Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020)

(On TV, April 2020) My knowledge of visual art is pitiful, but I’m always enthralled with books, articles and documentaries about the modern art world. While Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art focuses on the Art fraud scandal that led to the closure of New York City’s venerable Knoedler art gallery, it’s also a lens through which we can gauge the dynamics and the insanity of the contemporary art world, where fakes may be so rampant that people choose not to ask too many questions. Meticulously, director Barry Avrich introduces what we need to know in order to understand this incredible story, then carefully allows talking heads to explain and comment on the multi-year fraud, all the way from a talented Chinese forger to unethical middlemen to celebrated dealer Ann Freedman, who convinced herself that what was too good to be true… was, in fact, not true. It’s quite a feat to describe all of this in scarcely more than 90 minutes, but Made you Look also wants to explain what happened, bringing in an expert on confidence games to explain how these outlandish schemes work from a psychological viewpoint. There’s even some fun to be had, as two heavyweight art figures start contradicting themselves in separate interviews, edited rapid-fire. I strongly suspect that much of my fascination with art forgeries is pure schadenfreude at seeing so-called smart and rich (never forget the rich) people being fooled like rubes—greed is not specific to lower classes, explicitly says the film. It also doesn’t help that art investment is, frankly, a status symbol that is almost entirely incomprehensible to IKEA-is-good-enough rubes like me. Experts being fooled, institutions being brought down, people fired—if you’re looking for a happy ending here, there’s little to be found: nearly everyone who was forging and misrepresenting has fled the United States, were indicted, or had lawsuits brought against them. Stepping away from the story a bit, it’s striking that it is, again, is an indictment of untruth in the information age—as with so many other things, people lying and getting rewarded for it at a time where we expect much better. As for the conclusion of Made You Look—of course the guilty rich go free and unpunished.