This Little Piggy Got Pulled From Auction

Where the money flows, fakes will follow.

The Times of London has reported that Christie’s had to pull a work from an upcoming modern and contemporary sale that its experts had attributed to the cross-dressing, Turner Prize-winning Brit artist Grayson Perry.

Seems the artist couldn’t verify its authenticity.

Declaring that forgery is the sincerest form of flattery, Perry confessed that The Children’s Bore, a ceramic sculpture of a boar inscribed with parental nags, was “too well made” to be one of his early works. It had been estimated to sell for £4,000-£6,000.

There’s quite a bit of attention right now on markets like the Russian art trade, where forgeries are churned out with regularity. One hears about it less in the contemporary art market, where the artists are alive to refute the work. But make no mistake—it happens. The question is, how often does it escape notice?

People say that one way to immunize yourself from monkey business is to buy from a reputable source. But the lesson here: even the experts at the most venerable auction houses can be fooled. Another reason to take your time and do your own homework when collecting newer art. If you see something in an auction catalog that you like, the very least you should do is to read up on the artist’s work, try and figure out what period of their career it fits into, then check with their gallery. Play fast and loose and you may get burned.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Fine Art, Fakes and Forgeries, Contemporary, Craft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.