http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:29279
“You ain’t gonna believe this crap.“ That’s how 73-year-old long-haul trucker Teri Horton begins her story.
The bargain-hunting, Southern California granny bought an “ugly” painting as a gift, at Dot’s Spot Thrift for $5. But when the oversized painting—an abstract of multi-colored paint drips, splatters and swirls—didn’t fit through her neighbor’s trailer door, Horton kept it. When another friend told Horton that the painting looked like a Jackson Pollock, the feisty Horton had a quick retort: “Who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?“
Horton was soon to learn more than she ever wanted to know about the late American painter, whose mid-century drip paintings have entered the high-art pantheon. If—if—her unsigned painting could be authenticated, it might fetch as much as $50 million.
Horton’s Kafka-esque journey into the rarefied world of capital-A art is the subject of Harry Moses’ entertaining documentary, now available on DVD. Her find alone warrants the sort of breathless media treatment that accompanies valuable historical documents found stashed in discarded school desks or an Old Master lurking behind a cheaply framed map. But Moses, a veteran of TV’s 60 Minutes, expands Horton’s story beyond the charm of serendipitous discovery to cast an unflattering light on the art world.
Horton spends nearly a decade trying to get her painting authenticated and accepted. But the milieu of museums, connoisseurs and experts is insular and snobby. Unsigned works can be accepted through circumstantial evidence; in fact, Horton amasses a pretty good case for her painting. But it seems the biggest hindrance to her “Pollock” entering the holy land is simply that it originates with her: a mouthy, uneducated nobody whose artistic tastes run toward clown paintings.
Moses’ film is a fascinating snapshot, an illumination of one of our most cherished American myths (get lucky and get rich quick) that simultaneously reveals the deeply exclusionary nature of class that just as quickly cuts down such opportunity. The film also uncovers the extremely arbitrary nature of art scholarship that appears, at least in this case, to exist of dogmatic assumptions that protect high art’s status quo, particularly the maxim of “revered artist and process.“
It’s a fine movie. “The story of 73-year-old Teri Horton, a former truck driver from California, as she kicks and cusses her way, so to speak, through 15 years of what has been, so far, a vain fight to turn that $5 secondhand buy into the $50 million windfall she figures she should rightly pocket. Horton’s travails, as documented on film with heart and extemporaneous humor, and the aid of a forensic scientist and others supporting her case, provide an unfettered peek into the world of high art and its upper echelon of arbiters.
To the unschooled, it can seem that undue acclaim has been thrust upon more than a few artists whose renderings are no less magical than the stick figures etched into our Big Chief tablets back in grade school. But Wayne says that isn’t the case with Pollock, who, before his death in middle age, won notoriety for slinging paint onto canvases and letting it drip-dry. No, Wayne says, there is nothing arbitrary about Pollock’s designation as an artistic genius, even if some skeptics question what the commotion continues to be about.
“Does the artist stand the test of time?“ Wayne asked, citing that standard for assessing an individual artist’s worth. “There are early 20th century Parisian artists who generated a lot of excitement and are totally unknown today. ... I don’t think that in a hundred years, people are going to say Pollock was unimportant.“
—From Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-etcolumn5118580mar05,0,7923077.column
