Limited Edition Prints:
Open Letter To Artists
by
Joan Altabe, for Fine Art Registry®
Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 6
A crime against the art world is going unnoticed. There are no guns implicated. No slam-slam of bullets can be heard. But as far as I'm concerned, those involved are crooks.
The offense? Selling limited editions that aren't. A limited edition print is hand-duplicated and the original plate is destroyed. A lot of what you see these days doesn’t meet that standard.
Like anything else, the fewer of something, the more it costs. Some artists, though, are selling "limited edition" prints that are not only photo-mechanically produced, but also are reproductions of work in another medium. And they are selling these reproductions - with the potential for mass production - at limited edition prices.
How is this possible? The print market goes virtually without oversight. As far back as the '80s, witnesses testifying at hearings in New York about the sale of fake Picasso prints said deceit in the print market is "rampant."
The cause? Clearly, technology makes cheating easier, that and public ignorance of the difference between a handmade art print and a mechanically produced reprint. (More about the public in a moment).
Technology's part in cheating can be attributed to the proliferation of cheaper inkjet printers. It used to be that Cibachrome prints, which are nothing more than good-grade photographic reproductions, were the fake prints of choice palmed off as original fine art prints. They've become less prevalent because they're relatively easy to spot. They look too smooth, too much like a slick photograph.
The fake of the day is the Giclee (French for "to spray ink"), a scanned image printed on a high-resolution inkjet printer called Iris.
Granted, some experts defend Giclee. In 1995, Karen McCready of New York's International Fine Print Dealers Association (formed in 1987 to protect collectors), has said that Giclee is a legitimate fine-art print as long as artists do the printing themselves. Which is the Print Council of America's credo: printmaking requires artists participation.
But even if artists comply, Giclee is still illegitimate if copies are made from work in another medium. What you get, then, is a reproduction rather than an original fine art print.
Yet such reproductions are openly used as art prints. Giclee Print Net on the Internet offers a printmaking service with a promotion that reads, "Artists. Reproduce your works as limited signed editions on watercolor media or canvas."
About the public's part in this. Print dealers tell me that when people see original paintings they like for tens of thousands of dollars and then see what appears to be a very comparable facsimile by the same artist that sells for $1,500, they're willing to buy it.
The numbers bear this out. Art prints account for 40 percent of art sales, compared with just 16 percent for paintings. But here's where people's ignorance or indifference can hurt them: The difference between a hand-made fine-art print and a mechanically produced reproduction can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars in resale value. There is no reliable secondary market for such reproductions. Thus, if art lovers buy prints and later wish to sell them, they can't be sure of recouping the purchase price.
Michael Cowan, a senior art appraiser who determines print and painting values for the Arbitration Association of American, calls mechanically produced pictures nothing more than pictures of pictures.
If you're into such picture-making, you're spoiling the picture and ought to be taken away in a paddy wagon.
— by Joan Altabe
| July 25, 2006
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