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The Art Collection of Rick Haatj

The Art Collection of Rick Haatj premiered with a private viewing organized by Art Hijack at the penthouse suite of the Roger Smith Hotel (New York) from November 1-7, 2004.

Each night a select group of thirty people – artists, critics, dealers, and various artworld luminaries – was invited to come view the stellar but little known collection, which was being exhibited to the public for the first time in history. When guests entered the penthouse, they encountered eight rare master works spanning 300 years of art history, from Peter Paul Rubens to Pablo Picasso.

Under the elegant parlor’s arced ornamental ceiling and lit by little more than the warm glow of table lamps, visitors saw on the main wall a guilt framed mirror flanked by Ruben’s painting of George Villiers and Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. In the adjacent dining room hung works by Munch, O’keeffe, and Picasso. Duchamp’s famed Bicycle Wheel sat nonchalantly across the way between a dark wood hutch and pale salmon curtains.

It was a peculiar selection, and several keen visitors immediately noticed something askew with Mr. Haatj’s collection, especially after sighting Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Three versions of the iconic painting exist, yet one was recently stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo last August. Which version was this, guests wondered?

Keeping in mind that The Art Collection of Rick Haatj is first and foremost an art exhibition, Art Hijack’s original concept for exhibiting these specific works addresses several relevant issues. First, Rick Haatj’s acquisitions are intended to shed light on the methodologies of collecting itself. What parameters and criteria do collectors establish when they form a collection? What reasoning determines the choices made, not only for the works themselves, but also considerations such as their attribution, preservation, and presentation?

In the case of Rick Haatj, acquiring works ranging from classicism to cubism is a strange choice, as it is more common for collectors to focus on a genre, period, or medium. What was the leitmotif of this varied selection?

Eventually, it was revealed to visitors that what they were indeed viewing was a prestigious oeuvre of another sort, the kind one should not be privy or play accomplice to. Paraded here in plain daylight was an “illegal collection” of missing or stolen masterpieces, supposedly "commissioned" by Mr. Haatj over the years. That was just the icing. Each work of art, as it turns out, was a fake. The readymade and all seven paintings were deft forgeries painstakingly reproduced by the event's crafty hosts, Trong G. Nguyen and Elana Rubinfeld.

Thus, Rick Haatj (an anagram of Art Hijack), the art lover with a wide eye, his stylish biography, and the collection’s pedigree are nothing more than fictitious inventions acting as first fiddle to Art Hijack’s performance piece and conceptual installation.

Upon revelation, guests were happily alleviated of any suspicions and took little offense to the coy set-up, having involuntarily played their part in the duplicitous exhibit. This brings to light the second issue raised by The Art Collection of Rick Haatj, which calls into question the ethical responsibilities shared and expected between curator and audience, and artist and artist. How valid – or criminal, for that matter - are forged works and fabricated collections, even those produced under the auspices of new art? Like the unsuspecting culprits in MTV’s Punk’d, there is a sense of playfulness yet un-ease to the unseen manipulation of being forced into “character,” and it is this exact measure of control that radiates from this event’s conceptual core.

Third but not last is the notion of the exhibition itself, particularly the elements that constitute and characterize it. The Art Collection of Rick Haatj follows partially in the footsteps of the whimsical Surrealist exhibitions “manufactured” by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp during the mid-20th century, and perhaps even extends the latter’s exploration of identity, Duchamp with his female alter ego Rrose Selavy, and Nguyen and Rubinfeld with Art Hijack and Rick Haatj