Art News and Articles: FAR® Columnist
Art: The Endangered Pieces
by David Phillips - 4/12/2006
After nine long months the baby is finally born. It's a girl! In the hospital she is quickly tagged so that there can be no confusion as to which baby belongs to which mother. She is given a name—Mary Anne Jones—and the birth is registered officially and indelibly in the public records of her town. A birth certificate is issued which will remain a valuable document for the rest of her life. Somewhere down the line her fingerprints will go on record. Later, when she marries and changes her name, this too will become a matter of public record and a certificate. When she dies there will be another public record and another certificate. Identity theft stories notwithstanding, there will probably never be any confusion as to Mary Anne's identity, parentage or family history. Centuries from now some curious family member will be able to consult the records and obtain all the information. Mary Anne Jones will always be Mary Anne Jones.
IF ONLY IT WERE THAT WAY WITH WORKS OF ART!
Art Pieces, Origin and Identity—The Timeless Issues
Just a few days ago, there was story in the New York Times. The original Norman Rockwell painting, "Breaking Home Ties", one of his most famous covers for the Saturday Evening Post and valued at about $5 million, was found, hidden by the man who forged it. The forgery had been sitting in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. since 2002, no doubt admired by thousands of visitors as one of Rockwell's finest. It was in fact painted by Mr. Trachette, a cartoonist and friend of Norman Rockwell's, who copied the painting and hid the original to prevent his wife getting it when they divorced.
But this is just the latest in thousands and thousands of incidents and stories involving very basic issues surrounding any work of art: Who created it? Is it the original? How can we be sure?
An artist's attention is on creating meaningful pieces of art. As soon as one is complete, he is ready for the next one. The details of sales, exhibitions, galleries copyrights and legalities are often something one hopes someone else will take care of. Seldom does an artist stop to think about the future of his piece let's say 200 years from now. Rembrandt probably didn't give it a second thought. Norman Rockwell, Picasso, Dali, Chagall, Miró, Corot—none of them probably paid much attention at all to the issues that would arise with regard to their artistic creations and their legitimacy.
There is an often stated quip with regard to this. You may have heard it. It goes something like this: "Of the 700 authentic pieces painted by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, 8,000 of them are in the USA."
The mass produced "original" forgeries of works by Dali, Picasso, Miró and Chagall, sold as signed, limited edition prints are legendary in the art world. So much so that, for example, Christie's will not sell any Dali prints published after 1949.
Thomas Hoving, one of the New York Metropolitan Museum's greatest directors, in his 16 years at the Met either personally collected or saw about 125,000 works of art. He has been quoted as saying, "Fully 60 percent of what I examined was not what it was said to be." That doesn't mean all of these pieces were forgeries or fakes but their origin had been clouded or lost and they were misrepresented as to origin.
The FBI states on its art crime dedicated website that art and cultural property crime (theft, fraud, looting and trafficking across state and international lines) is "a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually" and has a special Art Crime Team whose sole job is to recover these precious pieces and bring the criminals to justice.
And here is a frightening thought: how many of the pieces currently in museums, galleries and private collections are fakes or forgeries that have not been found out? Quite often forgeries are discovered only because the perpetrator admits to it after the pieces have undergone extensive scientific and scholarly scrutiny. Scientific procedure is only capable of proving that a fake piece of art is a forgery, not that a genuine piece is legitimate. And scholars have a difficult job when they're up against a really good forger or faker.
Remember that the value of a work of art in our Western world hinges greatly on the reputation of the artist who created it. A painting valued at $50,000,000 today, thought to have been an original Rembrandt, is reattributed to one of his students tomorrow and the value plummets to $50,000. Same painting! And people look at it differently and don't have the same response that they did to the "Rembrandt." Say what you like about the phenomenon, it is part of our society and the huge sums commanded by works of art depend on it.
Relevance to Works of Art Created Today
How does this apply to John Jones, artist in Michigan or Florida today, who is producing pieces and earning a living by his art? If he is a serious artist, then it would be normal for him to expect his art to increase in value, even become famous, if not immediately then at some future time. Did Van Gogh, when he was happily painting sunflowers, predict that they would be selling for around $50 million within a lifetime or two of his death? No, he was painting sunflowers.
So it would seem sensible to take the steps now which will eliminate much of this confusion and doubt that surrounds the provenance and authenticity of works of art.
An Answer
It was to this end that Theresa Franks, a serious and dedicated art collector, founded The Fine Art Registry with the idea of providing an official, international registration site for any works of art and other valuable, collectible items whose provenance is an intrinsic part of their value.
The patented database and system includes a high tech, virtually indelible and noncounterfeitable tag which is attached to a work of art, preferably as soon as it is created and registered. The registration information includes photos and full descriptions, based on Object ID's core standard for identifying a piece of art. Object ID is the result of a lengthy study initiated by the Paul Getty Museum in 1993,to try to bring some order to the issues surrounding provenance and authenticity of works of art, which is endorsed by law enforcement agencies, insurers and the art world. An electronic transfer of ownership system makes it possible to rapidly establish provenance and the complete ownership over time of any registered piece. The presence or absence of a tamper-evident tag, along with the registered information, is all that would be needed to establish provenance and authenticity of a piece of art which was registered and tagged when it was created.
It is too late to go back and tag and register the original Rembrandt paintings or Picasso's drawings or Norman Rockwell's original "Breaking Home Ties" painting when they originally created them, but they can still be tagged now and it would greatly assist in preventing further abuse of provenance of their work. It is certainly not too late for John Jones, soon-to-be-a-well-known artist, to start tagging and registering each piece he creates. In fact, he should make this a unalterable part of his production process.
Then maybe, like the newly born Mary Anne Jones who will always have her undisputed identity, John Jones' artwork will go forward in time clearly identified and free from the shrouds and smokescreens of deception and fraud which obscure the source of so many works of art. Don't think that the next generation of the John Jones family won't be grateful. So will the curators of the museums and the directors of the galleries. Only the forgers, fakes and shady dealers will lose out.
It could change the whole world of selling and collecting art forever.
— David Phillips | April 12, 2006
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