Recently I have had a huge amount of correspondence from people looking to sell pieces of art they may have had hanging on a wall or lying in a garage for years. The recent opening up of shops and auction houses (and the success of online auctions) has
led to a real boom in sellers seeking to raise much needed cash as we exit the pandemic.
But what are all these things worth? How are you supposed to know a good deal from a bad deal?
The global market for art is worth over $64 billion each year. Is it any wonder therefore that the ability for criminals to pass off works as those of the real artist/maker is also a huge and lucrative industry? Even professional art experts can be taken in - Museums such as New York’s Met Museum and Paris’s Le Louvre have fallen foul of convincing forgeries from sophisticated scammers. In 2018 a museum in southern France, which featured work by acclaimed painter Etienne Terrus, discovered that well over half of its entire collection was in fact comprised of fakes, some of which had artist signatures that simply wiped off when touched