GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:
Welcome back to SNAP JUDGMENT, the "Suspicious Behavior" episode. Our next story comes to SNAP from the rarified world of art. And as you will soon discover, the first mistake anyone can make who's trying to get away with suspicious behavior is to mess around with the wrong person's money.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: When I was in high school, my uncle Ron and his family moved from New York City out to the 'burbs to Maplewood, New Jersey. My uncle was an artist and Maplewood wasn't exactly a thriving hub of the art world, especially compared to the city. So when he opened a gallery on a rundown backstreet, everyone thought it was kind of quaint. But then one day I heard from some of my family that something peculiar had happened and that uncle Ron's little galley was getting attention. This is how uncle Ron explains it.
RON: I was going into the gallery one day and this kind of quiet, shy black guy was standing outside and I asked him if he wanted to come in. He acted a little reluctant but he did come in. And then he just sort of stood there and looked at me and he handed me a A&P bag which I opened up and was full of these little cardboard paintings. Most of them were like sort of magical looking still lifes, little sailboats and teardrops. Other ones were of slaves and various kind of slave encumberments. I said these are great, you know, I'd like to show these here. And he left them and he never told me his name, never spoke at all. Every time I asked him a question that was personal, he would just put his hands up to his lips and said shh.
MAN: He said he wasn't quite sure what to make of the encounter, but then a few days later, another clue appeared. In the back outside the gallery, Ron found a suspicious package.
RON: There was a box, inside the box were all these hundreds of little pieces of broken Styrofoam with a little note on top of it which was a way of how to put the thing together. It was actually a broken up large painting that had to be reassembled. And after two days of assembling it, it was an 8x8 foot sort of a somber looking dark - someone coming out of the darkness with light eyes, a slave with a noose around his neck.
MAN: So even though my uncle Ron said he still didn't know anything about this guy, he decided to hang the art up in the gallery and introduce his work to the world.
RON: The paintings were great and I was just going to show them and, you know, if I sold any of them, he would get the money. A lot of people showed a lot of interest. And when they heard the story, of course, it was like, wow, I'm really interested. And then the word sort of got out and sort of a firestorm started. And the show was, you know, an incredible success. Everything sold and people - a lot of New York collectors were very interested in it.
MAN: Word of Ron's anonymous artist rippled through the art world. And before long, an art critic for the New York Times, Barry Schwabsky, was reviewing the show.
RON: He was, you know, very impressed with the show. He really liked it, gave it a very good review along with a bunch of question marks since the artist was anonymous and that brought a lot of people in.
MAN: Once the Times wrote about it, it was on. The art was selling, the small ones were going for $150 and the large ones, about $900. The show made about $25,000.
RON: It got so much attention it was like an artist's dream, you know, selling it all out.
MAN: Things were great, but with success came scrutiny.
RON: And then there were collectors who wanted to find out who he was. I said, I don't have any idea of how to get a hold of him, where to find them. And they suggested maybe they should hire a private detective. And I was like, you know, I don't really think so.
MAN: And that's when my uncle decided things had gone too far. He called up The New York Times writer who had gotten him all the attention and said he needed to set the record straight.
RON: That's when I called up Schwabsky and told him that I was the anonymous artist.
MAN: There was no mysterious black man with a plastic bag. My uncle Ron was the anonymous artist. So then Ron picked up the phone, called everyone who had purchased the art and 'fessed up.
RON: Well, I called people up and said, look, this is the truth, this is the story, so if you still want the piece than fine, if you don't, than that's fine too. A lot of people didn't want the piece. A lot of people were really pissed off. The ramifications for me was that I discovered that creating a fictional artist was really more than I had bargained for because I think everybody became suspicious of me after that.
MAN: My uncle's world fell into two camps - those that were impressed with his artistic genius and those that felt betrayed.
RON: So there was this battleground between the two groups of people. I was surprised about, you know, the people who took it the hardest and the people who took it the best. The people who got mad about the race issue were mostly white collectors who thought I was using race, you know, as a manipulation to them to buy work. And most of the black people - a lot of the black people were very supportive about the idea because they thought it exposed racism. I wouldn't say it was fistfights but there was like very angry feelings expressed.
MAN: Among the angriest was Ron's own wife because she was also tricked. My cousin, Aaron, Ron's son says he knew all along his dad was really the anonymous artist, but for some reason his mom didn't.
AARON: I thought it was silly that people that knew him well, like my mom, didn't know it was him. Like, you could walk down into the basement and just see all the work. I feel like since he was saying it wasn't him, that was more important than anything she saw.
MAN: Aaron's mom, who's now passed away had been defending my uncle and the anonymous artist all over town.
AARON: One of the reasons my mother was so upset was because, yeah, she was sticking up for him. People that would say this seems like Ron's work, she'd be like, no it's not. I'm not proud that he had to keep it from certain people, but I think he would have his own reasons for that. You'd have to ask him what those reasons were.
RON: I needed people to believe me, to build up the art, to build up the belief in myself. People's belief in it made it stronger, so yeah, her belief since she was around me a lot and I was talking to her about it all the time made it grow. I think she understood and I think she was fine with it in the end.
MAN: My uncle says his social and artistic experiment was a success, but the repercussions to my family were the price we all paid. Almost 15 years later, my mom is still really pissed at him. And my cousin Aaron says he hopes his dad learned a lesson.
AARON: The problem is when you hurt someone's feelings, no matter who it is but especially your wife's feelings, there's a problem. And no matter what he says, I think if he got to do it over, he wouldn't have hurt anyone's feelings.
MAN: But for my uncle Ron, it wasn't so simple.
RON: I think that having hurt feelings is not bad, is it? I mean, it's sort of a way of growing in some ways. I mean, I hate to make it - you know, you hurt somebody and they grow, but the thing was about emancipation. It was freeing people from the constrained idea of how things work and how things operate. And, I mean, it all ended peacefully. No one got killed.
MAN: A few years later, my uncle moved to Philly. And these days, he's got a little gallery there - well, actually, he calls it a collection, not a gallery.
RON: It's a collection of artists who may not exist or fabricated artists who may not exist. So my identity is not local, it's infinite, it keeps on growing. The anonymous artist is still living well on the street creating art.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "TOO MANY PEOPLE")
PET SHOP BOYS: (Singing) I sometimes think that I'm too many people, too many people, too many people at once.
WASHINGTON: That story was produced by Andrew Stelzer and SNAP's Anna Sussman. To find out more about Ron Cohen's - or should we just call him the anonymous artist - his ongoing shenanigans. We're going to have links to those New York Times articles if you want to check those out. Find out more on our website, snapjudgment.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.