Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art

A woman comes into a gallery in New York with paintings. Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell. None of them is in any record. Her story is this: a collector bought the works directly from the artists and kept them quiet, and now his heir is selling. The gallery buys. Then it sells. Millions of dollars of business goes through over the years. Experts authenticate the paintings. Then a buyer asks for scientific analysis and a substance not manufactured in those years turns up in the paint. One man made the paintings in a garage in Queens. Barry Avrich directs. The gallery director Ann Freedman, journalists and people from the art world speak in it. It is a Canadian production. The documentary is about a real case; the affair ended with the closure of one of New York's oldest galleries. The matter it treats is the limit of expertise; the people who authenticated the paintings were the best known names in the field. The documentary shows Freedman as both deceived and deceiving and passes no clear judgment. The man who made the forgeries was a painter from China and he left the country during the case. The narrative is about how the market works as well; the value of a work depends on who has vouched for it. The documentary shows the false paintings on screen and the viewer cannot see the difference. Its limit is depth; the narrative tells the story but draws no structural conclusion about the art market. Who it is for: viewers who like the art world and documentaries about fraud. Who it is not for: the subject is narrow, it repeats, and the ending is legal.