Wander up to Howth Head in north Co Dublin on Hallowe'en night and there you will see a real bonfire of the vanities.
Graham Knuttel, the Dublin artist who this week won a reputed £18,000 settlement because a pub displayed copies of his work, plans a spooky ceremonial burning of these nonworks of art.
It was an ambitious idea that turned out to be more trick than treat.
It seems the management of the Turk's Head pub did not know what it was getting into two years ago when it commissioned Dan Quinn (believed to be a pseudonym) to copy three of Knuttel's better-known works.
That the originals of Night on the Town, Love in the Afternoon and Foyer Regent Palace Hotel were owned by Sylvester Stallone and Frank Sinatra's manager was a mere technicality.
But the pub will rue the day it ever hung a Knuttel knock-off on its walls.
The artist has a record for guarding his reputation jealously: he has won a similar injunction in the past. What is surprising is how the pub ever thought it would get away with it.
Chances are that if Hollywood film director John Herzfeld hadn't wandered into La Stampa restaurant and spotted Knuttel's work on the walls seven years ago, the issue of the bogus reproductions might never have arisen.
He gave the painting to Sylvester Stallone. The film star's appreciation of it, Knuttel's selfpublicising abilities and his highly stylised work served to put him up as a kind of "artist to the stars".
Now his sometimes unsettling, colourful pictures fetch up to $100,000 in the US and are being snapped up by collectors from Paris to Hong Kong.
Sylvester Stallone has been joined by celebrities such as Teri Hatcher, Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Stipe in their devotion to the reclusive, some say eccentric, Dubliner.
They may not know much about art, less kind commentators might suggest, but they know what they like.
Some of his pictures now hang in the international trading hall of Barclays Bank in London, a most appropriate spot.
Sinister gangsters and their molls smile down on the traders there.
It is a Knuttel trademark that his subjects rarely smile or meet each other's eyes. They stare slyly in all directions. Other works include unusually fashioned fish or birds.
He has written that his obsession with the latter comes from an encounter with the mother of his eccentric German father.
His parents came to Ireland from England in 1947, and he was born seven years later.
Of his paternal grandmother, he remembers: "I met her only once when I was four or five, but the memory will never leave me. She was very tall and thin with a hook-like nose not dissimilar to my own.
"Her cheeks were hollow, whitened with powder and highlighted with rouge . . . The sight of her beside my father's huge dark wardrobe sent me into a state of total hysteria. There being no one else in the room, she tried to lock me in the wardrobe. I can still hear her cackling and feel her long white claws at the back of my neck."
Despite Knuttel's fears that she would strangle him and maybe even eat him, he emerged unscathed and went on to experience a relatively untroubled childhood. He was not interested in school and spent his time in Dublin cafes and by the seaside.
By the age of 18 he had opted for the artist's bohemian lifestyle and enrolled in Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design. A fellow student remembers him as an "extreme" personality. "He was a brilliant artist, not at all interested in the conceptual side of it. And he was really hilarious in an offbeat kind of way . . . but he could sometimes be cruel in putting people down," he said.
In his student days he began drinking heavily and, while his talents grew, his work was ending up in the hands of "irate publicans and landlords".
In 1987 he changed from being an alcoholic to a workaholic overnight with "sensational results", he has said. "Nowadays painting is an obsession for me. I have a strict discipline and I work from first light every morning until darkness and beyond."
He says he likes to paint the human predicament, using colour and form to express his subjects' emotions. "I prefer a nightmare world full of shadows where danger and savagery are always close to hand."
His work has spawned a snooty disdain in Irish critic circles. One said his work was "atrocious, phoney and primitive" but "even bad artists are entitled to make a living".
"He has found a style which he can mass-produce very quickly . . . The work is just kitsch," he said.
The La Stampa manager in Dublin where many of his pictures are hanging says people either love them or hate them.
"They work well in here because of the colours, but some people can't cope with the eyes. I find humour in them. They are great because they get people talking," she said. More of his pictures will grace the walls of the new bar and restaurant being developed in Dawson Street.
When not working on a canvas, Knuttel holds court and drinks an occasional vodka in a bistro near his home.
According to Hugh Charlton, Knuttel's dealer who runs a gallery in Dublin's Duke Street, he is probably the most financially successful Irish artist ever. "Consequently there is tension between him and the critics . . . It is tough at the top," he said.
His paintings have been featured in films, such as the biopic of boxing promoter Don King, and will also appear in the movie on the Beit paintings in which he has a cameo role.
Knuttel, an ardent Picasso admirer, will attend an auction of the effects of the Spanish master's mistress, Dora Maar.
Meanwhile, he is set to send the artistic ambitions of the Turk's Head up in smoke.
Costumed children looking for a more lucrative earner are advised to adopt the following phrase when knocking on the more affluent Hallowe'en doors:
"Any apples or Knuttels, missus?"