Noah Charney - The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock, and Rivalry Shaped the Art World

Dr. Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome, and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a groundbreaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org), and teaches on their annual summer-long postgraduate program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He writes regularly for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer, and the Art Newspaper. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, his children, and their hairless dog, Hubert van Eyck. Learn more at www.noahcharney.com.

Books do not simply appear. They evolve. Ideas become articles, articles loop together to become concepts for overarching narratives or theses. These become book proposals, which undergo countless drafts; then, once the proposal is acquired by a publisher, the dialogue begins between the author and the new editor that might change the book dramatically. The idea for this book began with three sources. First, I was asked by art historian Clayton Schuster to write a foreword for his book Bad Blood, which tells cinematic narrative stories of eighteen famous art rivalries. I enjoyed his book, which reads like a series of novellas, and from reading it saw that all of those rivalries actually proved beneficial for the course of art (and in most cases for the artists involved). Second, among the dozens of articles I write each year for magazines, I cover subjects that most appeal to popular publications: scandal and shock in the art world. These themes are of interest to readers who are otherwise not interested in art (or think theyre not), and so they are good hooks for articles in the cultural sphere. As I wrote more of them, I realized that these dramas that we think of as negative were actually beneficial for (almost) all involved, and certainly for art itself. Third, my former editor at Phaidon, Diane Fortenberry, suggested that I might write a book along these lines, on scandal in the art world. Piecing together these elements led to the book before you.

I came to this publisher thanks to having been asked to write a foreword for Nancy Mosess book Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds, also published by Rowman & Littlefield. Correspondence with the wonderfully kind and enthusiastic Charles Harmon, who expressed interest in doing a book with me, led to my shifting from Phaidon to Rowman & Littlefield for this book plus two others (and hopefully more in the future). Im very grateful to all who helped bring this project to life.

Thanks to my family and friends, particularly the artsy onesIm looking at you, Nathan and Jaafor reading chapters and offering suggestions. Thank you to Martin Kemp, a rock star of art history whom Ive long admired, for penning the foreword, and to Odette Lopez for kindly assisting with fact-checking and Meghann French for her excellent, friendly, and necessary copyediting.

If you are interested in learning more, please join me through my website (www.noahcharney.com) or on Facebook or Instagram. You might also consider studying with me on the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, which is run every summer in Italy and was the first academic program in the world on the study of art crime.

A warm thanks to you for reading, and may only beneficial devils cross your path...

Dr. Noah Charney

Slovenia, 2020

Scandals bring about downfalls, dont they? In the world of business and politics (certain twenty-first-century American presidents aside) this is the general rule. When was the last time you heard about a scandal that was not detrimental, much less truly benefited the individual implicated? Scandals can sometimes be beneficial in that they can summon up enough fury that a necessary sea change comes about. The scandal around the 1986 Woburn, Massachusetts, water contamination case that led to the book and film A Civil Action is but one such example. When the story broke, it triggered outrage. The public rightly considered it scandalous that major companies were dumping toxic chemicals that entered the groundwater and led to numerous illnesses and deaths among residents. The scandal severely damaged the companies involved: It made the companies household names, but in an entirely and lasting negative context. It also led to a broader crackdown on industrial chemical disposala good thing for all involved, aside from those found guilty and the bottom line for major companies with toxic materials to get rid of.

A more recent example may be found in the 2015 Volkswagen emissions affair, in which around eleven million cars were programmed to misrepresent their emissions levels to appear ecologically acceptable when they were not.

These two examples are, of course, unrelated to art, but represent what we tend to associate with the only good that can come of significant scandals (as opposed to gossipy ones driven by curiosity, like the leaked sex tapes of quasi celebrities). Outrage leads to punishment of transgressors and hopefully a sea change for the bettercertainly no plus for those outed, but perhaps a resulting positive shift more globally.

Politicians and public figures seem to suffer from scandal. Anthony Weiners sending photos of his nether regions, Harvey Weinsteins sexual assaults, Mel Gibsons antisemitic outbursts, Lance Armstrongs doping. All harmed the one scandalizing, either irrevocably or for an extended period. There are, of course, people who seem to hover through life with a Get Out of Jail Free card in their pockets, but it cannot be said that their scandals really benefited them in the long run, merely that they did not suffer repercussions to the level that the objective viewer might deem appropriate. It is important to distinguish scandals from shock. Accidentally released sex tapes can make beautiful people who were not previously famous into household names. Most such examples so benefited the naked person featured that they look more like a shock tactic, a publicity stunt. For it to be a scandal, by our definitions, it must lack intentionality on the part of the person at the scandals heart.

There are several types of possible reactions to scandal, and they tend to vary based on whether the scandal rises from (A) someone trying to get away with something and having that scheme revealed, (B) someone going about their business and a resulting explosive response seems, to the public, disproportionate or inappropriate, or (C) something private being leaked and resulting in public moral outrage. Outrage is the most frequent response to a scandal, but some lighter affairs, particularly those that qualify more as gossip (or sexual escapades) rather than objectively harmful and widespread, can provoke a luscious giggle (Isnt that just scandalous, perhaps mentioned by ladies-who-lunch over their martinis). But whether dealing with lighter gossip or a powerful organization or individual caught trying to get away with something, scandal almost always destroys, doesnt it?

In art, things function in a different way. Art is its own bizarre microcosm, with rules that follow their own paths. Scandal can help its protagonist by generating promotionthis is the point of intentional actions that shock. Do something that will get you talked about, and you will remain recognized and in the public mind beyond that shock event. But as we will see, scandalunintentional and apparently detrimentalalso seems to help advance the course of art as well as the careers of individual artists.