David Bowie & William Boyd Pulled Hoax on NYC Art World--Highlighting Their Pretentiousness.

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Years ago, Penn & Teller did a Bullshit! episode on the power of suggestibility. They set up a restaurant and had a "water steward" who was serving diners water from a garden hose, while the water steward upsold the product, like a fine bottle of wine. The patrons could identify the minerals and scents described to the steward, and each table was sold a different description of the source, the rarity, the bouquet and mineral content. This was directly correlated to the bullshit of wine tasters, who can't tell shit about different wines... most are made up.

Well, David Bowie & William Boyd, with help of a few others created a fictitious artist, and the rest is gold.

Never forget David Bowie masterminded "the biggest art hoax in history"

On April Fools’ Day, 1998, the crème de la crème of the New York art scene gathered for a party in the studio of Jeff Koons. David Bowie played host, and while a Who’s Who of the art crowd mingled over canapés and cocktails, the mastermind behind what would be (perhaps over-zealously) dubbed “the biggest art hoax in history” prowled the perimeters of the party. It was the key event to launch an elaborate practical joke concocted by Bowie and his friend, the Scottish novelist William Boyd, multi-award-winning author of numerous novels, most famously "Any Human Heart." Bowie and Boyd met while both members of the editorial board for Modern Painters magazine and quickly hit it off. Both were outsiders in the sense that they were art lovers but not involved in the art world directly, as a rock star and a star novelist. After a meeting in 1998, they bounced the idea around of introducing a fictitious artist into the magazine. Rolling with this idea, Boyd developed a fictitious history of a “lost American artist” by the name of Nat Tate.

With a novelist’s flair, Boyd developed a complete backstory for Tate: An orphan born in New Jersey in 1928, adopted by a family on Long Island, sent to art school and established in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Tate met Picasso and Braques in France, but this triggered self-doubt, rather than inspiration. Returning to New York, Tate burned most of his oeuvre. Substance abuse and depression led to his suicide on 12 January 1960, aged only 31. It was a dramatic tale but one in touch with the history of art, which is unfortunately full of tragic stories of early deaths, from Giorgione and Raphael to Basquiat and beyond. It also conveniently allowed for the lack of documentation about the life of Tate, as well as the paucity of surviving works. But coming up with the story was the easy part. Building physical evidence to back the story proved much trickier.
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To really make the story believable, Bowie and Boyd decided to publish a lavish monograph about the artist. Going with a publisher in Germany made it trickier for the anglophone public to ask questions. The friends reveled in the details, filling the book with plausible-looking footnotes, selecting historical photographs that they captioned as being of Nat Tate and his circle. Boyd, an amateur artist, even created some pieces to be featured in the catalogue as the work of Nat Tate. Bowie and Boyd recruited some celebrity colleagues who were in on the joke to offer bonafides and blurbs for the book cover, including Gore Vidal and Picasso’s biographer John Richardson. Bowie included a quote, as well, stating: “the great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread — that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist — did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate.”

The April Fools’ Day party in 1998 was officially the launch of "Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960," released as the first book from Bowie’s own publishing house, 21. Bowie read excerpts from the book and a British journalist, David Lister — who was also in on the joke — moved among the guests and instigated discussions about Tate, predicating his comments on the assumption that the party-goers had heard of Tate prior to that night. Apparently some of them had — a few guests could even recall having attended Tate’s exhibits in New York in the 1950s. Such is the power of suggestion.