‘Normal’ people are expected to look-up to often the upper crust rich elite who populate the so-called art world, aren’t they? The ‘Arts’ these days has apparently moved-on from being just the traditional two biggest visual fine arts of painting and sculpture, to include a multitude of skills in crafts, photography, ceramics, amid all kind of other arty things, but it is in the old school areas that we encounter the biggest of fanaticism problems, isn’t it?

Yes, the world of privilege paintings typifies the full extent of the proponents’ up-their arse delinquencies, don’t you think? Those plumb in the mouth morons who pontificate on the fascination of the paintings that they say they adore, are indeed just indicative of the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, surely? This lot are analogous to those belittled in the story by Hans Christian Andersen’s of the of the Emperor with new clothes that didn’t actually exist, as they claim they see something beautiful when in most cases it is a fantasy or fallacy.

Now, saying that, is not to belittle some of the undoubted great painters of the past that normal people, without an ounce of artistic background or knowledge, can admire when visiting an art museum, is it? Yep, anyone who has had the opportunity to visit the Louvre Museum in Paris to gaze directly at Italian Leonardo de Vinci’s fascinating Mona Lisa subtle portrait, or seen at The National Gallery some of English painter John Constable’s Suffolk intensive landscape paintings or walked around a London gallery exhibition full of French Claude Monet’s romantic countryside paintings with their amazing light patterns as seen in his Water Lilly canvases, will relish the experience, surely?

Now these painter guys lived a long time ago so are from past eras, aren’t they? But their paintings stand alone on merit and not merely on reputation, so they can be enjoyed by all and sundry, can’t they?

But in their time many of the now recognised major painters, the old masters or modern of a few hundred years [the likes of Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Manet, El Greco] were often spurned, scorned, criticised, or abused by the elitist art world. They were poor or normally only just survived on paid for work from churches and well-off families, or some even through the support of a rich benefactor – now their works sell in the open market for countless millions, don’t they?

Nevertheless, Leonardo hailing from some five hundred years ago, did quite well so moved in royal circles but he was much more than a mere painter, but also a brilliant engineer as well as an inventive and ‘predictive’ scientist, wasn’t he?

But then, take Constable who was painting a couple of hundred years ago, he was impoverished in his time, basically as his British artified countrymen ignored his stuff while the French didn’t quite so much – so he got his desire to ‘rather be a poor man in England than a rich man abroad’, didn’t he?

Similarly, in the case of Monet, who was outpouring his exhibition paintings a bit over a hundred years ago, while he was widely ridiculed and suffered wretched poverty before anyone would buy his work.

Nowadays in the art world, filthy rich megalomaniac individuals vie and fight with museums and galleries to acquire the paintings of all the old artists who remained unrecognised in their lifetimes, don’t they? So a 500-year-old da Vinci could set you back a cool hundred million pounds, or a Titan an eye watering seventy million, or a 400 old Rembrandt portrait pair a snip at a hundred and forty million, or moving to a mere hundred and fifty years, a Renoir at a hundred million, or if you are a bit strapped for cash, pick-up a Monet at fifty million, eh? When major works are in the hands of the museums, they very rarely sell them, and many private sales are done in secret, so it is often difficult to put a value on stuff but much of it is quite priceless.

Now, no doubt ‘some’ old paintings are worthy of a high price because they demonstrate outstanding art and talent, but most others do not. The way it works in the current art world is that if a painter produces say one magical work that astounds us all, then every other work they produced of say a thousand paintings, however crass, is deemed to be extremely valuable simply by its ‘association’ with the artists – what a joke, surely?

So, what we witness nowadays is an idiotic art world scramble to find any bit of canvas or paper that a ‘renowned’ painter ‘might’ have painted, scribbled on, or wiped their backside with, then to authenticate it, and subsequently declare another undiscovered masterpiece that is suddenly worth millions of pounds. The artwork itself can be without any merit whatsoever, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the ignoramuses involved in this silly game, thence if the famous artist wasn’t the culprit then the ‘potential’ masterpiece is heading for the bin, isn’t it?

So we have to watch and experience the embarrassing spectacle of elite owners uncovering old paintings and the like in their lofts and engaging scientific and so-called art ‘experts’ to “prove” it is by an admired historic artist. These so-called authorities on a particular popular artist get called-on to definitively pronounce about such authenticity: then you can get a situation when two of these sados who make a rich living of their ‘knowledge’, say it IS indeed by the dead artist, while another one says it definitely ISNT – so despite it being rubbish, the owner nevertheless takes it to say fine art auction house Christie’s to try and sell it for millions – idiotic madness, don’t you think?

Furthermore, the biggest joke of all this is that there are artists who can indeed paint stuff mimicking the style of some of the famous guys and they generate brand new own work which is accepted as by the artist by the powerful art houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, who then auction them sometimes for many tens of millions. The balloon goes up if occasionally the true background nature of the painting comes to light. Such paintings, though previously perhaps described as being superb, are then denounced as ‘fakes’, and the experts who were fooled take to the hills, leaving the ‘more money than sense’ art-fancier who was love stricken with the canvas at the multi-million price paid, suddenly falling out of love with it, and seeking their money back through court action, eh?

Good art forgery is very difficult in modern times but it provides rich pickings to the successful as the art world is a lucrative cash cow, isn’t it?

England had a very good forger, Tom Keating, who learned his skilled trade not at art college, but working as a painting restorer. He is said to have created and have in circulation, thousands of fakes done in the guise of some hundred different artists – that is true talent, surely? Around the World there will be many art fools gazing at a Keating on the wall thinking it is something much more valuable, as he had never disclosed which paintings were his forgeries (though he has deliberately hidden clues in them!).

His motive seems to be that he did it as he could do it; his drive was a belief that the whole art world was a despicable decrepit one, with the unscrupulous making a personal fortune through impoverished dead painters by feeding on the naivety of the idiot collectors. Well, he failed to destabilize anything, but nevertheless his infamy brought him personal fame before he died. When he had owned-up and confessed to it all, he had been put on trial for fraud of course, but charges were dropped when he appeared to be terminally ill – he recovered nevertheless, so perhaps he had faked that as well, eh?

[With luck the forgers will create so many fakes that there will be plenty to go around so museums, galleries & collectors will stop paying ridiculous sums for historic stuff, and start supporting today’s painters so they don’t live in the same kind of poverty as their illustrious predecessors, don’t you think?]