Who the #$&% Is Teri Horton?

[Dave Monroe]

Who the #$&% Is Teri Horton?

by Mark Scaramella on May 29th, 2010

Teri Horton is a 70-something retired long-haul California truck
driver who purchased an abstract painting from a thrift shop for $5 as
a joke-gift for a friend which, Horton soon discovered, turned out to
probably be a multi-million dollar Jackson Pollack painting. But so
far, despite heroic efforts, Horton has been unable to prove to the
art establishment that the painting is a real Jackson Pollack.

[...]

The art world’s skepticism about Horton’s find may be justified. After
all, it wasn’t until Professor Don Foster delved into our “Letters of
Wanda Tinasky” and found out they weren’t written by novelist Thomas
Pynchon, as many people thought. They were written by an itinerant
former San Francisco beatnik named Tom Hawkins who lived in Fort Bragg
in the late 80s. After writing the wonderful, highly literate letters
which he signed as Coast Bag Lady Wanda Tinasky for several years,
they abruptly stopped in the late 1980s. Hawkins seems to have gone to
some lengths to hint that Pynchon was the author of the Tinasky
Letters. Foster discovered that a few weeks after the letters stopped,
Tom Hawkins was the guy who murdered his wife and ran his car off the
coastal bluffs a couple days later. (Foster laid out his discovery
process in one chapter of his own very interesting book “Author
Unknown.”)

The point is that the literary world lost interest in the Letters of
Wanda Tinasky, which I think are better than Thomas Pynchon,
personally, when they discovered that the letters were not written by
Pynchon.  But a case can be made that, like Myatt’s fakes, the
imitation is better than the original, whether the original is a pure,
meaningless abstraction like Pollack’s drip-style, or if it’s the
nearly impenetrable prose of Thomas Pynchon.

Who gets to say that one is “great art” worth millions and the other
is a worthless “fake”?

http://theava.com/archives/6820

Meanwhile ...

Order in Pollock's Chaos

Computer analysis is helping to explain the appeal of Jackson
Pollock's paintings. The artist's famous drips and swirls create
fractal patterns, similar to those formed in nature by trees, clouds
and coastlines

By Richard P. Taylor

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=order-in-pollocks-chaos
http://www.uoregon.edu/~msiuo/taylor/art/scientificamerican.pdf

Pollock or Not? Can Fractals Spot a Fake Masterpiece?

Complex geometric patterns turn up in non-Pollock drip paintings

By JR Minkel

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-fractals-spot-genuine