The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World
2017; McFarland & Company; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1941-2894
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoThe Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World Anthony M. Amore. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 264 pp. $26.00A surprising number of competent artists turn to forging paintings and many dealers either look the other way or scam their customers and friends. Anthony Amore gathers eleven sometimes well-known cases and recounts them in an enticing volume reminiscent of a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories- except that these occurrences are real and many people lost a great deal of money, artworks, and faith in their fellow human beings. Indeed, discovering the truth in these cases requires the same type of detection for which Holmes was famous. He would have made an excellent art detective, and we could use him now, for ... tens of millions of dollars in illicit art changes [sic] hands every year around the world. And, astonishingly, 40 to 50 percent of the paintings hanging in museums and those that are bought and sold each year are fakes or forgeries.One of the most enraging of these horrors was the ongoing debacle of Knoedler & Co., recounted serially in The New York Times, as it unfolded. Amore bases his recitation on newspaper and magazine articles as well as court documents, so that what he offers is more nuanced than what was presented in the media. The story he tells is extremely distressing: one wonders how it is possible that competent and knowledgeable experts could believe that some Long Island woman had access to painting after painting purported to come from unknown, anonymous collectors who just so happened to want to relieve themselves of more than 60 invaluable works- Pollocks and Diebenkorns, Rothkos and Motherwells-that the wealthy so desire. Ann Freedman of the venerable Knoedler gallery bought both the story and the paintings at bargain prices and then resold them at a profit. She was not merely an innocent gull, as Amore notes: even after some trouble, Freedman continued to buy from the woman (who had a Chinese artist forging the paintings for which he received not millions but rather hundreds of dollars); she made false representations; when suspicions arose about other works, she did not inform a Rothko purchaser who had spent more than eight million dollars for a piece of junk1; she was irresponsible; and Amore claims that ego, greed, and acclaim contributed to her desire to believe the improbable stories that led to Knoedler's downfall.But Freedman and her associates were not the only gulls here. The purported experts were, as usual, often fooled and therefore authenticated forged works. (For their opinions, they are often paid astronomical sums. …
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