"It is important the integrity and provenance of established and aspiring artists is not undermined by the deliberate forgery of their endeavours"

A Tracey Emin forger has been sentenced to 16 months imprisonment by the Manchester Crown Court for making "at least 11 forgeries" and selling works on eBay for £26,000. Given the nature of some living artists' works today, a forgery of a contemporary work can be easier to create from a technical perspective than say a fake of an Old Master painting, especially since a forger is far more likely to obtain the same materials living or recently deceased artists use than those artists used centuries ago (fakes are often discovered as a result of forensic evidence revealing that the pigments in a painting were not available at the time the artist was supposed to have painted the work -- see link from "gold standard" fakes post). However, from a provenance perspective, it's far riskier to pass off as authentic a work by a living artist than it is for a centuries-old painting whose provenance may be undocumented or incompletely documented.

In this case, the forger not only chose to imitate the work of a critically-acclaimed YBA who is also a highly public figure, he then proceeded to auction the work in the most public manner imaginable! That's not just risky, it's plain stupid. And particularly "distressing" for Emin since the forger learnt his trade working alongside the artist herself in her gallery in London.

Eastward bound via Paris and Marrakech

To the East we go! As I've mentioned before, Paris and above all the East (Beijing, Hong Kong, Russia) are the new hotspots in the art world. Not only are the traditional art centers in the West feeling the pressure to compete with their younger Eastern counterparts, a taste for the East has also been palpable in recent auctions with a growing contingent of buyers demanding Chinese art. Below are a few recent links on the emergence and growth of thriving new markets.

• PARIS. France's "premiere" art fair: FIAC. The five best booths according to ARTINFO.
• MARRAKECH. "Morocco is developing economically and will be very important in the Middle East." It only makes sense then that it should get its first art fair in Marrakech.
• DUBAI. Mahmoud Said's 1929 painting sold for $2.5 million at Christie's Dubai, setting a world record for Middle Eastern Art. The modern and contemporary auction netted $14 million, far exceeding the estimate of $6.7 million.
• BEIJING. Poly auctions opens fall season with strong sales of diverse Chinese antiquities.
• SHANGHAI. "Dizzying array of art" at the Shanghai Biennale.

Warhol authentication and a lesson in litigation strategy

NEW YORK. The U.S. justice system is hardly the breeding ground for David and Goliath-type endings so when Joe Simon went up against the Warhol Foundation and Art Authentication Board all guns blazing, it was only a matter of time before "money, power and legal expertise" dictated the outcome of the litigation. Instead of limiting the complaint to challenging the Board's rejection on two occasions of myandywarhol's authenticity, Simon also sought damages and injunctive relief in federal court "alleging anti-trust violations, collusion and fraud." Despite the abrupt, unsatisfactory ending to the three-year long litigation (not to mention the waste in litigation costs), the case should lead to increased scrutiny of the Warhol Foundation's exercise of its leverage in the market. Technically, the Art Authentication Board's opinion on the authenticity of a work is but one more opinion; however, the reality on the market is vastly different as the major players, including Sotheby's and Christie's, will not sell a purported Warhol without Board authentication. The mere existence of the power to manipulate the entire market for Warhols is not, in and of itself, sufficient to prove the unlawful exploitation of such power. Still, given how prolific Warhol's oeuvre is and the fact that there is more than one collector out there feeling hard done-by the Authentication Board and/or Foundation, this may not be the last time the organization has to retain the services of the preeminent legal minds in the country.

UPDATED: Ouch!
Joe Simon intend to abandon his claims against the Warhol Foundation at the next hearing scheduled for November but counsel for the defendant has made a statement making it clear that the Warhol Foundation will continue to pursue its counterclaim against Joe Simon. According to The Art Law blog, the Foundation's attorneys made the following statement:
"The resources Mr. Simon forced the Foundation to expend litigating against these meritless claims would have otherwise gone to funding its charitable mission of promoting the visual arts and preserving the legacy of Andy Warhol. While Mr. Simon may now prefer not to face Defendants’ legitimate counterclaims, the Warhol Foundation is fully committed to pursuing all its legal rights and claims against Mr. Simon to recover the funds it has been forced to waste and give them back to the charitable causes to which they always belonged."

UPDATE: the Fisk saga continues

The Tennessee Attorney General filed last Friday a second proposal regarding the future of the Stieglitz collection. Background to and the Chancery Court's rejection of his first proposal can be found here and here (Fisk went on to revise its prospective agreement with the Crystal Bridges Museum in light of the Court's ruling). The AG's latest filing is the product of the establishment of a fund by Fisk alumna Carol Creswell-Betsch that has already received commitments sufficient to "allow Fisk University to keep its Stieglitz art collection and display the works on campus at no cost to the school" (approx. $130,000 a year). Assuming Judge Lyle is still of the view that the winning proposal must secure the long-term financial health of Fisk, I, like Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog, suspect the AG's second proposal will be rejected. However, given Judge Lyle's past record and the ever-illusive notion of "donor intent," of course, who knows what the next installment of Fisk news will bring. Meanwhile, Fisk University has already knocked-down the AG's second proposal.

Blair Di Donna gallery to open in uptown New York

NEW YORK. For those active or interested in the secondary market, former Sotheby's vice chair Emmanuel Di Donna is joining forces with London dealer Harry Blain to open the Blair di Donna gallery. The venture represents the teaming up of two artworld moguls -- Di Donna was with Sotheby's in New York for 17 years and Blain co-founded the London galleries Haunch of Venison (bought by Christie's in 2002) and very recently, Blain Southern (focused exclusively on the primary market and set to open in New York after closing its doors in Berlin). The Blair di Donna gallery is due to start trading next month and "the ambition is to have the doors open, and the first exhibition up, in time for the New York auctions in May." Keep you posted (no pun intended).

Insurer v. Insured

Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog points us in the direction of an insurance case about which party, the insurer or the insured, should get a stolen artwork when it's recovered years after the insurer made a payment in the amount of the policy's limit. Since in this particular instance the valid and enforceable written agreement governing the relationship between the parties had a "plain and unambiguous" provision directly on point, the resolution of the dispute turned out to be a straightforward application of basic contract law principles. Now the really interesting question is in favor of whom would the Massachusetts court have ruled had there been no contractual provision determining who gets what in the unlikely situation that a stolen artwork paid for under an insurance policy is found decades later.