COLORFUL MESS

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?

“Who’s the expert? Who’s the faker?” Those are the provocative queries put forth by Orson Welles, playing omniscient narrator in his masterful quasi-documentary on art forgery, F for Fake. Three decades hence, the enigma remains unanswered. In Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock, authenticity among the cultural elite is called into serious question. The documentary, directed by broadcast veteran Harry Moses, recounts the odd tale of elderly truck driver Teri Horton, a raunchy Southerner who, in the early 1990s, purchases a canvas covered in messy paint strokes for five bucks in a thrift store and gives it to her friend as a joke. When they decide to pawn it off at a garage sale, Horton learns that she may be in possession of an original Jackson Pollock. She reacts with an uncensored version of the film’s title.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...