Inside the world of legal art forgery, for the sake of movies

April 28, 2014 7:50 AM

Why This Movie Perfectly Re-Created a Picasso, Destroyed It, and Mailed the Evidence to Picasso’s Estate.
posted by Chrysostom (10 comments total)

Why This Fashion Magazine Perfectly Re-Created an Upworthy-Style Headline, Put It At The Top Of An Article That's Actually Pretty Great, And Mailed The Evidence To Everyone In The Entire World
posted by koeselitz at 7:55 AM on April 28, 2014 [14 favorites]

(More seriously, this is a really cool explanation of stuff I always wondered about. Thanks for the neat article, Chrysostom.)
posted by koeselitz at 7:58 AM on April 28, 2014

Yeah, I often struggle with titles/pull quotes and just sort of punted and used the VF title. Probably could have been better done, sorry!
posted by Chrysostom at 8:14 AM on April 28, 2014

(Oh, no worries. Sorry, I was being overly snarky.)

It's actually really interesting to me, the idea and practice of creating a perfect forgery. Reminds me a bit of F for Fake and its exploration of what it takes to make an exact replica of a painting, and the weird sense of betrayal that comes with that. I'd never thought of how that would impact clearance of art for movies, but it makes sense.
posted by koeselitz at 8:20 AM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I was thinking it was all going to be about tedious rights management etc., but this was actually interesting. The sheer amount of high quality, impressive craft work that goes into even a mediocre Hollywood movie is awesome and awful.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:29 AM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

Awesome article. For anyone who might be interested, here is the background on the 12 Monkeys and The Devil's Advocate lawsuits that were mentioned in the article but never expounded upon.

12 Monkeys
The Devil's Advocate
posted by I Havent Killed Anybody Since 1984 at 10:10 AM on April 28, 2014 [4 favorites]

I have been a huge fan of Basquiat's art since the early 90's and have seen the Basquiat movie at least a dozen times. I knew that Schnabel had re-created all of the paintings, but I always wondered what happened to them after production. The article doesn't explain, but reading about the Picasso reproduction was fascinating. It never occurred to me that they had to re-create it as well. I had always assumed they used the original. Great article.
posted by Benway at 10:39 AM on April 28, 2014

This website has a short blurb explaining a few other examples with additional content around music and other industries, although it fails to talk about the infamous Ghostbusters Theme/Huey Lewis debacle.
posted by Muddler at 10:45 AM on April 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

jonathan gash's rogueish fictional antique dealer "lovejoy" would forge about one antique per book when he needed money, telling you how to do it right there in the pages. my mom loved this, but i'm not aware that she ever forged any antiques.
posted by bruce at 6:24 PM on April 28, 2014

That 12 Monkeys example was pretty interesting, since it wasn't just using the painting as a painting, but using the depiction in the painting as a set design.
posted by smackfu at 9:47 AM on April 30, 2014