Fraud
Like the larger art markets in the northern hemisphere, fraud is a problem in Australian art. There is no public database of known fraudsters to date, although they are known to come from Australia and other areas ranging from Europe, China to southeast Asia. In addition to the growing number of faked paintings of artists including Minnie Pwerle, Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson, sometimes galleries and art dealers are impersonated over the internet. The major commercial art magazines have websites with the correct links to their client's websites.
Shoddy auction practices are common, for instance low attention to provenance, pseudo collections where art market dross is implied to be part of a collector's personal effects, and ramping, where prices for artworks are manipulated (inflated at auction).
Read more about this topic: Australian Art
Famous quotes containing the word fraud:
“He saw, he wish’d, and to the prize aspir’d.
Resolv’d to win, he meditates the way,
By force to ravish, or by fraud betray;
For when success a lover’s toil attends,
Few ask, if fraud or force attain’d his ends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“There exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government. On the broaching of this question, as general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?—We ask triumphantly.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)