The lucrative masquerade of merchandise as art

Ersatz art used to be inexpensive. Its consumer was the man on the street who knew nothing about art but knew exactly what he liked. In the late 1970s, picture shops sprang up throughout Manhattan, selling what was billed as original oil paintings or sofa-size paintings for $35 or $45 apiece.  They were often made by immigrants working assembly lines in secret sweatshops; one person painted the red barns or square-riggers, another the sunsets or full moons. The artist’s signature was a sham, for no artist existed: The picture was nothing more than merchandise made by art mercenaries. At best, an ersatz picture was signed fraudulently by someone such as Walter Keane who — in the 1950s and ’60s — claimed his wife Margaret Keane’s paintings of big-eyed waifs as products of his genius. It was easy to ignore. 

Meanwhile, the release of “Big Eyes,” directed by Tim Burton, gives us the ironic opportunity to note that this is a high-end film about ersatz artists. Walter Keane’s charade as the maker of Margaret Keane’s sad big-eyed waifs may have been despicable, but the truth is that whoever painted these images was producing kitsch, one step removed from a Hallmark greeting card. John Canaday, then an art critic of The New York Times, reviewed a picture titled “Tomorrow Forever” that was exhibited briefly at the 1964 World’s Fair, writing, “This tasteless hack work contains about 100 children, hence it is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane.” (Walter Keane pronounced it a masterpiece.) We must presume that Burton, who collects big-eyed Keanes, is aware that they qualify as camp objects and that his film presents a knowing melodrama of ersatz artists.

Above all, what ersatz art lacks is intentionality, a committed artist with a compelling concept. Lacking profundity, it wallows in the shallow and the superficial. (Sometimes a tear rolling down a cheek is just a drop of water). In other words, ersatz art is nothing but a commodity. All art is merchandise, but not all merchandise is art. Far from reflecting the present, predicting the future or conveying what once were called the human verities, such as the value of life and death, Lik’s pretentious canyon photo, like countless tourist photos of that canyon, is little more than a trite optical illusion. Margaret Keane’s waifs, meanwhile, are clichés of pathos. Genuine art has aesthetic value because it can stun or thrill you or make you view the world in a different way. As the cultural critic Walter Benjamin explained decades ago in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” art gives off the “aura” of a unique, meaningful original. Ersatz art — an imitation work of art, a naugahyde substitute — lacks that ineffable quality.