Stop Art Fraud

Well at least protect yourself from art fraud.

1. Internet Buying Guide                                          2. Check Your Collection


 
 
 It seems every ten  years or so a major art scams breaks out usually as the result of some peculiarity of the art market that makes it very easy to dupe unsuspecting consumers. In the late eighties and early nineties the booming economy of Japan bred an amazing appetite for  imported works of western art.  Suddenly American  and European collectors and speculators  saw the rising prices and thought there must be something here to grab hold of.  Out of this greed and need attitude came the great art scams perpetuated in galleries catering to affluent but not very knowledgeable tourists in Hawaii , San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Miami, and most of the other major and minor tourist destinations. (See the Great Dali Art Fraud).

The newest and most egregious scam  originates around selling art on the internet.  Sellers with no fixed address, no known expertise  or an abundance of puffed up fake expertise are out there duping the public with "newly discovered"  works by the major names in art...Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Dali, Miro, Rembrandt,  Lichtenstein, Warhol and a few others. These mysterious and usually unnamed so-called art experts find and authenticate literally thousands of  so-called rare works that the major dealers and art scholars somehow missed over the years and in some cases centuries.
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 It's no accident that many thousands of works more than the artist every completed in his lifetime are being found from these few big names in the art world as  these  are the artists names most familiar to the general public.  To hook a mark, you first have to have some name recognition to get their attention.  But while the larger public may have a vague notion about the work of these big names, they usually  have  no idea about the critical issues of connoisseurship that  determine authenticity and value.  Thus they are the  perfect pigeon.  The scams and ripoffs almost always work around the principle of  getting something for substantially less than it is really worth.  This pitch is so often seen you would think people would instinctually ask "why are you selling it to me so cheap?" Yet they seldom do. (There are some legitimate reasons why things are often attactively  priced...see discussion below...but rarely any legitimate reason for something to be sold at 10 cents on the dollar.).

Similarly there are an abundance of hotel auctions claiming to represent seized assets of drug dealers, smugglers, tax  seizures, unclaimed merchandise etc., who  seed their sales with fraudulently represented artworks often the same works being sold through the internet scams.

If you are knowledgeable, you can roam flea markets, consignment shops, antique shops and estate sales, search classified ads and attend endless pig-in-a poke auctions looking for that one gem that has escaped the many pairs of usually knowledgeable eyes that have viewed the works on their way to the particular market that you find yourself at.  But the thrill of the chase may often substantially eclipse the value of the reward  if you fairly value the time spent in such a pursuit.