Artist - or maybe actor? - Ron Mueck takes his latest work, A Girl, out of its mould. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Ron Mueck is supposedly having an exhibition at this year's Edinburgh festival. I say supposedly because I'm not convinced the artist actually exists. Perhaps a clever novelist made up Mueck just to expose the tastelessness and stupidity of our time?
The story of his career sounds fishy after all. Mueck is apparently the son-in-law of painter Paula Rego, which gives his hyperrealist sculptures a fine art pedigree (one which is seemingly recycled in every article about him). He made his eye-fooling models for adverts before turning to a career in art, and - as is absolutely crucial if such a fiction is to be convincing - sold his work to Charles Saatchi.
If you wanted to give Saatchi a run for his money, to sell him art that wasn't art at all, making models of people that, wow, look just like people, would be an excellent way to go about it. Saatchi is addicted to such simulacra, having a large collection of American losers modelled with confounding plausibility by Duane Hanson.
So, did some clever jokers invent Mueck, get him into the Saatchi collection, and the Sensation exhibition, and - in the perfect climax to the entire stunt - manage to get the Millennium Dome to commission a giant child by him as a meaningful statement about the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century?
That would indeed have been a terrific parody, in which the emptiness and silliness of Mueck's reliance on fairground effects - while claiming to do the work of a Michelangelo or Rodin - exposed the folly of a culture that has fallen in love with something it calls "art". Apparently it is unable to tell the difference between sensitive works of the imagination and big mannequins.
But surely, if this is an elaborate hoax, it has now run its course? I'm puzzled to see yet another exhibition by Mueck that restates the same gag - people cooing this time at a gigantic model of a baby. Personally I'm ready now for the tease to end, and the geniuses who concocted Mueck and the entertaining charade of his career to reveal themselves. They are the true artists.
