Dealing with Fakes After Identification

The NY Times has an interesting article on dealing with fakes after they have been identified as such.  There is a discussion on marking an identified fake as such, but there are also examples when fakes are identified at an auction house and are only removed from the sale and returned to the owner.

With so many fakes surfacing in the market, appraisers must be diligent in authentication, even as some groups are pulling away from formal authentications.

The NY Times reports

When it comes to undisputed fakes, law enforcement officials try to halt resales by such practices as stamping works as fake or, in rare cases, destroying them. Each option has drawbacks, including the possibility of mistakenly destroying an authentic work.

Ultimately, though, both the police and buyers mostly rely on the art market to police itself.

Artist foundations and estates that find fakes on eBay or at small auction houses can inform the dealer or Web site, but they have no authority to seize or mark the work. Frequently, they say, counterfeits go underground only to re-emerge later, labeled as the real thing.

Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, said that during the years that it authenticated works by Roy Lichtenstein, he regularly noticed that collectors informed that they had a fake would later quietly sell it as genuine. “And then we’d find somebody else would send the same work to us six months later” asking for it to be authenticated, he said.

In France, Switzerland and other countries that recognize the “moral rights” of an artist, heirs or foundations like Lichtenstein’s can ask the courts for permission to destroy a fake. But Ronald D. Spencer, a Manhattan lawyer and editor of the art-law handbook “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts,” said he was glad that is not done in the United States. The notion is “an anathema,” he said, noting how frequently opinions about authenticity can change. Just two months ago, for example, three J. M. W. Turner paintings that had been dismissed as fakes were reclassified as genuine.

“Stamp it, by all means, so that any subsequent owner knows that it was considered a fake, but don’t destroy works,” Mr. Spencer said, echoing the view of many art dealers. If destruction becomes routine, he added, a genuine work will mistakenly be consigned to the shredder at some point.

Marking a work was the course taken in 2011 by the Dedalus Foundation, a nonprofit created by the artist Robert Motherwell, after it identified a putative Motherwell painting as forged.

Source: The NY Times