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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.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 30 2018, @08:31PM
Which to me is just a classic "emperor has no clothes" phenomenon: Everyone thinks they're supposed to be amazed by, say, Andy Warhol's stuff, so they all act like they are even if they're really experiencing "Huh, why do I need to look at a painting of a soup can like it's something profound?"
I'm lucky in that one of the nation's largest free art museums happened to be near where I was working for a few years, so I'd sometimes drop in over lunch breaks and such. They had some really nifty pieces in their modern art section, really mind-bendy sorts of things that made you think if you took the time to look at them, and almost none of them were by big-name artists. And one of my favorite pieces of art I've ever had the privilege of enjoying was in a print I bought at a street fair for $10.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.