Speaking out about fakes

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, Robert Motherwell 1971 

Jack Flam, currently working on a catalogue raisonné of Robert Motherwell talks about the backwards incentives by members of the public and scholars when it comes to authenticating art. Highly recommended, it puts all the discussion of fakes and forgeries in the context of what experts and the market are not doing to prevent fakes from polluting the pool of art in private collections and in the public trust:

These market circumstances have unfortunately coincided with a situation in which scholars and foundations that make decisions about authenticity feel increasingly constrained by legal threats from people who own or are selling fakes. So while the number of fakes in the marketplace is dramatically increasing, an important means for assuring the veracity of artists’ works has been disappearing. Several scholars and foundations are ceasing to authenticate works because they are afraid of lawsuits, and such fears have even constrained the way scholars communicate with each other.
Back in 2008, after the Motherwell catalogue raisonné project suspected that a number of “Spanish Elegy” paintings were forgeries, I had ample occasion to observe how pressure can be effectively put on scholars who believe a painting is inauthentic in order to constrain them from saying so publicly. When I contacted scholars who were engaged in research on some of the other artists whose works were supposed to be in Rosales’s collection, many declined to discuss their opinions about those works; and the ones who did so usually insisted on speaking off the record.
It was not until injured parties came forward—that is, people who had spent significant amounts of money on works that did not pass the scrutiny of either connoisseurship or forensic testing—and the press picked up the story that scholars became (cautiously) more open about what they thought of those works.

1. Jack Flam, Break the silence over fakes, The Art Newspaper, April 12, 2012, http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Break-the-silence-over-fakes/26124 .