Artful Dodgers

The middle-aged couple sits on the couch in their living room looking at the appraiser with shock, trying to understand what they have just been told.

The pretty airline hostess yelps and whirls around, her hands pressed to her temples, then stands staring out the hotel window at the city below while she works to control her emotions.

The dentist gets up to close his office door and returns to his desk to hear again what he doesn’t want to believe.

With a four second delay due to the distance and satellite lag, the civilian worker at the end of the Aleutian Islands chain repeats the words which destroy his plans for early retirement.

Staring numbly at the carpet, the secretary struggles to comprehend how all of the long hours and hard work over several years to save her family following her divorce could suddenly face ruin.

These people all have something in common. They are victims of art fraud. Their experiences, with some variation, are repeated every day in all parts of the country, and when we try to understand who they are, we must accept that they are us.

While no tally has ever been, or probably could be, taken of the number of victims of this almost invisible crime wave, there is little doubt that in the United States, if known, the numbers would be staggering. There has developed a crisis of confidence in the last thirty-five years that has taken literally hundreds of thousands of buyers out of the market.

As an FBI Special Agent pointed out in 1987, “I assure you, Bernard, that the third largest crime in the country in dollar value, after sales of illegal drugs and firearms, is art fraud. Someone should tell the public.”

Victims of the widespread cons that have seriously tainted the art market have generally been unsophisticated first-time buyers. Lee Catterall of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, quoted in a 1991 article in The Journal of Art, referred to those individuals as, “ordinary people who bought not necessarily for the love of art but rather for investment to support their children’s education or to bolster their retirement.” The result, in my experience, is that when they discover their investment is worthless they adamantly declare, “I’ll never buy art again!”

The greatest art scam of all time—the production and sale of fake Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Marc Chagall prints—is only symptomatic of the parasitic problems which pervade, and are destroying, many strata of the host on which they feed.

Unaccountably, there has been no point at which legitimate art dealers have said, “STOP! We must clean up our nest and salvage whatever credibility remains while we educate potential buyers to be smart consumers. We must regain then retain their confidence.” One dealer even had printed on the back of his business card, People Get The Art They Deserve.

Victim demographics cut across socio-economic lines and include a widely diverse group of people. Statistics, however, are abstract and impersonal. Cheated buyers are people of many different types but they do have several characteristics in common:

1. Enough greed to propel them into a market about which they know very little and in which they must rely totally upon the promises and representations of others.

2. Sufficient available capital to invest from $1,000 to $60,000 in the expectation that they will eventually realize a substantial return.

3. An interest in art, but naiveté about the workings of the art market.

4. A basic belief that no matter what they have been told all of their life, somewhere there is a free lunch.

Added to this formula is the desire to believe several other things: that people are good, con men prey only on the weak and old, and somehow it always happens to someone else.

In a New Yorker cartoon, the jury foreman stands facing the judge and reads from a slip of paper in his hand, “Your Honor, we the jury blame the victim.” This reflects the experience of investigators who so often find that those who are cheated by con men wanted to believe they were making a wise investment when they bought art. Or, as a veteran of the street once told me,

“There are no victims. Cop talk. It’s a thing we’d say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred-thousand bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they’re asking for. There are no victims.”

Isn’t it heartless and unfair, however, to ignore the anguished cries of fraud victims and simply pass them off as not only ignorant but also greedy and therefore deserving of their fate? I believe so and have therefore spent over four decades trying to educate art buyers and help collectors develop their connoisseurship. In my experience with art fraud victims, I have found that very few of them were repeat mooches or terminally gullible. Most just fell for a scheme that was constructed in such a manner as to make sense to them and promised rewards far beyond any perceived risk. Such people do deserve protection and help. Law enforcement agencies can do little more that focus attention and inadequate resources on the frauds de jour in hope of alerting consumers.

Fraud is a crime that hurts people. It violates their dignity and robs them of their money and options. While it will never disappear from our society, those who get rich at the often painful expense of others should be exposed. In some small way it is hoped that this book will raise public consciousness and play a part in making it more difficult for purveyors of fraud and avarice to victimize art buyers.