The Art Business Is Still Booming

Both Fine Art and Forgeries!

In this age of digital information, you’d think forgeries would be easier to detect. They should be. (And they will be when NFTs come into common use.)

But when the art market is hot, and particularly when the contemporary art market heats up, forgeries soar for three obvious reasons. (1) They are contemporary and can’t be carbon-dated. (2) They tend to be easier to forge than representational paintings. (3) The prices they are fetching are so great that it’s impossible for forgers and crooked dealers (of which there are plenty) to resist the urge to cash in.

But there’s another reason, too, that Julie Belcove writes about in a recent issue of ARTnews. She says it is “mysterious” and “unique to the art world.” She calls it an “idiosyncratic, unspoken code of conduct.”

Read about it here.