Salvador Dalí: Self-Promotion, Madness, Genius, Hucksterism & Fakery...

"Dalí and I: Exposing the Dark Circus of the International Art Market" is a book devoted to the thesis that self-promotion, hucksterism and fakery are the only way to get ahead. They were certainly the basis of author Stan Lauryssens’s career, when he graduated in the Seventies from pasting together fake interviews with Hollywood stars for a Belgian magazine to flogging fake pictures by the biggest fake of all: Salvador Dalí.

When he enters the art world, Lauryssens knows little about his golden goose, except that Dalí means money. As the months pass, and he disposes of works of ever-decreasing quality for ever-increasing prices, he realizes the Dalí market rests on a gigantic con: thousands of works are being certified that cannot possibly be by Dalí.

In one instance, he buys a stack of prints from one of Dalí’s authorized dealers, only to discover that they are unsigned. When he returns the next day, Dalí’s signature is on every one.

Eventually, the titanic swindle, in which Lauryssens has only a small role, unravels, along with his extravagant lifestyle. And it is here that the book gets most interesting. After a cursory imprisonment, and a dark night of the soul that features some hilariously overwrought writing – “I was a fox in a trap. For the fox, the trap means death” – Lauryssens hightails it to his girlfriend in Catalonia. Here he finds himself both a neighbour of Dalí, and on the periphery of his circle, at last able to winkle out some of the truth.

And that truth is a sad business. Originally, Dalí seems to Lauryssens like a mad genius, a showman whose career is a cheerfully orchestrated fraud on the world, whether it be signing blank canvasses, ordering muses to drink his urine “to raise your genius level”, or hosting orgies based around demands for “2,000 live ants, four transvestites, a white Arabian stallion, 300 dead grasshoppers, four dwarfs, four giants and the suit of armour of Jeanne d’Arc”.

But the real Dalí is more pitiable – not just because of the crippled state in which Lauryssens finds him on their one meeting, but because of how he has become a prisoner of his greed and pathologies, to the extent that, according to Lauryssens, he maintained a “secret studio” of artists who did virtually every work of his final decades. Even Dali's moustache was a fraud: hair extensions wrapped around drinking straws.

In an interview with The Herald newspaper, Lauryssens says he believes the famous painting " Christ of St John on the Cross " was in fact painted by one of Dali's assistants. He claims Dali did not have the artistic skill to paint the image of the body of Christ. “If you look at Christ of St John on the Cross, you can see that it is made by two different people. It's basically two different paintings. The part below, the seascape – that is 100 per cent Dali. But on top you have Christ seen from above – that is not a Salvador Dali painting. It was painted by others because Dali couldn’t paint living flesh.” Lauryssens says he’s even seen film that shows an assistant drawing the life model who appears as Christ in Dali’s masterpiece. But art critics and the painting’s owners, Glasgow City Council – which bought the painting now estimated to be worth upwards of £60m for a bargain £8,200 – have rubbished Lauryssens’s claims.

It is sensational stuff, fantastic in every sense. And whether it is fact or fiction, it seems to capture two essential truths about Dalí: both his work and life could mean anything and everything, and that there is always a more astonishing story around the corner.

-Robert Colvile (Book Review: "Dalí and I: Exposing the Dark Circus of the International Art Market," Telegraph UK, 2.17.09. Image: -Salvador Dalí, "Christ Of Saint John On The Cross," Glasgow Museum, Scotland, 1951).

The Legacy Of Justice: Forget It, Roman, It's Chinatown....

Evelyn Mulwray: What were you doing there?

Jake Gittes: Working for the District Attorney.

Evelyn Mulwray: Doing what?

Jake Gittes: As little as possible.

Evelyn Mulwray: The District Attorney gives his men advice like that?

Jake Gittes: They do in Chinatown.
-Robert Towne ("Chinatown," directed by Roman Polanski, 1974).

There are, I believe, two kinds of people when it comes to crime and punishment. There are those who understand that we are a nation of laws, and that our system does not serve vengeance but justice. And those who are like something out of the Old Testament, eye for an eye righteous fumers whose philosophies on justice sound like something out of the most regressive, brutal and cruel sharia law. I like to divide these groups into educated and ignorant.

These groups stand in stark contrast on the matter of Roman Polanski, and the two classifications - educated and ignorant - become more obvious when you look at Polanski's case. The ignorant believe that Polanski should be serving life in prison or have been castrated or something equally harsh, and they are operating under the knowledge-free belief that the Polish filmmaker never faced justice in the matter of his rape of a 13- year old girl. The educated know better; they know that Polanski pleaded guilty (which is why he never went before a jury - when you plead guilty you skip the whole trial process, which exists to determine innocence or guilt) and that he served time in Chino under psychiatric supervision as part of his plea bargain.

What the ignorant don't know - and they would know all of this if they had watched the excellent, fascinating (and directed by a woman) documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (DVD release 1. 27.09) - is that the judge in the case, a notorious showboater, decided to renege on the deal and wanted to send Polanski to jail for up to 50 years, a sentence even the prosecutor and Polanski's victim felt was too harsh. It was this aspect of the case - an out of control judge seeking media attention by meteing out an obviously unfair sentence - that drove Polanski to flee America, never again to return.

In Wanted and Desired prosecutor Roger Gunson goes on the record saying that the judge acted inappropriately, and the film makes the case that further attempts to get the Polanski case cleared up ran afoul of more publicity hounding - another judge said that Polanski could come back to America for a hearing only if it was televised.

And now this streak of cruel attention-seeking continues, says the victim in the case. Samantha Geimer has called for the charges against Polanski to be dropped. From a wire services story:

"I was the 13-year-old girl Roman Polanski took advantage of on March 10, 1977, wrote Samantha Geimer, now a 45-year old mother of three. "I have urged that this matter come to a formal legal end. I have urged that the district attorney and the court dismiss these charges." True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother. I have become a victim of the actions of the district attorney," she wrote in a brief filed with the court.

Geimer continued: "My position is absolutely clear. Let us deal with the harm and continued harm that the pendency of this matter visits upon me and my family, and waive the legal niceties away, and cause it to be dismissed." ( Note: Geimer has volunteered to come and speak at the upcoming January 21st hearing).

At this point is there any question that the DA in this matter is simply trying to score political points? When even the victim is asking that this endless case be closed so that she can move on with her life?

The truth is that the case of Roman Polanski is a complicated one. Yes, he was wrong for what he did. Yes, he deserved punishment. But he went through all the legal steps required of him, did everything ordered by the court, up until the point when the court decided to scrap the agreement.

There's something Kafkaesque about Polanski's story, and this aspect is one that the American media ignores time and again. Whether or not you agree with the plea bargain deal, it was reached fairly and legally. Polanski committed a crime and he worked out a deal to pay his dues. He was then wronged when the deal was ignored. The case is filled with shades of gray that infuriate Americans, especially when it comes to sex crimes. Polanski can be wrong and yet, at the same time, wronged. Our system is set up to provide as much fairness as possible and despite the beliefs of the ignorant Old Testamenters, your rights don't suddenly evaporate when you plead guilty. You're not supposed to be subject to the extralegal whims of a judge. There's supposed to be accountability.

Hopefully we're closer to this whole matter being solved. Will Polanski ever come back to America should the charges be dropped? Hard to say. There are enough knuckle-heads out there that I guarantee any event at which Polanski appears will be picketed. I'm not sure it's worth it for him anymore, except to prove a point. Maybe it's a point that needs to be proven.

-Devin Faraci ("The Curious Case of Roman Polanski," The Devin's Advocate, 1.13.09. Image: -Roman Polanski, "The Tenant," directed by Roman Polanski, 1976 ).

King Henry VIII: Love Is A Many Splendored Thing...

In 1509 King Henry VIII of England married his dead brother's wife Catherine of Aragon, whose seven pregnancies failed to produce for him a male heir. In 1533 he annulled the marriage and married Boleyn, dissolving ties with the papacy and becoming the head of the Church of England one year later.

Love letter to Anne Boleyn:

"In debating with myself the contents of your letters I have been put to a great agony, not knowing how to understand them, whether to my disadvantage as shown in some places, or to my advantage as in others. I beseech you now with all my heart definitely to let me know your whole mind as to the love between us. For necessity compels me to plague you for a reply, having been for more than a year now struck by the dart of love, and being uncertain either of failure or of finding a place in your heart and affection, which point has certainly kept me for some time from naming you my mistress, since if you only love me with an ordinary love the name is not appropriate to you, seeing that it stands for an uncommon position very remote from the ordinary. But if it pleases you to do the duty of a true, loyal mistress and friend, and to give yourself body and heart to me, who have been, and will be, your very loyal servant (if your rigour does not forbid me), I promise you that not only the name will be due to you, but also to take you as my sole mistress, casting off all others than yourself out of mind and affection, and to serve you only, begging you to make me a complete reply to this my rude letter as to how far and in what I can trust—and if it does not please you to reply in writing, to let me know of some place where I can have it by word of mouth, the which place I will seek out with all my heart. No more for fear of wearying you.

Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain your HR."

Boleyn did not bear a male heir either. King Henry charged her with adultery, incest and treason. She was beheaded in 1536. According to prominent British historian Eric W. Ives, her Executioner was so taken and shaken by Anne, he found it difficult to proceed. In order to distract her, he shouted, "Where is my sword?" just before killing her. Anne could die thinking she had a few more seconds to live. Ten days after the execution, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour.

And...Anne Boleyn's daughter? Queen Elizabeth I: When she died at Richmond Palace on the 24th March 1603, England was one of the most powerful and prosperous countries in the world.

-King Henry VIII of England (Love Letter To Anne Boleyn, 1528. Image: -Circle of John Bettes the Elder.Temple Newsam House, "Portrait Of Queen Elizabeth I," 1592).

The Metamorphosis: Scandal, Ignorance & A Bottomless Pit of Self-Justification...

"Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit.

Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream.

1. Revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration.

2. Investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept.

3. Expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

It is a myth, of course, but a lovely one. It relies on images of power, the press, and the people that fit our collective longing—for justice, for heroism, and for ultimate goodness residing in a people who, once alerted to wrongdoing, insist on its rectification. The obstacle to this natural self-cleansing of our political life can only be the people's ignorance. For if they know, and the corruption and scandals persist—well, how can the people be good? No, what must be missing then—so the myth implies—is clarity, revelation. What is missing is the gatekeepers of our ignorance whose duty it is to draw the curtain back from scandal and show the people everything, thereby starting the polity on the road to inexorable justice.

Information is all. Information, together with the people's natural sense of the good and the right, leads to expiation and society's inevitable cleansing.

Scandals, the more complicated and richer the plotlines the better, have above all to endure. Scandals provide the fodder for on-air confrontation, the verbal slash and parry—which is what television, a terrible medium for conveying information of any complexity, does best, and does most cheaply. Scandals provide subplots and minor characters and spin-offs. They offer, to the post-Watergate, high-profile, well-coiffed, colleague-of-the-powerful journalist hero of today—could anything be further from the deeply irreverent working stiff cracking wise in Howard Hawks's "His Girl Friday" - the true venue for the highest practice of his art, the television studio.

That art relies on, or anyway thrives on, scandal. Scandal denotes success. Scandal shows he is doing his job. Scandal means pay dirt. And scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal.

Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new.

Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped "breaking news," beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis.

Everything changes and nothing does.

It is not information, it is politics. If we have learned anything this past decade it is that "the people," that vaunted repository of public good—"the people always find out"—the people are willing and able to live with quite a lot. They read, watch television, grunt a pox on all their houses, and turn back to their dinners. Thanks to the efficiency of our age of scandal we now know as never before what the public is willing to live with. "Now you have shown independence, commendable independence," Barack Obama said to John McCain in the third debate, "on some key issues—torture, for example." Torture has metamorphosed, these past few years, from an execrable war crime to a "key issue." From something forbidden by international treaty and condemned by domestic law to...something to be debated. Something one can stand on either side of.

Something we can live with.

What notes on scandal could be complete without mention of the presiding master-scandal of our age, The War. One uses capitals to denote not a set of discrete events—a set of particular people being cut down or blown apart by particular violent actions at particular times—but a state of mind. Threat becomes not only a political shield but what is in the end much more dangerous: a source of bottomless self-justification. What is dangerous is not only that our leaders have endlessly maintained that they are right but that they believe they are. George Bush, as he declared to the world in a proudly emphatic phrase, had been reborn as a "war president."

George Orwell has long since surveyed this ground, most famously in 1984, in his perpetual war between Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania, a never-ending, shape-shifting struggle that, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless.... It helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

How will history choose to explain a war launched in the cause of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist? It is a tantalizing question. Will the Iraq War take its place as a historical curiosity, alongside the Guano War of the nineteenth century or the Soccer War of the twentieth? And how interested will our descendants be in the response of our democratic polity: the investigations that, like dinosaurs slowly rousing themselves from the mudhole, ever so slowly got under way and then, after years of lumbering effort—hundreds of hours of testimony, thousands of documents examined—finally discovered...What...?

In the end, there was, alas, no "smoking gun."

-Mark Danner (Excerpt: "Frozen Scandal,"NY Review Of Books, Volume 55, Number 19 · 12.4.2008. Image: Poster for "The Pit And The Pendulum," directed by Roger Corman, 1961).