Sad and Happy Fake News in the Real Art World
Allen Midgette, the man pictured below, died on June 16 at his home in Woodstock, NY.
Yes, he looks a lot like Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, 34 years ago. That’s not a coincidence.
In 1967, either because he was too busy, too fatigued, or (more likely) because he thought it would be a novel form of performance art, Andy Warhol recruited Mr. Midgette to impersonate him in a series of lectures on pop art that he (Warhol) was scheduled to deliver.
When asked questions by the audience, Midgette would answer them by saying the first thing that popped into his head. “I knew Andy well enough to know I didn’t have to worry about talking too much, because he didn’t,” Mr. Midgette said. “And I knew I could deal with people much more easily than he could, because I did.”
Warhol thought he did a great job. “He was better than I am,” the artist said. “He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me.”
From the NYT:
Allen Joseph Midgett – he added an E to the family name later – was born on Feb. 2, 1939, in Camden, NJ. His father, Jarvis Midgett, was a ship captain with the Army Corps of Engineers and later a harbor master in North Carolina, and his mother, Dorothy (Jones) Midgett, was a homemaker.
He lived in Italy for a time and acted in several movies there, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Grim Reaper” (1962, the director’s first feature) and “Before the Revolution” (1964). By 1965 he was back in New York and working at Arthur, the Manhattan discothèque, which is where, that year, he met Warhol, who had seen him in “Before the Revolution” and invited him to make films with him. Mr. Midgette became part of the scene at the Factory, Warhol’s studio, although he told Chronogram that he had not been as immersed in it as some of Warhol’s superstars.
Mr. Midgette also appeared in Warhol films, including “The Nude Restaurant” (1967) and “Lonesome Cowboys” (1968). And he continued to don the Warhol disguise occasionally, even playing Warhol in a 1991 Italian movie, “Suffocating Heat.” His acting career, though, was limited. In his later years he made artworks of various kinds.
In other fake art news…
A copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” – known as the Hekking Mona Lisa – which was painted in the 17th century and marketed by art dealer Raymond Hekking, was sold at Christie’s on June 18 for $3.45 million. That was about 10 times its estimated value.
And here’s one more…
I just read this in Bill Bonner’s Diary:
“‘Modern’ or ‘contemporary’ art always seemed like a hustle,” Bill wrote. “Now, however, an Italian artist has taken the hustle to a new level…. His work is invisible.” Then he quoted this from the New York Post:
Salvatore Garau sold his piece, entitled “Io Sono” (I am), to an unidentified buyer last month.
Italian auction house Art-Rite organized the sale of the “immaterial” statue in May with a beginning estimated value coming in between $7,000 and $11,000. [It sold for $18,000.]
“The vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that ‘nothing’ has a weight,” the Sardinian-born artist explained…. “Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us.”
