Art sold as hand-signed November 11, 2009
Posted by cantueso in art, drawing, law, painting.12 comments
In November 2008 googling for Chagall lithographs, produced 153,000 hits and dozens of of offers, all for more or less the same price. — Because of the crisis, this market has died down.
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Next, a search for fraud Chagall lithograph produced 13,000 hits with dozens of people complaining that they had bought a lemon. The signature was a fake. The print was worthless. — But this business has died down. The same search got some 3000 hits in May 2009, but only 950 in November 2009.
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The problem is that you need a microscope to tell an original lithograph from a computerized imitation, and so the difference between the real work and a fake has become purely conceptual, the same in painting as it has been for ages in sculpture* * *.
***In sculpture and also in architecture and dressmaking, the “original” often exists only on paper as a design or in clay as a model. What can be bought and sold is therefore mostly a “copy”.
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It is probably true that Dalí signed some twenty thousand sheets of white paper which he sold to his business friends to be printed and peddled later. If the signature is authentic, so is the work; or isn’t it?
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Besides, what if it were “hand-signed”, not by the artist, but by the guy who runs the shop ?
“It’s a very new kind of case for us,” said Tina Shim, deputy city attorney in Los Angeles on efforts to prosecute misdemeanor art offenses. “The art market is relatively unregulated. A lot of low-level fraud goes on.”
In other words, it is very hard to do anything about it.
..The first thumbnail is of a Chagall’s “David escaping”; the second one is Dali’s “Woman at the window”; and the third one is Miró’s “Gold feathered lizard”.
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