An anonymous buyer paid more than £7,000 at Sotheby’s last night for the late Nat Tate’s signature work, Bridge No.114. The money will go to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund because, of course, Nat Tate never existed — he was the invention of the novelist William Boyd, who also painted the atrocious picture above.
Tate was conceived in 1998, at the height of the fever for the Young British Artists, when Boyd decided to play an intellectual game. He would test the credulity of the art world by writing the biography of a fictional artist. Boyd’s imagination conjured an unappreciated American genius, whose work had been lost his contemporaries. Tate, exhausted by frustration and failure, threw himself into the Hudson river and drowned aged 32. His tragedy was told in just seventy pages.
This was both an investigation into the power of fiction and a satirical crack at the art scene. Boyd recently wrote of his ruse:
‘The air was full of Hirst and Emin, Lucas, Hume, Chapman, Harvey, Ofili, Quinn and Turk. My own feeling, contemplating the unending brouhaha, was that some of these artists – who were never out of the media and who were achieving record prices for their art works – were, to put it bluntly and perhaps a little unkindly, “not very good”… the only true judge of a work of art, in any medium, is posterity. A consensus about real value does, it seems, eventually emerge with the passing of time. So one should look at the wilder fringes of the contemporary art world with some wry sagacity and understanding. “All this will pass” is the mantra to chant as the wild bacchanalia of the faddy and the briefly new, the danse absurde, whirls by.’
Nat Tate was a brilliant joke at the expense of the self-appointed arbiters of taste, who were exposed as pompous phoneys. The biography was launched at Jeff Koon’s flat in New York the night before April Fool’s Day, and Boyd recalls how ‘an English journalist (one of the conspirators) moved through the throng asking leading questions and – people being people and not wanting to look ignorant or uninformed – many of them spoke openly about Nat Tate, warmly remembering aspects of his life, shows they had attended, reflecting on the sadness of his premature death.’
The joke-cum-experiment appears to have eluded many of our American cousins. The New Yorker’s Macy Halford recalls how sections of the American press reacted to this “act of national aggression”. She then goes on to write:
‘What’s amusing to this New Yorker about the Nat Tate affair, twelve years on, is that no one in New York seems to have cared very much. “The question everyone here is asking is: What hoax?” a reporter stationed in New York wrote. And they still don’t care: the Sotheby’s auction and the re-release of the biography have been covered ad nauseam in British papers, but not at all over here. This isn’t only because Boyd “belongs” to Britain, where the legend of Nat Tate has never died, inspiring not one but three television documentaries. It’s because when you are a part of, or aspire to be a part of, a certain set in New York, you expect to be obsessed over, and whether that obsession takes the form of adulation or disdain is unimportant. If the worst thing that ever happens to you is that you pretend to know an artist you’ve never heard of at a party held at Jeff Koons’s loft hosted by David Bowie, attended by supermodels, and covered by members of the international press—this is in keeping with the order of things.’
It’s a point of view that might interest Boyd. What to make of an egotistical set whose only reality is publicity regardless of authenticity? Moreover, who would trust the opinions of such people when it came to collecting art? Plainly, there is absolute truth in the cliché that a fool and his money are easily parted.
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