The Art of the Prank

“They somehow look more impressive on canvas,” said my roommate, Ryan, standing beside me and staring at the three easels and what was propped on them. “And in frames,” he added.

“As opposed to the prototypes?” I asked. I sipped my black Gevalia coffee.

Ryan scratched his head, fluffing his sandy blond hair. “I don't think it's called a prototype in regard to painting.”

“Preliminary drawings then?”

“I think they're called 'studies,'” said Ryan.

“I think you're right,” I said. “I don't think the artist studied too much, do you?”

“You know better than I do,” said Ryan, “but … no. Wait. Do you mean Leah or Carson?”

“We're calling him Pavel Shutka. Remember?”

“Right,” said Ryan.

The painting to the left was a tangle of rainbow colored lines with more open loops visible on the outer edges and more of a dense knot of colors at the center. The middle painting was similar with coiling lines that almost looked like an unraveling ball of yarn, only not as spherical or orderly, with some random black lines in the eye of it, which, from certain angles, made me think of an insect. The painting on the right had big scooping loops of color like ocean waves crossing the canvas and some mysterious black scrawls on the far right side of it. Each had a unique signature with thin, tall, steeply right slanting letters – P. Shutka.

Ryan turned away from the paintings to look at me, “Ready?”

“Ready,” I said. I set my coffee cup down on the counter. “How do I look?” I fanned out my arms to the sides.

“Like a young Trotsky.”

“Seriously? I know I'm Russian-American, but ...”

Ryan pulled out his phone, typed, swiped and then handed it to me. He had done a Google image search for Trotsky apparently. The wild waves, the goatee, the glasses … He did have somewhat of a point.

“You feel like you're looking in a mirror, don't you?”

“Not quite,” I said, “But I see your point.”

Ryan took his phone back and began to pack up the canvases in a large art portfolio case.

“I was really asking about the clothes. I wasn't sure whether to do business casual or full on Cary Grant.”

Ryan looked me up and down, at my tie-free but designer jacket and pants ensemble. “You look understatedly elegant … like an artsy hipster.”

“Okay. I'll take that,” I said. “How do you like the watch?” I held out my right hand and pulled up my jacket sleeve a little. “A Movado, you know, the kind they call the 'museum watch.'”

“Okay,” said Ryan. “You look like a rich artsy hipster. Where'd you get it?”

We headed out of the apartment with the art portfolio. “On loan, from my client, George. He wanted me to look the part.”

“Ah.”

After fifteen minutes' travel, we were at the big glass doors of the MoMA, New York's Museum of Modern Art. Ryan pulled out his phone, did some more texting, and we found our way to a private event room, with a lectern and microphone set up on our right and rows of chairs to our left. A woman with a blonde coiffure, black tailored suit and heels greeted us at the door to the room.

She held out her hand, and I shook it. “Mr. Kuzmich, it is so nice to finally meet you in person.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I put on the Russian accent thick. As a second generation Russian-American, I could do it easily and remove it easily too.

“Call me Suzanne,” she said.

“Certainly … Suzanne,” I said. “You may call me Vlad.”

A flurry of other introductions ensued, and then the paintings were removed and set up in places of honor on the wall behind the lectern. “Vlad, these are exquisite!” gushed Suzanne.

“You think so … Yes?” I asked.

“The emotion in every line … and the texture. It almost looks like crayon, but it isn't, is it?”

“No,” I said. “It's all oil paints.”

“Very interesting,” she said, standing back a little to observe them from a distance. “A little Twombly-esque, I think ...”

She referred to an artist I knew about, who had a similar scrawling style. His multi-million dollar works were displayed elsewhere in the museum.

“Yet, it is his own style.”

“Quite right,” I said.

“All right,” Suzanne said to me. “People will start coming with their tickets. We have about fifteen minutes, and then you can speak.”

People gradually filled the seats in the room. When the time came, Suzanne gave me a grand introduction. “We are so honored to have with us Mr. Vlad Kuzmich, who so generously has loaned us these three works, Winter's Night, Anguish and Communism from his private collection. All three paintings are from an emerging Russian artist, Pavel Shutka. Mr. Kuzmich, please ...” She waved her hand for me to come forward and stepped aside.

As I looked out at the faces before me, my heart began to pound as I fully realized the precarious position I was in. In spite of that, I put forth my most confident smile. “Hello everyone.”

A few hellos echoed back at me.

“As an art lover, I am so pleased to share with you the works of an emerging artist from my home country. Great art should be shared and should bring opportunity to everyone to analyze and interpret. Shutka has only been discovered in the past three years, but, already, he has been acclaimed by several Russian art publications and has had his works displayed in the other MMoMA. You have to say it exactly like this... Mmmm … Moma,” I said.

This drew a few laughs from the audience.

“Yes, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Shutka has gained a reputation for his aggressive strokes, his raw emotion and his deep philosophical statements ...” Somehow, I made it through another fifteen minutes of similar speech.

When it was over, I took a breath of relief and joined Ryan at the rear of the room. A couple of waiters began to circulate the room serving champagne and a few hors d'oeuvres to the paying guests. As one passed us, Ryan took a flute of champagne, and handed me one. A few moments later, he gave me a discreet ear bud. When I put it in my ear, I was privy to all the comments people were making by the paintings and about the paintings in the other part of the room. Glancing at Ryan's phone, we could even see the people's gawking faces from the painting's perspective, all thanks to my roommate's technical geekdom.

A pair of young college age women stood by the first painting, discussing their observations with each other. The one on the right wore a pink skirt and ballet flats and looked like she needed to be studying Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her friend, looking more bohemian and bold, wore mismatched prints, colorful striped tights and bangles. “What do you suppose it means? Winter's Night? The colors aren't very wintry, are they?” asked Pink.

The colors of that particular painting were bright and covered the entire spectrum.

“Don't be so literal. He's trying to depict an emotional winter,” said Stripes.

“But wouldn't blues and blacks and grays be good for an emotional winter too?”

“I think,” said Stripes, “that he is in turmoil. Look at all those tangle of lines. It's dizzying. It's like being pulled into a vortex, a vortex of turmoil.”

“It looks like crayon,” said Pink.

“It isn't,” said her companion. “Mr. Kuzmich said it isn't, but it's made to look like crayon. I think the artist is going back to his childhood, kind of like a person who's been traumatized goes back to the fetal position.”

“Mmm... Maybe,” said Pink.

The two had even more interesting thoughts at the third painting, Communism. “It must be those black lines on the right that represent Communism. They seem to be stretching out like they're ready to swallow everything in its path,” said Stripes.

“You think? But if the black lines represent Communism swallowing everything, shouldn't they be on the right, you know, the east moving west, towards the left?” asked Pink, seeming to analyze the painting in terms of a map.

Stripes gasped and held out a hand, her bangles shaking, to take Pink's wrist. “You're right. I think he's making a pro-Communist statement. The bright colors are Communism, and the black is the western world.”

This was getting interesting. I tried not to choke on my shrimp canapé.

A short while later, another woman seized my attention for an entirely different reason. The woman had unnaturally red hair – helped from a bottle – bangs and a long bob. She spoke with a Russian accent, a genuine one, as she said aloud, “Shutka. Shutka is not a proper Russian name. It means 'joke' in Russian.” I watched her on Ryan's screen and also looked at her from across the room.

Ryan and I exchanged glances. “I like this woman,” I said. I genuinely meant it, but I was also a little worried.

The woman continued, “Picasso, I understand. Mondrian, I can appreciate, but this … this is scribbling. This can't be right.”

I nodded at Ryan and then walked across the room to introduce myself to this woman. I spoke in Russian. “Privet. Otkuda vy?” Hi. Where are you from?

We continued to speak in Russian to each other and shared that we were both from St. Petersburg. In my case, my parents were from there. After talking to her for a while, I invited her to join Ryan and me at a nearby Starbucks.

Later, over a dark espresso, I shared with her, “You're right about Shutka. It's a joke. He's a joke. He doesn't exist.”

My new friend, Olga, put her hand over her heart. “How did you know what I thought about the name?”

“I have my ways,” I said. I grinned mysteriously.

Ryan looked at me with raised eyebrows and a worried look.

“'Pavel Shutka' is actually two people,” I told her. “Would you like to see the artists?”

She nodded.

I pulled out my phone, brought up a picture and turned the screen to her, showing her a photo of my three-year-old nephew Carson. “My nephew,” I said, “Carson.”

Olga leaned into the phone. “He paints?”

“No,” said Ryan, swirling his coffee, “our artist friend Leah painted it from Carson's crayon drawings.” Ryan brought up a photo of Leah, in her artist's smock, on his phone and showed it to Olga.

I took the phone back and pulled up more pictures of Carson with his original crayon creations which we had named Winter's Night, Anguish and Communism.

I gazed down into my coffee. “We thought it might be going a bit too far to frame the original crayon drawings on computer paper and pass it off as an adult's modern art. We gave Carson's drawings to Leah, and she projected them onto canvas, enlarging them and painting the same patterns with the same colors onto canvas. It did take her a bit of work to do that, to mix paint colors to match the Crayola colors and – though we didn't ask her to do this – create a bit of crayon texture.”

Olga sipped her frappuccino and shook her head in disbelief.

“I first got the idea of the prank a year ago at Easter when Carson kept giving me his drawings. I thought what makes his artwork amateur and primitive and something that Twombly creates worth millions of dollars and museum space?”

Ryan nodded. “Who are the real scammers?” he said. “Are we the scammers or is the modern art world scamming everyone?”

I did a Google image search on my phone and brought up a photo of one of Cy Twombly's untitled pieces. I showed it to Olga. “It looks like a bland public bathroom wall with some spackle and a little bit of scribbled graffiti.”

Olga laughed. “I agree. Your nephew's work is more interesting and looks nicer.” She shook her head. “But how did you do it? How did you convince the museum to display paintings by this Shutka?”

Ryan caught my eye a second. “It wasn't easy. As he said, Paul had this idea a year ago.”

“Paul?”

“My real name,” I said. “Pavel actually. I am Russian, and my family's from St. Petersburg as I said, but my real name is Paul Denisovich.”

“Thank you for trusting me,” said Olga. “I won't give you away. I find what you did so interesting, and I think it proves a point.”

“So, we worked on this idea for a whole year, and we involved a lot of other friends and connections, including those in Russia.” Ryan glanced at me. “We have friends who are journalists, marketing specialists, web designers, and they were all in on the prank. We used them to create a buzz and a bit of a campaign.”

“But were these Shutka paintings ever in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art?”

“No,” I said. “But we gave this museum the impression that they were, by some Photoshop skills and links to a false webpage for the Moscow MoMA.” I brought up the false webpage and the Photoshopped image.

“It's amazing you were able to get away with it … so far, but it might not last. Surely, somebody else besides me will know the meaning of 'shutka' or someone can check with the Moscow museum,” said Olga.

“Perhaps,” I said, “But I think they will be too embarrassed by the incident to press charges. After all, we have video and audio evidence that they considered this great art,” I said. I sat back and smiled.

“And these paintings are only on loan to the museum?”

“Yes.”

“Will you sell me one?”

“Why?” I said. “It's worthless, and you thought they were ugly.”

“But it has such an interesting story, the painting that made a fool out of artistic critics,” she said. “You confess it's not worth millions, but perhaps you would take $1200?”

“It's a lot more than I think it's worth, but if you really want it?” I shrugged and looked at Ryan.

He shrugged and nodded back at me.

“We can't keep the money you know,” I said to Ryan. “We'll give half to Leah and half to Carson … for his college fund.”