4 Hoaxes That Shook the Modern Art World

Is modern art really art? Learn how chimpanzees, teenagers, and fake artists tried to challenge it

Modern art has many supporters, as well as detractors. When Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's piece 'Comedian' was unveiled at the Art Basel exhibition in Miami in 2019 and was sold for 120,000 dollars, modern art became the object of disapproval, ridicule, and even anger.

The reason for all the fuss was that the artwork consisted of a fresh banana stuck on a wall with duct tape. Even the most popular banana brands joined in on the joke, and the parodies lasted a considerable time.

Just like this more recent case, nowadays, certain styles of modern art are controversial, in that they force people to ask themselves: "Why is this thing in a museum when I could make it myself?". In fairness, doubting the validity of the art world is not a new trend. Many skeptics throughout history have challenged a world that can appear elitist and inaccessible armed with humor.

Discover here the most notable cases:

1. Can a chimp paint better than you?

Have you ever looked at a painting that is highly celebrated by art experts and thought: "This looks like a child or a monkey could have made it"? This type of thought may have inspired Swedish journalist Åke "Dacke" Axelsson, in 1964, to come up with a singular idea. Axelsson put the art critics to the test by introducing a series of paintings created by an unknown French avant-garde artist, called Pierre Brassau. His objective was to observe their reaction. Four of his paintings were exhibited at Göteborg's Christinae Gallery, where they created a buzz among the experts. However, the experts did not know the true identity of Pierre Brassau. He was, in reality, a four-year-old chimpanzee.

Although one of the critics did evaluate the work negatively by claiming that "even a monkey could do it," the majority of the experts’ comments about the piece were very flattering. Critic Rolf Anderberg wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper that Brassau "painted with powerful, determined strokes" and that "yet he was an artist who had the delicacy of a ballet dancer." Once the hoax was revealed, he defended himself by saying that Brassau's had been the best canvases in the exhibition.

2. Disumbrationism, a fake art movement

Novelist Paul Jordan-Smith was not satisfied by inventing just one artist and conjured up an entire art movement. After his wife Sarah Bixby Smith's realistic still lifes had been poorly received by critics, Jordan-Smith decided to seek revenge. In 1924, he picked up a paintbrush for the first time in his life and painted the piece called "Yes, we have no bananas," later renamed "Exaltation." He presented it at the Exhibition of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, under the guise of Pavel Jerdanowitch, the creator of a new art style called "Disumbrationism."

The very critics who had belittled his wife's realistic paintings acknowledged this new art movement with praise and admiration. Riding the wave of his hoax's success, Jordan-Smith created more work under the same pseudonym and expanded the scope of his new artistic movement. However, so much admiration ended up frustrating him, and he confessed in 1927 to the Los Ángeles Times newspaper. Had Jordan-Smith never told the truth, one wonders whether disumbrationism would still be taught at art school.

3. Are you familiar with Nat Tate?

What do musician David Bowie, Nobel Prize nominee Gore Vidal, and novelist William Boyd have in common? The three men took part in a hoax that tried to highlight certain negative aspects of the world of modern art and social elites, although it wasn’t as malicious as the previous ones. William Boyd made up the character Nat Tate (named after the National Gallery and Tate Gallery) and wrote a fictitious biography about his life.

Gore Vidal added an endorsement on the book's dust cover, which made it more believable. David Bowie threw a launch party in honor of the publication, where some of the painter's art was displayed, on the eve of April Fool's Day in 1998. Bowie read out some excerpts of the book at the party to celebrate the artist's life and body of work.

The hoax was exposed quickly, but it thoroughly accomplished the goal. Journalist David Lister was one of the first to have doubts about Nat Tate's existence. In The Independent newspaper, he wrote that during a party, every one of the elite guests pretended to know this artist and that they had heard of him and his work before the event. Dubious of being the only person in the room not to have heard of this artist, he investigated the book and discovered that the galleries mentioned in it did not exist and that the paintings had been created by the novelist William Boyd himself.

Later on, the hoaxers confessed that the most humorous part of the spoof had been watching how people had pretended to know the trending artist, thus demonstrating the elite guests' panic at admitting their ignorance.

4. The Duchamp teens

You do not need to be a famous musician, a novelist, or a journalist to be aware of things to mock within the modern art world. Two teenagers (Kevin Nguyen, 16, and TJ Khayatan, 17) visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and thought they too could have easily created some of the objects on display. They decided to act on their thoughts and placed a pair of glasses on one of the gallery's empty spots.

The glasses quickly turned into a piece of art that the public started to admire, and the hoaxers shared the stunt on Twitter. The hoax went immediately viral, and the museum itself responded with a tweet: "Do we have a Marcel Duchamp in our midst? They alluded to Duchamp's controversial artwork of a urinal on a pedestal, a sign of wanting to break with the traditional notions of the time's art.

Although the issue of what constitutes art or not is still open for discussion, what these hoaxes prove is that modern art, despite its detractors, always stimulates creativity.

English version by @acesarato.

You may also like:

- Explore Escher's Engravings in High Resolution
- 5 Socially-conscious Artists Creating Art Out of Waste
- Hilma af Klint: The Fascinating Story of an Abstract Art Pioneer