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  • Introduction:Cons, Scams, and the Arts–Aesthetics and Techniques of Delusion
  • María González Pendás (bio)

delusions and illusions are important components in the making of art works and structural maneuvers in the art world itself. If one were to find a connecting thread in artists' ambitions across times, geographies, media, styles, and contents, it may very well be a persistent urge to fabricate illusions, to establish equivocal relations between the form and the content of the work of art, and between the mind and the senses of the beholder. For the objects, images, experiences, and spaces derived from aesthetic programs are invariably invested in multiple possible narratives and strategies of deceit. Answers to questions of what the work of art "is," what it "represents," and what it "means" are never straightforward, nor are they related in any inevitable or necessary manner. Rather, they interact in a game of ambiguities, optical illusions, conceptual deceptions, and many other forms of mirage that are routine artist techniques.

The stakes of deception in the arts are only higher once we consider art, or the art world as we have come to know it, as an institution. In it, the artwork and its reception are often only part of a network of institutional interests, public discourses, and modes of judgment that come together in a hall of mirrors in which it is difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion or cultural and financial value. [End Page 823]

Therefore, the arts offer a rich repository of stories and techniques of deception, analysis of which is central to the "Cons and Scams" project begun at the 2018 conference at the New School and represented by the current special issue of Social Research. In this section, the articles that follow by Maggie Cao and Elaine Salisbury could hardly do more justice to the issue's broad challenge. Sweeping through the history of American art from the turn of the twentieth century to our own troubling days, these two texts double down on the deceitful potential of the arts by unpacking stories of art forgers, art world swindlers, and counterfeit artists. Cao does this by threading a fascinating cultural and economic history around the forgotten story of painter Ralph Blakelock in the early twentieth century. Salisbury draws a broader canvas of the long history of art forgers, the public's fascination with them, and the dubious judicial destiny they have long enjoyed as a result, including the recent case of John Myatt. Taken together, the two articles offer a fascinating look behind the curtain, in an exposition of the strategies, actors, and narratives that have not only made art scams pervasive in the history of art, but also made art fakes ubiquitous in museums, auctions, and the public imagination, up to the present day.

Both texts then provide a nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of art world scams that touches upon questions of the nature of art as illusion. More critically, however, they draw connections between the work of art and the larger cultural and political context of which it is part, and between scams in the art world and the art of the scam in politics and economics. As Cao points out early on, while scams are like art in involving artifice, fabrication, and semblance, economic rhetoric itself is often fraught with "an aesthetic vocabulary of illusionism, imitation, surfaces, and depths" (853).

Cons and scams typically involve precise planning and the construction of illusions; diversion and masking effects; and rhetorical tropes aimed at producing double realities and twofold worlds. In the scam, as in much art, what one sees is but a representation of what might or might not be happening on the other side. In turn, artistic [End Page 824] frauds like those of Blakelock or Myatt not only are captivating stories in and of themselves but also have "much to teach us," as Cao notes (839), about the broader dynamics of cons and scams beyond the arts. To make the point, the two authors invite readers to broaden their understanding of the art object, the art world, and the art scam well beyond perceived disciplinary boundaries, and in relation to public debates, bureaucracies...

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