Art Fakes on the Internet

The NY Times has a good article on the large number of fakes and questionable labeling of how some art is represented on the internet.  As appraisers we have known this for years, but the problem persists and perhaps is growing.  Tony Pernicone wrote a very good article for the 2012 edition of the Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies called Caveat Emptor! Fakes Frauds at eBay and other Online Auction Sites.

For example, the article shows a Google image search of an elephant by Calder, with multiple dealers offering it for sale.  The Calder Foundation states it is not a work by Calder (see image).

The NY Times reports

That these works are sometimes fake or misleadingly labeled 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 Véronique 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 Web site, she added.

Many reputable online sellers, of course, 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 naïve. A recent study by statisticians at George Washington University and the University of California, Irvine, estimated that as many as 91 percent 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.

Source: The NY Times