BERATED: Brina Thurston’s Harm video casts a poodle as the victim of an emotionally unhinged owner.

Not everyone loves art, but who doesn’t secretly admire an art forger, the kind of con man who cashes in on the excesses of the market while exposing its experts as fools. Think of Elmyr de Hory, who claimed to have sold more than 1,000 forgeries to reputable galleries from the 1940s to the 1960s. He became a celebrity and was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving — himself a hoax artist — and Orson Welles’ last major film, F for Fake.

So even if you’re not a gallery goer, consider dropping by Inman Annex to spot a forgery of a sculpture by a Menil Collection-exhibited international art star, one of whose works fetched a cool $7.9 million at auction in May.

The fake, which we’ll get to later, is just one example of the high jinks on view in Weasel, a lively group show that plays off of — and has fun with — popular suspicions of the art world and other sites of fakery, such as corporate America and the Internet. Though much of the humor has the appeal of one-liners, at least the one-liners are well executed.

Brina Thurston pokes fun at the assistants known as gallerinas, who greet, ignore or suck up to visitors at commercial galleries. Thurston’s Lumi, Zach Feuer Gallery is a life-size cardboard cutout of a gallerina perched behind a table stocked with binders and the booze and snacks galleries serve at openings. (Don’t eat the cake; it’s got an art-history book embedded into it — possibly one with half-baked ideas.)

Another Thurston work, Harm, is a guilty pleasure of a video that casts a poodle as the victim of an emotionally unhinged owner who berates it off-camera with an expletive-filled tirade that gets more vehement the longer she goes on. The video and audio tracks were recorded separately, so the poodle’s abuse is feigned, however hilariously.

FALLACY: Karla Wozniak’s Bank of America painting depicts economic prosperity as a mirage.

Karla Wozniak depicts economic prosperity as a mirage with small, surprisingly sensuous paintings of corporate logos for companies such as Chevron and Bank of America. Although they were created in 2005 and 2006, Wozniak’s logos are shown going up in smoke or melting down — just like the economy did in 2008.

The artist-prankster duo of Eva & Franco Mattes, who are also known as 0100101110101101.ORG, explores issues of authenticity in the age of the Internet. For their video No Fun, they staged the suicide of a man who appears to have hanged himself in his apartment, then broadcast live footage of the hanging “corpse” on Chatroulette, a website that randomly links strangers around the world for webcam chats that either party can end at any moment.

Watching users’ reactions to the hoax — which most people immediately peg as a prank — is entertaining enough, partly because some of the chatters are so creepy. (Most amusingly, the one person who grows concerned enough to call the police asks his friend to look up the number so he won’t be charged to call 911 on his cell phone.) But apart from lower production values, little separates No Fun from hidden-camera TV series such as ABC’s What Would You Do?, in which unwitting bystanders either intervene in or shy away from staged scenarios such as bullying, abuse and theft.

More thought-provoking is a Maurizio Cattelan sculpture featuring a canary perched on top of a birdcage with a peeved-looking cat inside (both animals are stuffed). It’s similar to the works in Cattelan’s Menil exhibit last year, with a similar one-note charm. But a month after Weasel opened, the Mattes issued a statement, copies of which are on hand at the gallery, confessing that they, not Cattelan, had made it. They say the image was “actually a copy of a cat meme image we found on the Internet.”

Since the sculpture is not for sale, we’re left wondering whether the Mattes really faked it or, with Cattelan’s cooperation, faked the fakery. After all, Andy Warhol once said it would be great if more people took up silk screening so no one could tell whether his pictures were his or someone else’s.

Does it matter?

“The cultural landscape that emerges (thanks to digital technologies) will be a plural space of creation in which it may even become pointless to designate who created exactly what, since everyone will be stealing from and remixing everyone else,” the Mattes have said. “The results might be confusing, but it’ll probably be a lot more fun and worth seeing than a world where only those with the ‘muse inspiration’ get to make works of art.”

WEASEL
Curated by Kurt Mueller and Chelsea Beck
11 a.m.-6 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays through Jan. 15
Inman Annex
3917 Main