Auction house fun police!
I’ve got a problem; I think I’ve used up the good will of all of my local auction houses. You see some of my pictures struggle in the ‘genuine’ department and there are only so many pictures you can inherit from your granny before the auction house staff smell a rat. What about posing as a dealer? Not a bad idea, but again dealers always have a wide selection of pictures – and that means lot of work and a cash flow problem before you can enter a batch. Not to mention a lot of exposure for some body whom might naturally be shy of too much attention.

There’s another problem too. Some of the auction house ‘art experts’ are quite resourceful. There is quite good access to genuine pictures here in the UK and it doesn’t help to have your ‘Herring’ compared to several real ‘Herrings’. No matter how good a chap might be, when his 19th century work comes up against several quality originals it becomes much harder to deceive (sometimes I loose out because my picture is too old – madness!). I need pastures new!!

Let’s say for example that we managed to get an export license for our picture. How would it fair in a respectable auction house in a modest sized US city? Let’s get a few things straight here; I’m not talking about a $600,000 painting because they will call in an ‘expert’ from somewhere before they give it provenance. I’m talking about a nice little 19th century sporting painting that could fetch upwards of $10,000. Who gives the lesser picture provenance and what reference source do they use, because if it’s photos they use there is no way they will detect a determined faker.

Now before someone gives me a verbal punishing for being disrespectful to the good old USA and it’s specialists in the fine art field. I want to say the following: I’m not questioning their ability to detect fraud or recognise quality antique art. BUT without a ready supply of original lesser works how do they keep on top of the $5-25,000 picture market? Don’t they care? Or do greedy punters drive the whole show?



 
A. A. Art. This Site designed and maintained by Alexei Antonov
Translation from Russian Copyright (c) 1999 Vladimir Pavlov.
Copyright (c) 1999 Alexei Antonov. All rights reserved.