Art Fraud Open Forum

Art Fraud Open Forum

Art fraud is still a very taboo subject within the art market with a large majority of people more happy to ignore what is going on than have their name associated with anything even remotely related to fake artworks or fraudulant activities. Because of the unwillingness of art dealers and art market professionals to report fake artworks the number of works on the market that are either questionable or just plain fake continues to rise. Current estimates suggest that between 10% and 40% of works on the market are fakes which, when you think about it, is a really huge number. For quite a while now I have been trying to come up with a way of helping to combat art fraud but have yet to come up with something that is viable. The ideal project would be an online register or fake artworks but there are legal issues relating to defamation which could arise if an artwork was to be put on the register that was not fake or fraudulent. Because art fraud is such a huge issue I thought that I would open a discussion to discuss possible ways of helping to combat art fraud. If you have any thoughts or suggestions it would be great if you could leave a comment below and help take a stand against this major problem. If you don’t want to be identifiable then leave an anonymous comment but please don’t be too scared or shy to give your point of view.

If you viewing this post on a site other than artmarketblog.com please go here to comment:
http://artmarketblog.com/2008/07/23/art-fraud-open-forum-artmarketblogcom/

**Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications