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In north Michigan woods, feds raid an alleged upscale art forgery factory
- QuinnWilton 6y agoIf this is interesting to you, Orson Welles has an utterly fascinating kind-of-documentary (it's a bit genre defying) about art forgery, named "F for Fake". It's a very strange movie, but it's worth a watch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake
- artur_makly 6y agoF for Fake is on YT: https://youtu.be/gIVgUjj6RxU https://youtu.be/gIVgUjj6RxU
- alexmingoia 6y agoI recommend also watching “Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery” documentary about Wolfgang Beltracchi, the infamous art forger. He tricked the international art world for almost 40 years, made millions selling forgeries, and went to prison for it. He even created paintings by famous artists that didn’t exist and convinced historians that they were newly discovered paintings. Fascinating stuff.
- 34679 6y agoAlso, “There Are No Fakes”. It's about a bunch of fake Norval Morrisseau paintings and how one was sold to the drummer for Barenaked Ladies. It's an interesting story with some colorful characters.
- davinic 6y agoI'd also recommend Sour Grapes, which is about the vintage wine market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(2016_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(2016_film)
- pgt 6y agoPart of me is fine with convincing art forgeries. It's like calling a PDF copy of a book a "forgery". Well, you got the same information out of it, didn't you? If the forgery imparted the same emotion and it's gonna last longer than the original, isn't that a bonus? :)
- paulie_a 6y agoThose are called reproductions and are legal.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoSometimes legal, if they've gone out of copyright. But nevertheless, this is an important distinction: The reason the reproductions were forgeries is because of the deception involved.
- bserge 6y agoWouldn't this technically fall under copyright infringement? If there were any copyright holders (I assume Da Vinci and Van Gogh's expired a long time ago)... Since they copy someone else's stuff and claim it as the real thing, making money from their sale.
- jaywalk 6y agoNo, it's fraud. You can make and sell the Mona Lisa all day long as long as you're not trying to pass it off as the Mona Lisa by da Vinci.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoNope. Reproductions are fine, so long as they are out of copyright or if you have permission of the copyright holder. (I don't usually give permission for folks to copy my paintings, but almost always give permission to copy my photos, for example). Copyright itself is different, though: It often means you can't make money off of copyrighted work, but it can just as easily mean that you can't post a reproduction or fan art on social media - but lots of things are out of copyright. Selling a reproduction and passing it off as the original is fraud, and since there is fraud involved, it makes a reproduction a forgery. In general, you use different materials to make a reproduction than you do a forgery as well: A good reproduction might use some materials that folks used in the past, but often mixes it with modern materials. A forger might use things that were never used to trick the tests the experts used and use techniques to make the painting age faster. You could argue that the forger actually is the better craftsman with these distinctions: It is too bad that there is so much deceit involved. I'd buy an honest "forgery" that tricks the experts, but would be angry if someone passes it off as an original.
- apetersonBFI 6y agoWow, something from Traverse City on Hacker News. Had no idea there was that kind of thing happening around here.
- voiture_rapide 6y ago$299K goes a long way in TC ;-)
- a2tech 6y agoForgery pays well judging from that aerial shot of the property.
- vmh1928 6y agoHN goes to the most remote corners of the Universe to bring us pertinent information!
- apetersonBFI 6y agoWe have a 4 bedroom house just south of TC for 157k, so 300 would get you a small lakefront home or a very nice house.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoI'm jealous that you get to live up there! I summered up there as a kid (on Long Lake) and my uncle and aunt raised my cousins there in the 80's and 90's. We try to go up for a week or so every summer. COVID is putting a damper on this one. My wife and I would move in a heartbeat, but for the kind of IT work I do the prospects seemed very limited (outside of Munson). I'm not ready to try to bootstrap independent contracting all over again. The property taxes seen nightmarish, though. The house on Long Lake is easily 3X what a similarly-valued house in my part of Ohio would be. My aunt and uncle lived on Cherry Bend, not too far from where this went down!
- apetersonBFI 6y agoDefinitely beautiful here. I work in a hybrid IT - Programming role at a Food company here. I know a few people in the IT community locally but outside of Munson and Hagerty there's not many positions open. I'm in Grawn, outside of the city limits, so the property tax isn't too bad.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThese type of ‘save the rich’ operations leave a bad taste in my mouth. With the amount of corruption being seen in police/teacher unions, wouldn’t that be an effective place to use limited federal resources?
- danielfoster 6y agoAbsolutely. And if collectors are worried about forgery, they have the resources to investigate it themselves.
- marcoperaza 6y agoPeople making themselves wealthy off of crime is a problem for the whole public. It is grossly unfair to everyone, not just the people they directly defraud.
- gowld 6y agoOnly if there's some possible connection to the while public. It's highly likely that whoever is buying art forgeries is spending money they defrauded from the public, so I'd rather those funds get redistributed to an artist and laborers. Also, the harm, as a percentage of victims' net worth, is trivial compared to crimes the authorities don't help solve.
- bluGill 6y agoAs the public my only encounter with some art is if the local museum has it on display. If the local museum buys fraud I'm defrauded by proxy.
- bagacrap 6y agoI for one didn't read this article and think that I was getting shafted
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoFederal law enforcement occupies a precarious position where both sides of the isle hate them for certain reasons and tolerate them for others. I'd really love to see federal resources directed at a boondoggle so spectacular that it brings the whole thing crashing down to the point where the FBI is forced by law to spend a much more significant portion of its time investigating official misconduct and civil liberties violations conducted by state and federal agencies.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoInteresting career, forgery. But more interesting is the people that buy them. In particularly the work of Ralston Crawford, which looks uncannily like computer generated drawings. A novelty at the time (1970's?) I suppose, but very ordinary today. Why would anyone value that now? You can make it with Paint or something in minutes.
- FlowNote 6y agoOh wow, I'm shocked that naive HackerNews twerps can't understand that art forgery is a key part of the money laundering operations that allows the wealthy to remain wealthy. You're all so goddamned helpless.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago> “These were very beautiful – fake or not," Feld added. "Whoever did this is quite an accomplished artist — just not the artist he or she purported to be.” I always find it interesting that some of these works are high value when everyone thinks that they are by a certain person, and worthless when they find out it is by someone else. This guy would probably never be known for anything, except that he sold some expensive paintings he made fraudulently. But he has talent in that particular area; but that sort of talent doesn't get you far. You'd think paintings have an intrinsic value by themselves, but in art dealing, context & association is everything.
- helipad 6y agoNot just paintings but any art really. You could likely expand that to anything creative. Someone could make a frame by frame reproduction of a Kubrick film, or cover a Bowie song as faithfully to the original as possible. There is some value in the execution, the talent needed to pull it off. There's so much more value in the idea, the situation that led to its development, the blood, sweat and tears. It just so happens that in fine art there is scarcity and that drives the price up.
- mhb 6y agoNot just art. For example, hundred dollar bills.
- nicholaides 6y agoThe difference here is that these paintings were "previously unknown paintings by well-known artists", so, it's not like a frame-by-frame reproduction or a cover song at all. It's more like a newly discovered but fraudulent Bowie album.
- rimliu 6y agoAnything, really, not necesarrily even creative. Imagine I gave your a piece of paper with my signature. How much would you get for it on ebay? No imagine, if on that piece of paper were signature of say, Stephen Hawking from 1960-ies instead. The amount of creativity would be the same, the price…
- vmh1928 6y agoProbably paying off student debt from an MFA.
- smileypete 6y agoAnother well known UK conman/forgery 'mastermind', was John Drewe, who met and manipulated a struggling artist, John Myatt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drewe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drewe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De3S2kkGQow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De3S2kkGQow https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/18/magazine/a-20th-century-master-scam.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/18/magazine/a-20th-century-m... >'His unorthodox formula of emulsion and K-Y Jelly was fast-drying, allowing him to paint quickly, if obsessively. "I took no trouble technically," he says. "There was a negligence to everything I did." Even so, his pictures were passing as genuine and selling for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was enjoying a financial success he could never have approached by painting Myatts. Perhaps no other forger of his or any other time has worked so prodigiously and in so many styles...'
- kriro 6y agoThanks just watched the provided youtube video. Interesting case. Less greedy and it would have worked perfectly. As someone with 0 idea about the art world it was really interesting to see how well an approach of "fake the history by altering the archives" + medium skill level painting worked. The lady that flew in from France basically already told them "these are pretty bad forgeries" and got the reply "yeah but the documents are legit" and had to go through all kinds of trouble to prove the documents are fake. In my worldview these scams only worked with perfect and amazing forgeries that require some sort of high tech color-analysis and canvas analysis to uncover...alas just faking the chain of trust worked quite well.
- smileypete 6y agoYeah, that lady from France was an expert who truly studied the art itself. The opening words of Eric Hebborn in the follow on video are illuminating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKbbajb5pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKbbajb5pE Some (most?) of his works are probably hanging in museums and collections, indistinguishable from the genuine thing.
- josefresco 6y agoRelated: I just watched "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" starring Melissa McCarthy which was entertaining and informative: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/
- Allower 6y ago"Art forgery" what a joke.