The other evening, I was listening to the French public radio (France Inter) while trying to micro-wave chutney out of green tomatoes and green crab apples found in my garden (I failed). The program was about a French art dealer, Giuliano Ruffini, who had sold several grand master paintings that later got resold at insane prices (€5 million and $9 million), and even later detected as modern forgeries of Cranach and Hals. While the forgeries were suspected from scientific analyses that found anachronic pigments in the paintings, I find much more interesting the philosophical questions it raises on the art market! So radically exposed by Bansky’s Love is in the Bin! From the hugely fluctuating worth associated with an art piece, depending on whether it was painted by a Old Master, one of their students, or a modern genius forger, and who says so, to the uncertain nature of the crime [of selling a painting with no attributed author] when the change in authorship should not impact the joy in watching a beautiful piece of art. And does not have an impact commensurable to the one of a forged drug or garment…
