Who knew that it would be enough to artificially age a contemporary painting to multiply its price by more than a hundred.
Of course it has to be done conscientiously, with a certain method and a high degree of impudence.
The fraud in question took place on November 21 at the Viennese auction house Deutsch Auctioneers and has just come to light thanks to an article by Simone Facchinetti in
Il Giornale dell'Arte
.
It was enough, in the words of Facchinetti, with a “cunning make-up” for a rather trivial canvas by the Neapolitan painter Donato Grieco, born in 1939, to be convincingly attributed to the Parthenopean Baroque master Pacecco De Rosa (1607-1656), a member from the circle of artists of Valencian José Ribera, Lo Spagnoletto.
The estimated price of the piece, in the small range of between 900 and 1,800 euros, was already somewhat suspicious.
As Facchinetti indicates, “who can be willing to part with an (alleged) masterpiece by an established painter at a bargain price?”
Some of its potential buyers assumed that it would be the work of an imitator or someone worthy of De Rosa's workshop, but they still bid for it.
Nobody questioned its age and its possibilities of continuing to appreciate in the medium term.
'Scena di Mercatto', the work that has been fraudulently aged and sold at a price one hundred times higher than its own.
blind buy
In the end,
Scena di Mercatto
, which is the title of this 115 by 178 centimeters painting of manners, received several offers and was sold for a final amount of 72,000 euros.
The anonymous collector who acquired the piece did so, apparently, without knowing it and without having the opportunity to see it, guided exclusively by the images displayed
online
by the auction house.
The same images that allowed an anonymous fan to verify that it was the same piece that had been sold two months earlier, on July 17, for 650 euros.
The transformation of an authentic, but of little value, Grieco into a false De Rosa had been very simple.
The author of the hoax limited himself to carefully erasing the two signatures (one was in the lower left margin of the painting and the other on the back), applying a layer of yellowish varnish and making a series of small surgical damages that ended up giving gave the fabric the aged look I was looking for.
In this specific case, the buyer may return the work and demand a refund, given that it has been proven that the attribution of authorship was not only erroneous, but also fraudulent.
In the opinion of gallery owner and art curator Llucià Homs, “the business of buying and selling art had barely evolved in the last century and a half, but the emergence of virtual auctions and NFTs, the variety of digital art associated with the rise of Cryptocurrencies have completely transformed the rules of the game.”
For Homs, “the value criteria that served as a compass in the sector have been disrupted and diluted” by the emergence of “a generation of young collectors and speculative investors with a lot of money and, often, very little judgment.”
This new buyer profile would be “artificially inflating those
online
auctions that have become almost great television shows.”
Beatriz Ordovás, director of Contemporary Art in Iberia at Christie's, one of the main auction houses on the planet, shares, with nuances, Homs' opinion.
From his point of view, “a sifting” would already be taking place and “quality criteria” would be recovering, but the market has not finished processing the impact of that speculative spring of crypto art, in 2021, in which, without going Further, a collage of 5,000 images in NFT format, the work of the American Mike Winkelman, Beeple, “sold for more than 69 million dollars, a scandalous amount, completely out of the market, and that can only be attributed to a speculative bubble which has now subsided to a large extent, but has left a deep mark.”
A woman looks at the work 'Take the money and run', by Jens Haaning, at the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, Denmark.HENNING BAGGER (Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Ima)
Take the money and run
Compared to the systemic convulsions that the art market has suffered in recent years, the fake De Rosa's fraud could be interpreted as a minor collateral effect of that influx of fresh money and that loss, temporary or not, of direction and judgment.
Despite everything, it is refreshing to note that, in the era of Beeple and his multimillion-dollar collages, there is still room for artisanal picaresque in the art business, as other acts of shamelessness halfway between conceptual transgression and simple scam.
This is the case of the “immaterial” sculpture that the Sardinian artist Salvatore Garau sold for 15,000 euros in 2021. For his detractors, it is a complete rififi, a white-collar theft, given that Garau has not sold a concept or a sketch, but a supposedly finished work that cannot be seen or felt, because it does not even exist.
That is to say, he would have put a price on “nothing”, taking minimalism and conceptual art to the most fraudulent and deranged of extremes.
For the critic Eli Federman, it would be the equivalent (with an artistic alibi) of the unscrupulous people who have tried to sell their soul on eBay: “Even if it is a free transaction between adults, if they buy your soul and you don't you send, they can sue you for breach of contract.”
And that, suing Garau, is precisely what another artist, the American Tom Miller, did.
Although the reason for the legal action is that Miller demands that he be recognized as the paternity of the immaterial sculptures.
As he argues, he was the first to develop the concept and (not) put it into practice.
Even more curious is the case of the Danish Jens Haaning, famous for his conceptual art with political content.
The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg sent him an advance of 84,000 euros to update one of his most famous performative works, a diptych showing enlargements of two bank statements, that of an average Dane and that of an immigrant in Denmark.
Haaning took his time, exhausted all the agreed deadlines and ended up sending the museum two empty frames in which he had written a title: Take the money and run.
New York artist Zachary Ginsberg was scammed by a supposed collector out of $3,400.
In the image, Ginsberg poses with the New York Times article that tells his story.
As the artist explained, the work, as he conceived it, has been completed: “It simply consisted of keeping his money.”
So he invites the institution to display the empty frames, contextualize them and let the public draw their own conclusions.
Lasse Andersson, director of the museum, was not at all satisfied with the proposed solution.
He demands that Haaning return the advance, given that the planned work has not been delivered, but authorizes him to keep an amount (940 euros) as reasonable remuneration for his creative effort.
Finally, Zachary Small reports in
The New York Times
the elaborate hoax that the young New York artist Zachary Ginsberg has been subjected to.
After years of exhibiting his work through her website and his Instagram channel with nothing more than anecdotal sales, Ginsberg received an
online
offer from a supposed collector for $3,400.
The buyer offered to send him a check and include in it an extra amount for shipping costs, since the work had to be sent to its destination through an intermediary, a certain Lisa Shady, with a postal address in Fond du Lake, Wisconsin.
Ginsberg sent Shady the $2,000 that, in theory, it was going to cost to transport the piece.
As soon as he attempted to cash the buyer's check, he discovered that he had no funds.
Fond du Lac, by the way, is the town of 46,000 people where Beeple was born 42 years ago.
So that they later say that scammers have no sense of humor.
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