was now being marketed as an investment. Many gallery owners told customers a piece of art by the likes of Picasso, Miró, or Chagall would never lose value. There was a good interview with Jeff Koons on 60 Minutes last night. Koons mentions how he met Dali and was instantly inspired. The two share a lot in common - mainly hyper-capitalism meets the art world. Humans are very good at creating near worthless (debatable) objects we covet and pay millions of dollars for.
- jameshart 3y agoTo be honest this distinction between a 'real print' and a 'fake print' feels more Magritte than Dalí. > Because many of Dalí’s original and legitimate prints were turned into limited-edition series (sometimes with a vague number of authorized prints) and he had been sloppy with his signature throughout his life, it was hard to tell the difference between a real print and a fake print that had been copied an unlimited number of times. If only they had issued some sort of nonfungible token that the owners could point to to attest to the true provenance of their limited edition prints.
- baerrie 3y agoNo, the person that invented the smiley face drawing is the most faked :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]