'Art and Craft,' profile of a crafty forger
The documentary "Art and Craft" profiles serial art forger Mark Landis, who fooled museums for strange reasons that had nothing to do with money.
"ART AND CRAFT" is a documentary about art forger Mark Landis, an eccentric Southerner whose hobby is in making replicas of valuable art.
His other hobby? Posing as a big-shot donor and fobbing his fake paintings off on museums (for free) as the real thing.
He calls this "mischief." Museum curators call it fraud. Either way, law enforcement isn't interested, because there's no money involved.
Landis doesn't ask for payment. For him, the reward is simply fooling the curators - the satisfaction of a con job well done.
"Art and Craft" explores the deeper currents at work in Landis. He's the sort of strange, found object tailor-made for documentary film - tall, shambling, hairless, with the voice of Truman Capote and the oedipal complications of Norman Bates.
His putative crimes, though, are not very menacing. More like an art world in-joke that only he gets. He gives them to museums (including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the film claims) so that he may see his work on display.
For Landis, the urge to keep making fakes is revealed, in the film, to be tied to his need to please "mother," now dead but occupying a Faulknerian place of power in his psyche.
He's harmless, unless you feel harmed by looking unwittingly at inauthentic museum paintings. The movie conjures a few objectors, but their bland zealotry is less engaging that Landis' quirky, borderline criminality.
Few dislike him. It's hard to dislike a guy who, at his worst, is a man (as Landis puts it) on a "philanthropic binge."
Online: ph.ly/Movies