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On an exhibit wall hangs an enormous painting, bright with vivid blues and greens and a setting sun like a yellow cat eye. Petroglyphic creatures float across the composition as if pulled from a lucid dream. An art curator approaches this $25k Norval Morrisseau (aka Copper Thunderbird) painting and, with a sloppy can of paint and a big bristled brush, slashes a giant red X across the canvas. “Someone made this painting a lie,” he says. “Someone put Norval’s name on it. Copper Thunderbird… It’s not the truth.”
This occurs in the opening minutes of Jamie Kastner’s brilliant, under-the-radar 2019 documentary, There Are No Fakes. It is a dark dive into a shadowy, exploitative art world—a tangled tale about how greed corrupts beauty—and the power of the privileged eye, be that eye a curator, a critic, a buyer, or a camera.
Norval Morrisseau is a Canadian icon. He was an Anishinaabe artist from Canada’s Bingwi First Nation. They nicknamed him the “Picasso of the North” (Picasso himself was reputed to have been a fan). Morrisseau’s 1962 exhibition was the first time an indigenous artist had a commercial exhibition anywhere, a major accomplishment, given that gatekeepers in the elitist high art world so often scoff and sideline such artists as “outsider” or “folk”. Because Morrisseau was one of the first indigenous artists to break through these barriers, he had “huge significance” and was “a trailblazer”, says Greg Hill of the National Gallery of Canada in his interview with Kastner. “He’s one of our most successful indigenous artists ever. His significance expands globally.”
So when the existence of not just one, nor a dozen, nor a hundred—but possibly thousands—of fake Morrisseaus are discovered, Kastner turns his documentarian’s lens to the controversy in what he and we expect will be a clear-cut art world whodunit. What he ends up filming, however, unearths a much darker, tragic story rooted in the deep sociological scars of Canada’s relationship with its indigenous population.
Kastner hints at the twists to come in the opening moments of There Are No Fakes with an expansive aerial shot that pans across a muted white, rural icescape. This is a cold, desolate place, empty and poverty-stricken: the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek reserve in...