The Dali Scam

Often times people that don't really like art will want to create the image for themselves of a cultured, mysterious, unorthodox thinker. What they usually turn to is Salvador Dali. Hang a few pictures Salvador looking cross eyed with his silly waxed mustache twisted in strange directions and people in your life will get the impression you are complex. It is also important to hang a couple of his famous paintings with melting watches or elephants with spindly legs. This will prove that you have the taste to show his most iconic works.

Dali was only able to foist his art on the world because of the unique time period when he was a young man. Art had been moving away from realism starting with the impressionists. A large part of this was spurred on by photography. Why paint a meticulous representation of the real world when photography will always be more accurate? The lack of color photography helped slow the transition away from realism, while oddly the non-realists used the newly available vivid paints to create striking compositions.

Dali was able to exploit this transitional time period. Many people at that time despised abstract art as deviant. But Dali was able to use realistic painting style to pull in people that wanted something different but couldn't handle abstraction. His strategy was to combine objects that were not normally not associated or warp the appearance of real world items. The problem is, by and large the items combined were purely nonsensical, like boats with butterflies as sails. On top of the arbitrary nature of the compositions the execution was usually somewhat amateurish are cartoonish. Paintings were typically quite drab and lacking any real vibrancy.

Dali peddled his fame as a product unto itself, constantly mugging for the cameras, crossing his eyes and meeting any celebrity as long as the encounter was photographed. Its interesting that a google image search on Salvador Dali yields very little of his actual artwork but instead the results are image after image of Dali hamming it up. He got to the point where he stopped paying restaurant tabs and instead would just doodle on the check as his form of payment. The last decades of his life he would sign blank canvases and other impoverished artist would paint their art resembling Dali's style but making sure his signature remained  untouched. Now most paintings from this period are looked at suspiciously by art dealers for likely being fake and are valued far less than earlier paintings. On top his lack of ethics regarding his art, when he was younger he aligned himself with Fascists in Spain who persecuted many of the talented abstract artist of the era.

I sometimes meet someone and they tell me they like Dali and they hesitate so the can appreciate how edgy I must think they are. Then when I visit their home the only Dali related object they have is one of those framed infernal photos of Dali twisting his mustache. They don't really like Dali they just like the impression Dali appreciation will make on others.