It is hypocrisy at its height.
The documentary reminds me of another documentary, Sour Grapes. The people who pride themselves on their exquisite taste in art and wine can’t even tell the difference between the authentic and the forged.
This seemingly most spectacular art forgery began in 1995, when Ann Freedman, the director of the Knoedler Gallery, a 165-year-old gallery that went into business 25 years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded, bought an untitled piece by Mark Rothko from Glafira Rosales, a woman who lived (and still lives) in Long Island that no one in the art world had heard of. Freedman bought the piece for an astonishingly low $750,000. In 2004, it was sold to art collectors Domenico and Eleanore De Sole for $8.3 million. The painting itself, a black and orange composition, is beautiful. (Even Rothko’s son said so.) David Anfam, an expert on Rothko, after having seen a photo of the painting, said that it was genuine. (He denied in court that he had seen the painting in person.)
The painting came with no provenance except for a story about a mysterious Swiss collector who had a wife and kids but at the same time was also gay and had ties to a gay gallerist. However, it was not difficult for Freedman to get documents from different experts to, in one way or another, endorse the painting. No one…
