Bargain hunting online? How about an original Rembrandt for $US900
("you can clearly tell its age by the paper," the seller of this etching
attests), or a signed piece in ink by Matisse for $US1250. (The
artist's work is, the online seller notes, "radical and unprecedented in
the history of Western art".)
Yes, Sotheby's can command more than $US100 million for a Picasso at auction. But shoppers on the web can find an "original" painting by that master for a mere $US450 — less than a pair of designer shoes.
Every day works labelled "original" and "authentic" and attributed to titans of the art world are offered at close-out prices by online galleries and auction sites. And every day people buy them.
That these works are sometimes fake or misleadingly labelled is no surprise to art experts and to foundations that monitor online art sales. But fraud has saturated certain sectors of the art market, experts say.
"In every country that I visit, even Abu Dhabi, I'm approached by artists or estates who are desperate about the fake situation," said Veronique Wiesinger, the director and senior curator of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris. "We counted the other day 2,005 fake Giacometti sculptures for sale" – on just one website, she added.
Many reputable online sellers deliver precisely what they advertise. "There is a lot of buying online and most people are satisfied," said Alan Bamberger, an art consultant and appraiser.
Over the last few years the internet has broadened the art market far beyond the exclusivity and opaque jargon of its moneyed enclaves and has helped turn the slogan "art for everyone" into reality. But it has also become a sort of bazaar, where shoppers of varying sophistication routinely encounter all degrees of flimflammery, from the schemes of experienced grifters to the innocent mistakes of the unwitting and naive. A study by statisticians at George Washington University and the University of California, Irvine, estimated that as many as 91 per cent of the drawings and small sculptures sold online through eBay as the work of the artist Henry Moore were fake.
The Giacometti Foundation and the Picasso estate view the problem of bogus art sales as so acute that this year they helped found a new association, the International Union of Modern and Contemporary Masters, to promote legal protections "against the circulation of counterfeit works of art".
Art is legitimately sold on the internet at a wide spectrum of sites, including those run by individual artists, established galleries that have expanded online and new galleries that represent the work of emerging artists. A byproduct of so many reputable businesses selling art through the web these days, experts said, is that it has become easier for those that are less reputable to pass off forgeries.
Fakes can take many forms. Most common are unauthorised reproductions that violate an artist's copyright or trademark. Other times the reproduction has been authorised but someone adds the artist's signature – either forged or copied – to transform a cheap poster into an expensive "signed" limited edition.
Finally, there are out-and-out forgeries sold as the work of an artist.
Last month David Crespo, the owner of a gallery in Madison, Connecticut, was charged with selling fake Picasso drawings that he had been duped into buying on the internet years earlier. Crespo had paid nearly $US50,000 for a supposed set of Picasso drawings from a seller known as Collectart4less, according to court papers. Prosecutors allege that after discovering that they were reproductions, he sold several to unsuspecting buyers for hundreds of thousands of dollars, providing false documents attesting to their authenticity and provenance. Crespo has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Online art is often accompanied by a "certificate of authenticity" or a registry certificate. But these are generally not worth much as a measure of authenticity, experts say, unless they have been signed by an artist or his or her authorised dealer.
The registry certificates are often sold by online businesses that give out certificates attesting that someone has registered a work – not that the art is authentic. At one site, for example, National Fine Arts Title Registry, anyone who fills out a form and pays $10 can print out a certificate minutes later.
Trawling eBay and other websites for fakes is a daily activity at the Calder Foundation in New York, said its chairman, Alexander Rower, who is Alexander Calder's grandson. At the foundation recently, Rower explained the myriad ways that buyers and sellers were deceived. Using an iPad, he pointed to an image of a 30-centimetre-high sculpture of an elephant balancing on its upraised trunk, a wire with a red sun on one end and a crescent and a yellow half-star on the other. "This is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my entire life," Rower said.
Several galleries around the world advertise it as a limited edition by Calder, although the artist had nothing to do with it.
Employees of eBay do not vet merchandise sold on its site, though the company does investigate complaints of counterfeits, said an eBay spokeswoman, Amanda Christine Miller. Rower said that eBay was prompt in removing fakes.
For the caretakers of estates, protecting an artist's legacy can be expensive. Wiesinger said the Giacometti Foundation spent more than 40 per cent of its operating budget in 2011 on tracking fakes, up from 25 per cent in 2004. And the foundation last year began awarding €10,000 ($A12,300) to institutions or individuals who bring public attention to the prevalence of fakes and forgeries.
In Rower's view, sellers, frequently hobbyists, are often as uninformed as buyers. He noticed, for example, that people were mistakenly selling teardrop-shaped candy bowls as Calders because they saw on them the letters "C" and "A," in a version of Calder's characteristic initialling. It turns out the "C" and "A" stand for "copper alloy."
You would think that the reputations of those who repeatedly sell fakes online would suffer. But Bamberger, who runs the website artbusiness.com, said consumers generally did not base their assessments of sellers on the authenticity of the art, because they may not know the difference. Rather, customers tend to look at whether a seller packed carefully, shipped on time and answered questions promptly.
Do those three things well, Bamberger said, and chances are that people buying art on the internet will give you high marks.
Barry Werbin, an art lawyer in New York whose father was a fine-art dealer, says customers who buy art online are out of their minds. Buying art in person, with expertise, is hard enough, he said. But people hear about astonishing finds at garage sales or watch television series like Antiques Roadshow and feel that some kind of good fortune can strike them online.
"It gets everyone riled up and makes for great television," he said, "but such finds are very far and few between."
Yes, Sotheby's can command more than $US100 million for a Picasso at auction. But shoppers on the web can find an "original" painting by that master for a mere $US450 — less than a pair of designer shoes.
Every day works labelled "original" and "authentic" and attributed to titans of the art world are offered at close-out prices by online galleries and auction sites. And every day people buy them.
That these works are sometimes fake or misleadingly labelled is no surprise to art experts and to foundations that monitor online art sales. But fraud has saturated certain sectors of the art market, experts say.
"In every country that I visit, even Abu Dhabi, I'm approached by artists or estates who are desperate about the fake situation," said Veronique Wiesinger, the director and senior curator of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris. "We counted the other day 2,005 fake Giacometti sculptures for sale" – on just one website, she added.
Many reputable online sellers deliver precisely what they advertise. "There is a lot of buying online and most people are satisfied," said Alan Bamberger, an art consultant and appraiser.
Over the last few years the internet has broadened the art market far beyond the exclusivity and opaque jargon of its moneyed enclaves and has helped turn the slogan "art for everyone" into reality. But it has also become a sort of bazaar, where shoppers of varying sophistication routinely encounter all degrees of flimflammery, from the schemes of experienced grifters to the innocent mistakes of the unwitting and naive. A study by statisticians at George Washington University and the University of California, Irvine, estimated that as many as 91 per cent of the drawings and small sculptures sold online through eBay as the work of the artist Henry Moore were fake.
The Giacometti Foundation and the Picasso estate view the problem of bogus art sales as so acute that this year they helped found a new association, the International Union of Modern and Contemporary Masters, to promote legal protections "against the circulation of counterfeit works of art".
Art is legitimately sold on the internet at a wide spectrum of sites, including those run by individual artists, established galleries that have expanded online and new galleries that represent the work of emerging artists. A byproduct of so many reputable businesses selling art through the web these days, experts said, is that it has become easier for those that are less reputable to pass off forgeries.
Fakes can take many forms. Most common are unauthorised reproductions that violate an artist's copyright or trademark. Other times the reproduction has been authorised but someone adds the artist's signature – either forged or copied – to transform a cheap poster into an expensive "signed" limited edition.
Finally, there are out-and-out forgeries sold as the work of an artist.
Last month David Crespo, the owner of a gallery in Madison, Connecticut, was charged with selling fake Picasso drawings that he had been duped into buying on the internet years earlier. Crespo had paid nearly $US50,000 for a supposed set of Picasso drawings from a seller known as Collectart4less, according to court papers. Prosecutors allege that after discovering that they were reproductions, he sold several to unsuspecting buyers for hundreds of thousands of dollars, providing false documents attesting to their authenticity and provenance. Crespo has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Online art is often accompanied by a "certificate of authenticity" or a registry certificate. But these are generally not worth much as a measure of authenticity, experts say, unless they have been signed by an artist or his or her authorised dealer.
The registry certificates are often sold by online businesses that give out certificates attesting that someone has registered a work – not that the art is authentic. At one site, for example, National Fine Arts Title Registry, anyone who fills out a form and pays $10 can print out a certificate minutes later.
Trawling eBay and other websites for fakes is a daily activity at the Calder Foundation in New York, said its chairman, Alexander Rower, who is Alexander Calder's grandson. At the foundation recently, Rower explained the myriad ways that buyers and sellers were deceived. Using an iPad, he pointed to an image of a 30-centimetre-high sculpture of an elephant balancing on its upraised trunk, a wire with a red sun on one end and a crescent and a yellow half-star on the other. "This is one of the ugliest things I've ever seen in my entire life," Rower said.
Several galleries around the world advertise it as a limited edition by Calder, although the artist had nothing to do with it.
Employees of eBay do not vet merchandise sold on its site, though the company does investigate complaints of counterfeits, said an eBay spokeswoman, Amanda Christine Miller. Rower said that eBay was prompt in removing fakes.
For the caretakers of estates, protecting an artist's legacy can be expensive. Wiesinger said the Giacometti Foundation spent more than 40 per cent of its operating budget in 2011 on tracking fakes, up from 25 per cent in 2004. And the foundation last year began awarding €10,000 ($A12,300) to institutions or individuals who bring public attention to the prevalence of fakes and forgeries.
In Rower's view, sellers, frequently hobbyists, are often as uninformed as buyers. He noticed, for example, that people were mistakenly selling teardrop-shaped candy bowls as Calders because they saw on them the letters "C" and "A," in a version of Calder's characteristic initialling. It turns out the "C" and "A" stand for "copper alloy."
You would think that the reputations of those who repeatedly sell fakes online would suffer. But Bamberger, who runs the website artbusiness.com, said consumers generally did not base their assessments of sellers on the authenticity of the art, because they may not know the difference. Rather, customers tend to look at whether a seller packed carefully, shipped on time and answered questions promptly.
Do those three things well, Bamberger said, and chances are that people buying art on the internet will give you high marks.
Barry Werbin, an art lawyer in New York whose father was a fine-art dealer, says customers who buy art online are out of their minds. Buying art in person, with expertise, is hard enough, he said. But people hear about astonishing finds at garage sales or watch television series like Antiques Roadshow and feel that some kind of good fortune can strike them online.
"It gets everyone riled up and makes for great television," he said, "but such finds are very far and few between."
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