"Greg M. Johnson" wrote:

> As Calvin (cartoon kid) said, "The problem with modern art is knowing who's
> scamming whom!"

There was just a segment on one of those in-depth news shows (Dateline or 20/20
or some other human-interest garbage that abuses meaningless statistics and
doesn't give the full story) about two guys in Britain who pulled a major scam.
One was an artist who paints replicas (and tells people they're fakes), and the
other guy bought one, remove the sig, and sold it at an auction house for
$50,000. He realized the profit potential, had the artist do a bunch more, this
guy then went into various museum reading rooms and inserted fake records of the
paintings into the libraries. Then, whenever someone wanted to authenticate a
painting, they just looked in the museum records and viola!-there it was. The
artist only got four years, the other guy is still in prison, the fakes were
dumped in Japan and New York, and the museums are *still* sorting out the fake
records, which is nearly impossible...

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