Arrests in a String of High-Profile Old Master Forgeries | Hacker News Reader

Arrests in a String of High-Profile Old Master Forgeries

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From the millions of dollars pumped into money laundering, tax avoidance, and forgery that seems to perpetuate high price art sales - it find it hard to see any benefit to the industry and practice of private ownership of such pieces.

The preseevation is the benefit really. Although money laundering goes into whatever the hell will launder money period.

Forgery is also the reverse of perperuating high prices at the cost of authenticity - to the market usually and if indistinguishable from the original.

How is the painter breaking the law? He painted the forgeries, but didn't pass them off as real. Isn't that legal?

I have been told that you have to make the copy obvious. Usually this is done by changing the size of the canvas. To be honest, though, as all of the works will be out of copyright, I'm not entirely sure what law is broken simply by painting a copy.

I don't believe it's illegal to make a copy, even a perfect copy (see my comment below about the Nova episode paying an artist to repeat the process on camera of creating a duplicate). What's illegal is fraud in selling it as an original.

The point of making it obviously a copy is to have a clear defense of "obviously I wasn't trying to make a perfect copy" should it later be sold as authentic--as happened to the 'forger' in the Nova episode. He genuinely sold it as a copy; it was only after several more sales (to which he had no connection) that it was fraudulently sold as authentic.

Big disclaimer that I haven’t read the article yet, and I’m definitely not a lawyer of any kind either.

I would suppose that the activity you describe would become illegal if you knowingly sell the paintings to someone who intends to fraudulently pass them off as the real pieces.

I guess anyone who paints exact replicas of famous paintings and sells them for a very high price is kind of in on it. No one would pay them big money for that unless it is part of a forgery ring.

Someone who can replicate an original is undoubtedly very skilled. It's reasonable someone would pay well for a faithful replica.

If there is suspicion that the painter was working with the dealer, you could probably nail the painter on some sort of fraud conspiracy charges.

Yes, it's legal to paint copies; it's selling them as real that's illegal (you don't need to make it obviously a copy). The artist claims he didn't pass them off as real, but that's his defense. He's been linked to forgeries before and the police obviously don't believe him.

There's a great episode of Nova from 1991 called "The Fine Art of Faking It" [0] where they not only follow the case of a man convicted of forging prints, but they track down the German farmer who painted a copy of a Matthias Gruenwald painting that ended up being presented as the real thing to the Cleveland Museum of Art (who paid a million dollars for it). He really did just paint a copy and artificially age it for a couple thousand dollars for a friend down the road; it only sold as real after several more sales for increasing amounts. The farmer was never accused of wrongdoing.

The best part: they pay him the same amount to do it again, and he does, on camera, demonstrating everything he did to make it look authentically 400 years old (besides being an almost perfect copy of a Northern Renaissance master's painting). For example, to add cracks to the painting, he takes the canvas off the frame and rubs it back and forth on the corner of a table, then rubs a thin wash of brown paint over the whole thing.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/17/news/review-television-ho...

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