Editorials/More Black Cats/Reforming the Arts
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L S MORE BLACK CATS Another black cat news story has been heaved across the Reagan Administration's path to glory. I speak, of course, of the diabolical "blacklist" that was...
...Thenceforth, everyone in Europe would live in peace and harmony...
...impressive facility...
...Nothing very exciting I assure you...
...The subject is well worth exploring in greater detail, and one senses that there is a great book to be written on the topic...
...What makes this a black cat news story is that its presence is supposed to portend misfortune and possible doom for the administration, despite the fact that there is no logical reason that it should...
...Think of the savings...
...He had copied them all...
...Is he our Robespierre...
...A t any rate, Americans have heard it all before, savored its consequences in the Carter Administration, and indicated that they are not much fetched by it...
...In the art world as elsewhere many fear and hate the truth...
...Housing starts were up, and over the past year industrial production rose 15.1 percent...
...Therefore, let us leave NATO...
...He spends too much time urging us as a nation to be good and to remember that he is very good...
...In The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest to be published this month, Banfield asks why original paintings sell for such enormous prices given the fact that geniuses like Keating can copy them so accurately that not even the experts can always detect a fake...
...No doubt there would be cries of dismay from some in Europe, just as there are always those who reach maturity but prefer the comforts and shelter of their parents' home to by Tom Bethell the unknown and frightening outside world...
...I know it is not easy, and to recapture the sense of horror that enhaloed these news stories is more difficult still...
...Moreover the most recent Gallup Poll indicates that the voters have gotten the message, and notwithstanding the lamentations of Mr...
...Remember the portentous stories about the First Lady's humors or Caspar Weinberger's infamies or William Casey's investment portfolio...
...Truth be known Campaign '84 is shaping up to be a colossal bore...
...Banfield questions all government spending on the arts...
...Absorbed as we are today with budget deficits, Congress ought to consider the wisdom and work of these men...
...Nor can we expect much digitalis from the fellow who is now en route to the Democratic nomination, to wit: Good-Boy Walter...
...Crozier suggests that antiAmericanism in Britain is recent, perhaps only really emerging with the Suez Crisis in 1956...
...I enclosed a William Satire column to the same effect...
...So there you have it...
...He is as boring as an archbishop...
...I would not go so far, but it is manifest that museums could save a lot of money if they had the policy of purchasing only high-grade fakes...
...to leave, I agreed...
...sparked a wave of anti-Americanism in the right wing of the Conservative Party, which still endures...
...Furthermore, my impression is that anti-Americanism is now quite a bit stronger than it was when I left England in 1962...
...The Europeans were big boys and girls now, and surely should be able to make it on their own...
...I wonder if it would have given the old man pleasure in his last days to know that one of America's most brilliant political scientists, Edward Banfield of Harvard, had written a book endorsing the underlying wisdom o f Keating's rationale...
...I doubt it...
...This was not the first time that the eminent of the art world had spurned the confession of an art faker...
...Quite the contrary...
...Admittedly, all this easygoing Messiah can do is appeal to our fears and vanities...
...Who says men thirst for truth...
...No doubt also the American absence from Western Europe would mollify the Soviets, who would no longer feel threatened, "surrounded," et cetera...
...V J t o u r letter came as a great surprise but I did not find it reassuring," she replied...
...Earlier he had been a house painter...
...I speak, of course, of the diabolical "blacklist" that was drawn up by conservative pinheads at the USIA to alert all hands as to which dangerous liberals were to be barred from USIA tours...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S A YANKOPHOBE'S DOUBTS I n a recent issue of National Review, Brian Crozier had some interesting things to say about anti-Americanism in Europe, Britain in particular...
...This placated the art critics and collectors not at all...
...Some Americans might regard Europeans as "ungrateful," she could see...
...After all, how many conservatives are sent on USIA tours by Democratic administrations...
...Unfortunately, most art critics shunned Keating when in 1976 he admitted to his imitations in The Fake's Progress...
...This could be summarized as "Get out and let Europe stew in its own juice...
...Mondale and his seven fellow Jeremiahs, the President's job approval rating has risen to 57 percent...
...His campaign pledges are fairness, national safety, and returning American business to by R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . competitiveness...
...REFORMING THE ARTS Last month in London one of the most important artists o f the age expired, Tom Keating...
...So punctilious in detail was this highly principled artist that he would always leave a clue to his work's essential fraudulence...
...He cannot appeal to our good sense, for under the Reign of Reagan things are turning out rather well...
...It is a mark of conservative political naivet~, rather than treachery, that they have to keep enemy lists...
...Here were the Americans "spending millions in the West's defense," and what was the response...
...This is the rough and tumble of American politics...
...Except for his desire to maintain a military more awe-inspiring than that of the first Jefferson Administration, Good-Boy Walter is as far to the left as the George McGovern of Campaign '72...
...Keating was, as I have said, a particularly important artist as modern artists go...
...Europeans were no doubt better judges of the Soviet threat than we were, I went on...
...Thus a coy Mondale has been going about the country intoning bromides, making pious promises, and crossing his heart...
...My guess is thatart lovers will flock to see the fakes in greater numbers by far than those who go to see the originals...
...Never did he want his works to be muddled in with those of earlier masters, and so he would often use white lead to write his name or "fake" or some mild specimen of billingsgate on a canvas before beginning to paint...
...His talents were awesome, embracing the highest achievements of Rembrandt, Goya, Gainsborough, Constable, Degas, Renoir, and Turner...
...A collection of 135 superb Keatings went for less than $150,000 at Christie's last year...
...This episode, in which President Eisenhower failed to support the famously "wet" British prime minister, Anthony Eden (thus underlining Britain's hitherto unsuspected dependence on the U.S...
...As scandals go all are about of the same magnitude as those 1981 reports about the new White House china...
...Resourceful as our nation's investigative journalists are, the ominous stories that they have come up with over the past three years have been mere piffles, which exit the mind with Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...What galled the critics, of course, was that Keating had hoodwinked so many of them, revealing their basic pretentiousness...
...Then he depicts us as living under conditions similar to those that characterized France just before the French Revolution...
...Their charge remained that Keating was a scoundrel, poisoning the world of art with bogus works...
...Thus I am looking to the media to keep us alive to our civic duty this coming November 6. I urge more black cat news stories, and I would not be surprised to see the next one flung smartly into the path of Walter Mondale...
...In a 1976 letter to the London Times he announced that he had "flooded the market" with his fakes "as a protest against merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead...
...During World War II he was a stoker for the British navy...
...The only stirring moments come when he goes into his lament about how we suffer under the Reign of Reagan...
...The art world was heaved into a pother...
...It was to be the turning point...
...Not surprisingly he believes that the best way to be good is to vote for a goody-goody like him...
...Though Washington correspondent Tom Bethell argues that he is further to the left, bearing in mind his positions on abortion, affirmative action, and his acquiescence in stupendously higher levels of government spending and taxation...
...Indeed, we should pull out of NATO as well...
...He argues against public money going to support such inflated and questionable costs...
...Moreover, all that he had to do was point his 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 finger at one of the enormously expensive canvases hanging from the wall of some gallery or museum and the thing's value could plunge along with the reputations of all the establishment art experts who had conspired in its purchase...
...They have too much invested in its opposite...
...Something.must be done to relieve the growing tedium of this primary season...
...Everything about our age suggests it...
...They recognize their enemies intuitively...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 9...
...In January unemployment dropped to 8 percent, the sharpest decline in 30 years...
...He was 66...
...Though he obviously had the talent to spread oceans of vague colors across canvas after the fashion of the great de Kooning, Keating chose to do more...
...If any interest at all is to be sustained the black cat news stories thrown across the path of the Reagan Administration will have to be considerably more frightening, which is unlikely...
...So now, it seemed, the latest response was the point of view expressed in my letter, which she discerned as " a trend of thought current but I hope not prevalent in America...
...The critics had not wanted to know...
...His pictures were flawless...
...In 1945 the Dutchman Van Meegeren confessed that a collection of beautiful Vermeers was from his own hand rather than that of Vermeer...
...It was time for the U.S...
...What will the Democrats' response in Campaign '84 be...
...I was curious to see how she would react to this perfectly sincere conversion...
...Phew...
...But we should not encourage this dependence...
...It took the bewildered Van Meegeren's repeated and carefully documented assertions to prove his case, and then only after he publicly painted a splendid Vermeer under court supervision...
...In fact he is so boring that many voters consider him a moderate...
...Recently I wrote to her and told her that I was slowly coming around to her point of view about the American military presence in Western Europe...
...His answer is that a painting's cost does not reflect its aesthetic value but rather its market value and that is determined solely by its rarity...
...Being so much more ideological, most liberals do not have to keep lists...
...From time to time she camps on Greenham Common, for those who have come late to this saga, and more recently appears to have been touring Britain in search of protests and demonstrations...
...Under X-ray the word would show up...
...As with so many others who in the postwar period have had a fleeting encounter with higher education Keating became a marvelous imposter...
...Well let Congress reduce the cost of funding the arts and with no aesthetic loss whatsoever by merely insisting that the National Endowment for the Arts make its grants solely to those museums that henceforth purchase quality fakes...
...Congress has done nothing that I have been able to detect about cutting government costs...
...This is highly inaccurate...
...Museums are now willing to spend over a million dollars for one painting...
...There was embarrassment and fear...
...The only candidates offering something different from the discredited policies of the late 1970s finished at the end of the pack in Iowa, and we cannot expect much better from them in New Hampshire...
...And almost 40 years have elapsed since World War II...
...Personal income rose 1.1 percent, much of it due to increased employment and longer work hours...
...Protests and demonstrations...
...This is surely the case if my sister's letters are anything to go by...
...The man was a reformer...
...Keating painted fakes, as many as 2,000 during an astounding 25-year efflorescence of artistic genius...
...The Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...It is becoming very tedious...
...Then someone had the fine idea of giving this gifted man a grant to study art at England's Goldsmith College...
...If the rich wish to purchase originals let them set up their own museums...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
