In 1964, the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson, writing under the pen name Dacke, grew skeptical of the rising snobbery surrounding abstract expressionism. To test the critics, he arranged an experiment. He selected Peter, a four-year-old chimpanzee from Borås Zoo, and let him paint during a series of short sessions. A few of the resulting works were then submitted to a well known Gallery in Gothenburg under the invented identity of “Pierre Brassau,” supposedly a Parisian modernist influenced by primitive vitality.
Contemporary reviews were full of praise:
Rolf Anderberg, art critic wrote: “Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.”
Swedish Public Radio said: “One becomes a believer in the power of the primitive. Pierre Brassau’s paintings are a sheer delight to the eye. After the first moment of shock, one adapts to the new and intense colours and hails Brassau as a genius.”
The art collector Bertil Eklöf was so moved by the work that he purchased one of the four paintings.
Among all the praise there was one lone dissenter who said: “Only an ape could have done this.”
When the hoax was later revealed, Rolf Anderberg refused to back down: “Relatively speaking, Pierre Brassau is still better than 90% of all the modern Swedish artists.”
That response is funny, but it is also revealing. The point of the episode was never just that critics can be fooled. Anyone can be fooled. The point was that they were not merely responding to paint on canvas. They were responding to a story, a setting, a name, a set of cues telling them what sort of admiration was expected of them. Once the icon had been supplied, the meanings rushed in behind it.
This is not only true in the visual arts. The art critics spoke of “strokes,” “delicacy,” and “fastidiousness.” Literary critics speak of “voice,” “authenticity,” and “soul.” The words change but the function is the same. They are not descriptions. They are credentials. Each term says less about the work than about the speaker — that they belong, that they see what you do not, that their judgment is not to be questioned.
One example from the literary arts comes to mind. In 1977, a writer named Chuck Ross retyped Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Steps — a National Book Award winner — and submitted it to publishers under a false name. All twenty-seven recipients rejected it, including the house that had originally published it.
