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posted by mrpg on Monday April 30 2018, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the punters-were-happy dept.

A state-owned French art museum has discovered that more than half of its collection consists of worthless fakes and experts fear that other public galleries may also be stuffed with forgeries.

An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist's death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist's birthplace in southern France, were fakes.

Many of the forged oil paintings, watercolours and drawings were bought with £140,000 of municipal funds over the past few decades. Others were given to the museum by two local groups that raised money to buy them by appealing for donations. Some were bequeathed by a private collector.

Yves Barniol, the mayor of Elne, near the Spanish border, said: "It's a catastrophe. I put myself in the place of all the people who came to visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It's intolerable and I hope we find those responsible."

[...] Art experts estimate that at least 20 per cent of paintings owned by major museums across the world may not be the work of the purported artists.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday April 30 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 30 2018, @01:06AM (#673553) Journal

    Can all of this be bad luck or was this a long-running conspiracy?

    Well, there was more than enough money involved to incentivize counterfeiting in the first place. But maybe the state funds flowed better when someone was buying those fakes.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday April 30 2018, @12:49PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 30 2018, @12:49PM (#673694)

    Modern art scene is mostly financial money laundering and tax dodge on a medium size medium legality level for wealthy people. This has been widely understood for a long time by wealthy people.

    So I owe you $500K for some nefarious reason like I told you verbally all the details of an upcoming merger and you made $5M untraceable profit off trading or gambling debt or whatever ridiculous reason I need to give you $500K without pissing off the IRS gift tax limit of $5K or whatever it is now ($10K I think?) or election campaign finance laws or its just simply an old fashioned bribe or whatever. You take a shit on a painting canvas or have a local toddler scribble on it, we both agree in a legal contract that I feel its a lost Picasso worth $500K and the contract has a "no gives backsies" clause and you pay off 1, 2, maybe 3 equally bogus appraisers who agree that's a real fine piece of $500K art you mysteriously came into owning (well technically it usually involves paying a fine arts college grad like $25K cash to make a really good fake and STFU about it), I give you a check for the fake $500K value, the IRS takes its smaller-than-gift-tax smaller-than-W2 tax smaller-than-misc income tax cut of your art earnings, and we're all good. Eventually I donate the fake Picasso to a museum for a tax writeoff of... lets say it goes up in value to $1M. Cool so I get a million of income tax free because I paid some dude off the $500K I owed him, not a bad deal, kinda like the upper class version of shady stuff like mortgage tax deductions or child credits or whatever tax scams poorer people run. Someday someone notices its worthless and the great game starts over with some other fake "art".

    It gets the wink-and-nod treatment from the authorities because crime isn't going to go away if they ban this form of money laundering they'll just do something more complicated and this is easier to track and occasionally bust the right people or ignore the right people. Also the fakes, as mentioned, frankly look kinda alright and its sort of a jobs program for liberal arts grads as both artists and critics and appraisers and criminal investigators. Sorta like if you left the Russian nuclear and rocket scientists to their own devices after the wall fell, the world would be more Fed up than it is with USA funded jobs programs like the ISS. Also its a class based thing where everyone in the sailing club when I was a kid growing up at my grandparents house knew all about it and how it works and as long as we keep it quiet from the middle and lower classes they'll stay out of the racket and merely make weird jokes about bad taste and fools and money being soon parted. Not understanding the whole point was "money being soon parted" involving upper class crime financial laundering.

    Somewhat more lower or middle class money laundering and tax evasion involves buying a shitload of lotto tickets or drugs for later resale, and that stuff looks horrible framed and hung up on a wall and employs nobody interesting. Maybe weed people should get the government off their backs by doing decorative marijuana flower arrangements to attractively display wealth and then get a zillion people on the financial bandwagon of liberal arts grad floral arrangers and floral arrangement critics and magazine editors and floral arrangement appraisers and of course criminal investigators to prune the wrong kind of people out of the scene. Once enough people wet their beak, its tacitly legal in practice.

    Essentially modern art in the era of the photographic reproduction and mass product, exists mostly to launder money.