Art Articles & Reviews

Dear Editor:

Fiction often has an historical basis. Art fraud having great financial rewards is an enticing endeavor of organized crime as well as a popular subject of dramatists. In 2004 the BBC television series ``Hustle`` committed one episode, ``The Perfect Picture``, with a plot of a scam that victimized a respected art dealer. The art dealer was deceived into purchasing a fake ``Piet Mondrian`` and when she discovered her error, she chose to remain silent and absorb the loss rather than acknowledging what would destroy her reputation as an art expert.

Sarah Cascone in a 2014 article in Artnet News cited a report by the Fine Art Experts Institute ( Switzerland ), that estimates art fraud to be a 45 billion dollar business, representing 50% of the entire art market. I recently viewed the documentary film, `` There Are No Fakes``by Jamie Kastner, https://www.therearenofakes.com/ . The film tells of a 10 year conspiracy to mass produce 3000 forgeries of Indigenous Canadian artist , Norval Morrisseau. Art collector, Kevin Hearns in 2005 purchased a Morrisseau for 20,000$ and was presented with a flawed provenance. Hearns would later be informed by the Art Gallery of Ontario that the printing was a forgery.

The film goes to great lengths to expose a forgery conspiracy intertwined with a drug dealing ring . The fraudulent Morrisseaus constituted a 30 million dollar business. See CBC report :
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/there-are-no-fakes-morrisseau-
1.5114954 . 

If  normal commission agreements were followed, 15 million would have gone to the dealers and the remaining to the forgers. Married to an artist, L`OR Artiste, my perspective is that every dollar diverted from the legitimite art market to the fraudulent deprives the yet-to-be discovered artist from market opportunities.

Gertrude Stein had no need for validating the provenance of her collection. She knew the artists ! The naive collector would be better served to speculate on living artists and communicate with them directly, and base their purchase decisions on how the painting would look on their wall.

James Wise
Longueuil Québec
[email protected]

Content from this Letter to the Editor is solely the opinion of the author and not that of Artists in Canada. Responses to this article may be sent to [email protected]