- The oft-stolen Ghent altarpiece is being restored at a cost of $1.3 million, only a piece or two will be removed from display at a time. But if you can’t make it to Ghent you can view the whole altarpiece in 100 billion pixels here.
- The now-closed Knoedler art gallery has settled a suit involving an allegedly forged Jackson Pollock.
- In case you missed it, Arnold Peter Weiss, a prominent physician and coin collector wrote an essay on buying ancient coins as part of a plea agreement. Chasing Aphrodite has published the essay on scribd.
- Public lands officials in Idaho are urging people not to disturb the increasing number of antiquities and other sites which are being revealed by the plague of forest fires.
- Apparently some use their art to secure loans.
- The four thieves in the theft of Chinese art from the Fitzwilliam in Cambridgeshire have been convicted, but where’s the art?
- Art forger Ken Perenyi continues to claim he’s doing everyone a favor by forgin’ art. I’ve got his book sitting on my desk but haven’t had a chance to read it just yet. In an interview with Janice Harper he claims:
“My lawyers said at the time, ‘Ken, when your own victims circle the wagons to prevent you from being indicted, that’s got to be the definition of the perfect crime.'” Why would they protect him? Perhaps a better question is why would they turn him in? To do so would reveal not only the fact that they were duped. It would also mean they could not continue profiting from his work. “I would say from the art world establishment… the money is immaterial. They’re not interested in trying to recover money at all. What they are worried about is their reputation. … At the time of [the FBI] investigation, they had several important paintings that had gone through the auction houses that they knew were authored by me. And by looking at those paintings they would say, ‘Oh my God, if he was good enough to do this, this certainly wasn’t the first. So if he’s indicted, what is this going to open up?'” What it would open up, Perenyi suggests, is that there are well over a thousand of his paintings out there right now, masquerading as “authentic.” How does that impact the buyers of these works?
