Who the #$&% Is Teri Horton?

[Robin Landseadel]

If you get Netflix note that Orson Welles' "F is for Fake" is  
available as streaming video in a good looking transfer. Very much  
relates to this theme of artistic fakery.
On May 30, 2010, at 8:22 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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