Fake Art as Art

Want to make some acquisitions at Frieze but afraid you'll break the bank? Tried to ask a dealer for a 97% discount — hey, isn't it a recession? — and got laughed out of the booth? Don't despair! Head on over to stand P7, devoted to Philippines-born artist Stephanie Syjuco's project "Copystand: an Autonomous Manufacturing Zone," which is part of the Frieze Projects series curated by Neville Wakefield. Syjuco and several of her artist colleagues have set up a workshop where they're recreating art being sold by other Frieze presenters out of humble materials, such as cardboard. All the copies are for sale, and all are priced no higher than £500 ($820).

Now, contemporary art's relationship with fakes has always been a little complicated. You've got your appropriationists, your rephotographers, your art world-approved, official fakers — Sherrie Levine, Mike Bidlo, Richard Pettibone, et al. — and then you've got your unofficial fakers, like Eric Doeringer, who used to set up a folding table outside art fairs and peddle his bootleg copies of works by Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and other household names.

Lately, Doeringer has been hawking his bootlegs inside art fairs, invited by Flash Art magazine, or even a fair itself, as was the case in Miami at the Geisai fair two years ago. And now, enter Syjuco's officially sanctioned project at Frieze, where, on Friday afternoon, she could be found standing next to what looked like one of Mark Wallinger's signature paintings depicting the single letter "I" in bold typeface. Syjuco herself had made this particular copy, which, unlike Wallinger's paint on canvas, is constructed from cardboard, wood, and paper; a pink dot on its label indicated that it had sold.

Read the whole thing by Sarah Douglas at artinfo.com here.