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From: Michele "Gigi" Le Bouef
Date: 04 Sep 2001
Time: 13:09:14
Remote Name: 64.13.113.226
Madame de Pompadour,
At the request of my admiral, Rear Admiral Phineas Fogg-Bottom, I have recently completed an exhaustive review of the etiology of "Lost Brew," a work by Rusty O'Dowd currently on display in the Fogg-Bottom Museum of Beer Photography. The photo can be viewed at http://www.fogwatch.com/lost_brew.htm.
As you suspected, the work does not actually date from 1970, as originally claimed in the accompanying discussion text. Lost Coast Brewery did not begin operations until 1986, as you pointed out, making it impossible for O'Dowd to have taken the photo at the time claimed. The age of the work was confirmed through extensive carbon dating in our labs.
However, the story behind "Lost Brew" does not stop there. You suggest that the photograph may have been taken later in O'Dowd's career, following his self-imposed exile in the 1980s. The truth is far more sinister.
We have discovered that "Lost Brew" is actually an elaborate and cleverly conceived forgery. That's right, a forgery. The work was not created by O'Dowd at all, but rather by Cletus "Buck" McGinley, one of the lesser lights of the beer photography movement. McGinley studied in O'Dowd's shadow for some time, but never approached O'Dowd's mastery of the art form.
Frustrated by years of laboring in oblivion, McGinley produced "Lost Brew" in 1988 and affixed O'Dowd's name to the work in hopes of validating his talent and achieving monetary remuneration by selling it to a gallery or museum. He did this successfully in 1991, pocketing a cool $250,000. Much of this windfall was spent on prostitutes and alcohol, and McGinley was last seen in a Nevada trailer park in 1995.
Ironically, O'Dowd never noticed that the work that achieved him so much renown was in fact not his at all. There is a perfectly understandable reason for this: in an 1997 interview with Art Historian magazine, O'Dowd estimated that, due to his frequent spells of inebriation during his career, he only remembered approximately one-third of the photo shoots that produced his outstanding oeuvre of beer portraits.
In light of this new information, we shall be making the appropriate corrections to the accompanying text to "Lost Brew."
Yours,
Michele "Gigi" Le Bouef FogWatch.com Art Historian