Dark Side of the Boom by Georgina Adam

Author:Georgina Adam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lund Humphries
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

NOT JUST THE TOP END OF THE MARKET

While these cases all involve high-end art, they are not the only ones, and indeed according to FBI agents, forgery is widespread, and growing, at a much lower price level. The FBI’s Meridith Savona, who investigates art and antiquities with the Major Thefts Squad, says; ‘The high-end cases are fewer and further between, but they are the ones to hit the headlines. Far more victims are caught by fakes selling for $10,000, $12,000 or $20,000; we see these cases all the time.’34

A case in point was a group of hundreds of works purportedly by Jackson Pollock, some identified as fakes by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) in 2017. According to Dr Sharon Flescher, IFAR’s executive director, the works were sold at five-figure prices and targeted modest collectors in the Mountain States and along the East Coast, ‘a whole network of people who are not professional dealers, a different world from what we’re used to’, says Flescher, who notes that with lower prices, the fakes circulate more easily, but that the figures add up because of the potentially large number of victims.35

Another case successfully prosecuted by the FBI was that of art dealer Eric Spoutz, who in 2017 was sentenced to prison for selling forgeries of lower-value works by well-known artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell, using counterfeit documents to convince buyers of their authenticity.36 According to Savona’s colleague Christopher McKeogh, ‘a single case may be about the sum of $5,000, but then we run the names in our system and find that six months ago there was a person in Phoenix with a similar complaint, then six months before that in Seattle; it quickly turns out there are 150 victims.’37 In the case of Spoutz, the FBI recovered about 40 forgeries, but McKeogh thinks there could be hundreds more as yet unidentified. ‘This is a case we’re going to be dealing with for years,’ he says. And other cases are not even pursued, according to the agents; some owners of fake art remain in denial, refusing to believe they have been conned even when presented with irrefutable evidence.

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