Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of fake art since reading about Elmyr de Hory. If you’ve seen Orson Welles’ mindfuck of a movie F For Fake, you’ve only scratched the surface of Elmyr’s story. An art forger of the highest order, he managed to forge hundreds, potentially thousands of paintings from renowned masters lien Picasso, Van Gogh, Kandinsky and many more. He would defend himself by saying that he never signed their names to the paintings, so he never actually FORGED … he just painted in the style of someone. Experts authenticated many of his works, and were rightfully embarrassed when the lie was exposed in the 1970’s. Made You Look intrigued me because this was a story similar to Elmyr, but with a twist; the forger themselves wasn’t getting rich. They were a pawn in a long con, the supplier of the material around which the con was based. A con that ended up costing people $80 million dollars. This doc does a fantastic job doing what a lot of documentaries don’t: it DOCUMENTS. The documentarians are never seen and only heard from, off-camera, unmic’ed, asking a question. The story is told entirely by those willing to be on camera: art experts, people in the art world, lawyers, and most importantly, the art dealer who got suckered by a housewife from Long Island with a series of fantastical stories about selling lost art now found. By staying out of the way, the documentary has no agenda; the art dealer states her case. People who bought the forgeries tell their story. The prosecuting attorneys tell their side, and so does the defense. Art experts weigh in. Everybody has a viewpoint, and the documentary isn’t here to say who is right or wrong. It’s just here to present the story and let you, the viewer, be the judge, and it does it remarkably well. It’s a fascinating case, almost impossible to believe it happened, and well worth watching.