The “Art of the Scam”!
Pictured Above – “Portrait of Alice Neel” by Lida Moser, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
By F. Lennox Campello
I’m starting this month’s column with one of the most common questions that I get: “Lenster, how do art scams work?”
To start, once a week or so I get an email from an artist somewhere on the planet like this one below:
Hello, I’m a German artist and found your “Art Scam Alert” from July 15, 2018 about this Donald Hugh mail. Now at January 21, 2024 I got the same mail from him online in German. He ordered two pictures from me. My question is, how he is trying to rip off artist? He wants me to send pictures and doesn’t pay?
Thank you for an answer.
This is how:
- They will most likely give you (a) International Bank Draft/Postal Money Order or (b) Credit Card
- Your bank will accept them and they will show almost immediately as available in your account, which is the “normal” way to show that the deposit has cleared
- Artists then usually ship the work
- A few days later the bank gets a note from that overseas bank… bad news – the draft is fake and/or cc has just been reported as stolen
- They withdraw the funds from your account
- You’re hosed.
One would think that in 2024, the banking system would be more reactive to the above scenario… but nope!
If you an email out of nowhere, about someone who admires your work, or who noticed his wife looking at your artwork on your website, etc. and wants to buy your art, be suspicious and immediately do a search for the email address and you’re likely to find warnings all over Al Gore’s Internets about the scam.
Be aware and be careful.
Another golden nugget for you readers: The non-existing formula for pricing artwork!
Another question that I often get is how to price one’s artwork… recently in Facebooklandia, a local artist asked the question:
Easy, easy question: how do you price your art?
Material cost + (hourly rate * number of hours * 2)? Plus studio cost plus miscellaneous stuff like going to Sushi?
That’s what I thought someone said. This might be for artists who have just started selling.
Not so easy my friend… not so easy!
In my opinion, there’s really no formula now and there was never a formula.
Why? Because art for sale is a commodity; therefore, ECON 101 tells us about how prices in most cases are driven by supply and demand, but that doesn’t work for 99.999% of us in the fine arts because that ECON 101 formula only works for that art that is very limited in supply but in high demand: Picasso, Frazetta, Monet, Manet, etc.
Example one: About a decade ago, you could pick up a painting by my good friend Sam Gilliam, may he rest in peace, at a local DC area auction house for hundreds of dollars. Why? Because there was no “demand” for Gilliam’s amazing and novel work, and buyers were not willing to pay above a few hundred Samolians for a Gilliam canvas from the past.
About ten years ago the Sam Gilliam painting from 1972 titled “Dance” was estimated at $1000-2000 and sold for $600 at a local auction. That painting is now probably worth several tens of thousands of dollars if not higher.
Why?
A few powerful exposure events happened driven by art galleries (not in DC) “re-discovering” Gilliam and bringing his work to art fairs, and suddenly there was a huge demand for Gilliam’s works, and his prices skyrocketed and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!
Or take the case of Carmen Herrera, for decades and decades her canvasses sold for practically nothing (if they even sold) – then a curator from the Tate in Great Britain “discovered” that this artist had an amazing pedigree (she showed alongside some of the greats of art in the 40x, 50s, etc.) and organized a retrospective for Herrera at the Tate, and suddenly the world art collectors discovered her work and rushed to buy it – creating the demand and thus a huge rise in prices.
More examples?
In the 1960s Alice Neel was on welfare and traded her paintings to Lida Moser for Moser to take slides of her work so that Neel could try to get galleries interested in her work… then… go back to the top of this article and substitute “Neel” for those two artists.
Maybe there is a formula in there somewhere.
About the Author: F. Lennox Campello’s art news, information, gallery openings, commentary, criticism, happenings, opportunities, and everything associated with the global visual arts scene with a special focus on the Greater Washington, DC area has been a premier source for the art community for over 20 years. Since 2003, his blog has been the 11th highest ranked art blog on the planet with over SIX million visitors.