In north Michigan woods, feds raid an alleged upscale art forgery factory | Hacker News Reader

In north Michigan woods, feds raid an alleged upscale art forgery factory

detroitnews.com

109 pointsrmason99 comments

> “These were very beautiful – fake or not," Feld added. "Whoever did this is quite an accomplished artist — just not the artist he or she purported to be.”

I always find it interesting that some of these works are high value when everyone thinks that they are by a certain person, and worthless when they find out it is by someone else. This guy would probably never be known for anything, except that he sold some expensive paintings he made fraudulently. But he has talent in that particular area; but that sort of talent doesn't get you far.

You'd think paintings have an intrinsic value by themselves, but in art dealing, context & association is everything.

Not just paintings but any art really. You could likely expand that to anything creative.

Someone could make a frame by frame reproduction of a Kubrick film, or cover a Bowie song as faithfully to the original as possible. There is some value in the execution, the talent needed to pull it off. There's so much more value in the idea, the situation that led to its development, the blood, sweat and tears.

It just so happens that in fine art there is scarcity and that drives the price up.

Not just art. For example, hundred dollar bills.

The difference here is that these paintings were "previously unknown paintings by well-known artists", so, it's not like a frame-by-frame reproduction or a cover song at all. It's more like a newly discovered but fraudulent Bowie album.

Anything, really, not necesarrily even creative. Imagine I gave your a piece of paper with my signature. How much would you get for it on ebay? No imagine, if on that piece of paper were signature of say, Stephen Hawking from 1960-ies instead. The amount of creativity would be the same, the price…

It's true in most luxury goods. In this case, instead of Louis Vuitton, George Ault was the brand being replicated. High-end mechanical watches are another example, where the "right" name on the dial definitely affects the demand, even if lower-priced watches have nicer internals and finishing for far less cost. In fact, there is a whole group of consumers who knowingly purchase replicated pieces (some of which are getting indistinguishable from the real thing). A lot is in a name, in art and otherwise.

They were also making things like fake memorabilia. For say a baseball bat with a Babe Ruth signature it is pretty obviously the authenticity of the signature which makes it worth something, not the "intrinsic value" of a bat with some ink on.

There is this attitude that it is somehow wrong to value authenticity when it comes to art, but I don't really get it. Surely an authentic historical artifact is more interesting than a fake.

Another view could hold that, in exposing a fake, one is deliberately destroying the value of an artifact. The 'real criminal' is the one doing the exposing. Until then, everybody was happy and the artifact had 'real' value.

Just like how your partner isn't cheating on you if you never find out? Seems like a silly view.

Come on. There have been paintings for 100's of years considered by a master, and later study disproves it. Were they valuable all that while? Sure they were.

You mean, did the thing they were assumed to be have value all that time? Yes. But then it was discovered that they were not that thing.

Does 'value' mean what people would pay for the thing? They paid lots for those 'fake' paintings. Ergo, they had value. The value was destroyed by looking a little too carefully at their provenance.

I simply observe that the value was destroyed not by the artist that created them, but by the investigator. That much seems obvious.

But whom to blame? That's a human moral issue. I suggest we could reasonably blame the investigator.

You are basically rejecting the idea that something can be fake.

If I faked a letter from Albert Einstein where he confessed to secretly being a Christian I'm sure people consider it of great value. Would it "destroy value" if someone figured out it was actually a hoax?

i wasn’t going to hell until i was told about the whole “God” fiasco

Or so you thought at the time.

That quote came from a person who bought the fake paintings, so take it with a grain of salt. It sounds like they're deflecting questions about their credentials to sell art.

Andy Warhol made a whole career questioning this assumption.

Photography and other forms of reproduction changed people’s view of art.

There are a LOT of talented painters in the world, with incredible skills. But there’s only one Picasso. Buying an original is owning a tangible piece of history — an object that he touched with his own hands, which maybe then went on to tour museums around the world (and maybe bears the freight stamps from those travels on the paintings backside).

Otherwise you can just frame a perfect reproduction or poster.

This gives the camera a little too much credit. A painting is really a three-dimensional object (texture, etc, can be critical). So a two-dimensional projection of that will by definition lose information.

Oh, but this is giving a painting too much credit. A sculpture, of course, is truly three-dimensional - a painting can hardly be called three-dimensional in comparison. And this gives the sculptor too much credit, since it's just a creation of a stationary, dead object. True art comes from real movement of bodies on the stage. But this isn't true art either, for it's ephemeral. Clearly, a movie would have the most encoded information, and is thus the most credible art. But this is laziness, for anyone can hit record, it must be the person who photographs, who chooses the exact moment to capture, rather than the person who says "capture everything" that can truly get at the essence of art. /s

It's definitely more subtle than that, for sure. Rembrandt is a great example. He created life-like illusions through a mastery of the medium – the way light reflects and refracts through different pigments, the role of varnishing, the thickness of paint, etc. Standing in front of one is an entirely different experience than looking at a photo reproduction. Doesn't compare.

But broadly speaking, photography emerged at a time where the aim of most painters was still to create a window into a world. It's no accident that Impressionism emerged at the same time as the avant guard reaction to that. Which then led to abstract expressionism, etc – the idea that a painting is an object in and of itself. That the surface of the painting (the texture, the geometry of the composition) is what's interesting; rather than it being a vehicle for depicting some image.

Reminds me of this:

https://archive.org/details/related_communists/page/36/mode/...

I suspect that you have objects of sentimental value as well. Most people do. Perhaps it is a book given by a friend that you don't throw away, even though you never read it and, if you had to, could replace it for a few dollars. Perhaps it's an autograph from a celebrity, or a prop from a movie.

Sentimental value isn't rational, but it's innately human, and practically all people practice it. The art market in particular is famous for expanding it to some ludicrous levels, where sentiment is given a dollar value in the seven and eight figures, but it's mostly just rich people playing on exactly the same emotions you have, with more money.

It's complicated by additional factors of competitive culture and possibly some money laundering, but at the base of it is a feeling that a piece of art that "witnessed" history takes on a value beyond the visual conveyed on the canvas. Often, the artist was innovative in some way that's appreciated by fans, and that innovation is no less rational than a baseball that was hit out of the park at an important time -- even though it's just a baseball.

I'm under the impression that sentiment plays very little role in bidding up art. Its a 'tulip bulb' sort of thing, where folks are trading the art essentially as they trade baseball cards, not because of intrinsic value (just a bit of paper or cloth etc) but because others may be expected to bid more later.

What is intrinsic value?

You can look that up. It means something like, the materials or useful value (as a tool etc) gives it a price in the market.

I'm sure the parent knows the meaning of the word, but was asking as more of a philosophical exercise. But funny enough, your example is still describing extrinsic value. Tools don't have intrinsic value. They're valuable because of a problem they solve. If they stop solving that problem or the problem no longer exists, the same thing happens to their value.

You've lost me. I was aware of both those definitions, and used them as I intended, I believe? Oh, its the tool issue. Its reasonable to value a tool for its inherent usefulness - that's intrinsic to the tool. Extrinsic value is just the market value. That one seems clearer.

Anyway I imagine the intrinsic value of a piece of art is, the joy it gives in interacting with it. Kind of the entire point of art after all. And notice, nothing in that about "who made it".

But it can give you joy to know who made a painting and the historical context of it.

Replicas do have intrinsic value. I have several replica paintings and none of them were cheap. I prefer hand painted artwork & craftsmanship over prints. The difference is, nobody is fooled into thinking these are authentic Picassos.

As someone else said, the original paintings are worth more because they are one touched by the master. That history is valuable to certain people. I am not one of those people, and many others share the same opinion, they appreciate the art only for its aesthetics.

Interestingly, replicas of famous works are often much more expensive than original works by the same no-name artist. I have lots of originals from art students that I picked up for <$20 or so.

You see the same behavior in other fields. An original Mustang GT350 is worth a hell of a lot more than a replica, even if the replica is better in many metrics, because a small group of wealthy people value the heritage and history much more than the tangible good.

Worth saying, there is a whole village in China making living on oil painting replicas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViHZ_OdCDBg

The comment to which you're replying isn't referring to replicas though, but rather original paintings fraudulently attributed to a famous artist:

> FBI agents have identified eight probable forged paintings, five of which were billed as previously unknown works of Ault, an American artist active through the 1940s. Two other paintings were purportedly created by Crawford, an artist active through the 1970s whose precisionist style was similar to that of Ault, according to the search warrant affidavit. The last painting was purportedly created by Abercrombie, a surrealist American artist active through the 1970s.

To use your analogy, it would be as if someone created a car using Ford Mustang styling cues, but that wasn't a replica of any Mustang that Ford ever made, and claimed that it was a Ford Mustang prototype found hidden in a garage.

I was merely pointing out that the artwork itself does has intrinsic value, irrespective of who made it and when. As the parent said,

>You'd think paintings have an intrinsic value by themselves,

If paintings didn't have intrinsic value, then there wouldn't be a market for replicas and prints of famous of pieces. Yet, there is a market for such.

Where do you find good replicas?

(There are a few paintings I would love to have nice replicas of on canvas, but I haven't yet tried any of the online replica factories for fear of poor quality)

Local artists generally.

We have a lot of street fairs with artists showing off their work, most are receptive to commissions and you can get an idea of capabilities by looking their work. Anymore, my favorite place is this antique store next to an art studio, the artist that owns the studio makes a lot of replicas (and original) to sell in the antique store.

These type of ‘save the rich’ operations leave a bad taste in my mouth.

With the amount of corruption being seen in police/teacher unions, wouldn’t that be an effective place to use limited federal resources?

Absolutely. And if collectors are worried about forgery, they have the resources to investigate it themselves.

People making themselves wealthy off of crime is a problem for the whole public. It is grossly unfair to everyone, not just the people they directly defraud.

Only if there's some possible connection to the while public.

It's highly likely that whoever is buying art forgeries is spending money they defrauded from the public, so I'd rather those funds get redistributed to an artist and laborers.

Also, the harm, as a percentage of victims' net worth, is trivial compared to crimes the authorities don't help solve.

As the public my only encounter with some art is if the local museum has it on display. If the local museum buys fraud I'm defrauded by proxy.

I for one didn't read this article and think that I was getting shafted

Federal law enforcement occupies a precarious position where both sides of the isle hate them for certain reasons and tolerate them for others.

I'd really love to see federal resources directed at a boondoggle so spectacular that it brings the whole thing crashing down to the point where the FBI is forced by law to spend a much more significant portion of its time investigating official misconduct and civil liberties violations conducted by state and federal agencies.

I don’t know why people are lumping teachers unions in with police unions. I’ve never heard of teachers rolling up in an armored personnel carrier and jumping out with batons and tear gas or kneeling on someone’s neck until they die. Sounds like you just don’t like unions.

Definitely a vast difference in the level of physical violence between those two groups. But similar how bad performers are shielded by the unions for both of those groups. That's likely the issue that has OP lumping them together.

Corruption obviously isn't the right term - but there is something inimical about a group of public workers organizing against the public interest, and (from my perspective) workplace rules that prevent bad performers from being fired certainly fit into that category.

Teachers union corruption looks a lot different for sure and is likely less insidious but there are lots of examples of problems.

From teacher protection clauses that mean teachers who aren’t legally able to teach being retained to opposition to any pension reform in bankrupt states.

I’m certainly not anti-union but I lump teachers unions in with police unions and the teamsters as cautionary tales of their downsides.

Fighting for a decent pension is a legitimate thing for a union to fight for. Fighting to be able to murder with impunity is not. Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and there is a lot of pressure to convert the school system to charter schools in order to bust the unions. Meanwhile administrative costs skyrocket every year. There’s a lot wrong with our school system but I don’t think teachers unions are one of them. Paying teachers even less is not the way forward.

Fighting for a pension is of course a legitimate union activity.

It’s equally legitimately to state that one way unions become problematic is when their demands are not financially viable and are in fact part of the problem fiscally.

I don’t consider it legitimate because of the proven conflicts of interests involved in taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions.

The math can be fudged to purposely understate costs, never mind the fact that predicting that far into the future is impossible.

So you have politicians with an interest in keeping taxes low in the short term to get re elected, you have union bosses who are older and also don’t care about fudged numbers way into the future, since they will be getting theirs before shit hits the fan.

The people screwed are future generations of taxpayers and benefit recipients who have to accept cuts to their benefits.

Cash remuneration works for everyone else, if the union members want an annuity, they can negotiate for higher cash pay and then go purchase an annuity from an insurance company. I don’t want my kids to pay for labor that was performed today just so can pay artificially low taxes.

I'm fine with them fighting for one. However their incentive needs to include ensuring that the pension fund actually has enough money in it to cover the future payouts.

Teacher pay is highly variable. Teachers are usually paid above median for their local community.

I'm not sure either. I guess it's some sort of "both sides" going on. A bad police union leads to deaths, maimings and loss of freedom. I'm not sure a "bad" teachers union can match that level of malignancy.

Entrenched teachers' unions protect bad teachers. Bad teachers create disinterested kids, conditioned for a lifetime of following overbearing bureaucratic authority as "just the way things are". Kids stuck in a pointless system with no worthwhile authority figures are more likely to become bullies. And bullies get older and gain employment as bad cops.

This.

Also, kids stuck in pointless systems get bored and commit crimes.

New York City pays on the order of $30 million dollars a year in salary to teachers accused of misconduct who can't be in a classroom with children, but as per their contract cannot be fired.

The police budget of New York City is 10.9 billion dollars including 2.8 billion dollars for pensions.

The school budget is 24 billion. So $30 million is a drop in the bucket. My point was not really about the money. It was about the inability of the Department of Education to fire teachers who are deemed a threat to children. I can only imagine how hard it is to fire someone for simply being bad at their job.

Hell with saving the rich, the number of carve outs that benefit only the wealthy under the guise of protecting the environment should catch your ire instead.

instead of funding EVs and solar panels for those well off enough to pay for them we should be directing the same money to covering schools in solar panels and replacing petrol school buses.

just saying, there is outrage when it comes to government expenditures in every direction but people tend to only focus on what upsets them now.

(but to your point, public employee unions are just political slush funds in disguise and you will be bailing them all out soon)

Well, if your goal is to cover everything in solar, tax rebates to the rich cause the rich to pay 2/3 of the cost instead of none of the cost of your school example. So you end up with 3x the solar deployed for the same amount of government money.

Then again, solar is a productive asset, so maybe it’s still better for the government to retain it.

Solar panels, and EV's are pocket change to the property tax breaks given to people holding tens/hundreds of millions in property in the name of preservation.

I would love to have huge ranch on some of the most prime lakefront property in texas 15 mins from downtown Austin and pay a tiny fraction of what my neighbors do for a tiny fraction of the land.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tax-day-farms-owne...

I'm all for greespace preservation, but if someone is getting an exception for not developing their land, then it should be open to the public as green space.

edit: (and I should point out the property valuation of the dell ranch in that article is way out of wack with the fact that adjacent housing subdivisions are having their 1/4 acre lots valued in the 200k range for taxing purposes. So turning it into a subdivision would put the just the land value in excess of a billion $ for taxing purposes.)

I like this sentiment but just wanted to add that school buses are one of if not the most efficient vehicles on the road (obviously when you divide emissions by a full bus of people) so this is arguably not a good place for an environmental crusade.

CO2 per passenger or cargo mile is not what we're optimizing. We want CO2 reduction per dollar spent. Converting high usage vehicles is better for that.

The point of subsidies is to increase scale if spending for the industry. People with the disposable income to buy it are a multiplier of total demand. It also helps build up consumer facing business practices towards that end vs just effectively being a government contractor.

> With the amount of corruption being seen in police/teacher unions, wouldn’t that be an effective place to use limited federal resources?

Unions are like political institutions: almost everything you see about them that bothers you is actually legal.

That was my takeaway from the documentary on the McDonald's Monopoly scam. The FBI spent incredible resources (and they were proud of having a whole field office working on it for months right before 911) to arrest and charge a whole bunch of people who didn't even make any money off it. Then in the end, outside of the core couple guys the harshest sentences were probation, frequently plea bargins, made by people who were themselves borderline victims of the whole scam.

I do think the guy doing the ticket swapping should have been stopped, but there were a lot of ways to achieve that, which didn't involve spending tens of millions+ to save McDonalds from giving a couple million away to an insider. Heck just letting mcdonnalds handle the inquiry with their internal security would have been enough to stop it (if all it did was scare the guy from ever trying it again).

The McDonald's case put some thiefs in jail and hassled people who learned the cost of helping thieves. Thieves don't steal only from corporations on principle.

I think parent would accept that, were it applied equally to all.

The real victim there wasn't McDonalds, though, but all the people who spent additional money at McDonalds to play a rigged game.

Wrong incentives probably?

Gone are the days when good work alone was enough to get noticed and get appreciated. These days, everyone needs to be aggressive and market themselves, so everyone tries to do stuff that gives them maximum exposure with minimum risk.

Maybe it makes sense for law enforcement to get the attention of the mega rich than that of a struggling school teacher who makes 40K a year.

Not saying it is right, just that as a species, our priorities are completely out of whack.

Government biases may feel great when they produce the outcome you want, but by codifying the mechanisms of bias in the first place you are paving the way for it to swing the other direction as soon as someone new takes the reins of power.

What you want is for laws to treat everyone equally regardless of how much money is in their bank account at the time.

You also have to remember you are sending signals not just to the victims but to the criminals. Do you really want a society where the rich have a target painted on their backs because law enforcement will not protect them? You might not like the world of private law enforcement they will create to protect themselves, should the need arise.

Corruption in politics too. Of course, that's a larger issue. We need to get big money out of politics. Most other democracies do not allow the same level of campaign donations (especially mysterious ones like Super PACs). Also, lobbying as we know it has to end. There's no room for organizations to have that level of impact on actual laws. Politics should be like military service -- you do it to serve your fellow countrymen, not to get rich. If the law isn't for the benefit of the people, it shouldn't be written.

Problem is money is most useful to the unknown candidates. Get on the ballot as a major party and you have guaranteed 30% of the vote, and another 30% will research you even if they don't vote for you. By contrast if you are not one of the two major parties you get 5% at best that even serusouly research you, and only large quantities of money can convince more than that to look.

Other democracies actually have a solution to that too, the government provides financial support to the kind of candidates you describe. That kind of spending is not ideal, but if it means reducing corruption and getting candidates that support the people more than a few corporations then it seems like money well spent.

They have to decide who is serious about running and who is pretending to run to get that money...

Another well known UK conman/forgery 'mastermind', was John Drewe, who met and manipulated a struggling artist, John Myatt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drewe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De3S2kkGQow

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/18/magazine/a-20th-century-m...

>'His unorthodox formula of emulsion and K-Y Jelly was fast-drying, allowing him to paint quickly, if obsessively. "I took no trouble technically," he says. "There was a negligence to everything I did."

Even so, his pictures were passing as genuine and selling for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was enjoying a financial success he could never have approached by painting Myatts. Perhaps no other forger of his or any other time has worked so prodigiously and in so many styles...'

Thanks just watched the provided youtube video. Interesting case. Less greedy and it would have worked perfectly. As someone with 0 idea about the art world it was really interesting to see how well an approach of "fake the history by altering the archives" + medium skill level painting worked. The lady that flew in from France basically already told them "these are pretty bad forgeries" and got the reply "yeah but the documents are legit" and had to go through all kinds of trouble to prove the documents are fake.

In my worldview these scams only worked with perfect and amazing forgeries that require some sort of high tech color-analysis and canvas analysis to uncover...alas just faking the chain of trust worked quite well.

Yeah, that lady from France was an expert who truly studied the art itself.

The opening words of Eric Hebborn in the follow on video are illuminating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKbbajb5pE

Some (most?) of his works are probably hanging in museums and collections, indistinguishable from the genuine thing.

If this is interesting to you, Orson Welles has an utterly fascinating kind-of-documentary (it's a bit genre defying) about art forgery, named "F for Fake".

It's a very strange movie, but it's worth a watch: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_for_Fake

I recommend also watching “Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery” documentary about Wolfgang Beltracchi, the infamous art forger. He tricked the international art world for almost 40 years, made millions selling forgeries, and went to prison for it. He even created paintings by famous artists that didn’t exist and convinced historians that they were newly discovered paintings. Fascinating stuff.

Also, “There Are No Fakes”. It's about a bunch of fake Norval Morrisseau paintings and how one was sold to the drummer for Barenaked Ladies. It's an interesting story with some colorful characters.

F for Fake is on YT: https://youtu.be/gIVgUjj6RxU

I'd also recommend Sour Grapes, which is about the vintage wine market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(2016_film)

Wow, something from Traverse City on Hacker News.

Had no idea there was that kind of thing happening around here.

$299K goes a long way in TC ;-)

Forgery pays well judging from that aerial shot of the property.

HN goes to the most remote corners of the Universe to bring us pertinent information!

We have a 4 bedroom house just south of TC for 157k, so 300 would get you a small lakefront home or a very nice house.

I'm jealous that you get to live up there! I summered up there as a kid (on Long Lake) and my uncle and aunt raised my cousins there in the 80's and 90's. We try to go up for a week or so every summer. COVID is putting a damper on this one.

My wife and I would move in a heartbeat, but for the kind of IT work I do the prospects seemed very limited (outside of Munson). I'm not ready to try to bootstrap independent contracting all over again. The property taxes seen nightmarish, though. The house on Long Lake is easily 3X what a similarly-valued house in my part of Ohio would be.

My aunt and uncle lived on Cherry Bend, not too far from where this went down!

Definitely beautiful here.

I work in a hybrid IT - Programming role at a Food company here. I know a few people in the IT community locally but outside of Munson and Hagerty there's not many positions open.

I'm in Grawn, outside of the city limits, so the property tax isn't too bad.

Part of me is fine with convincing art forgeries. It's like calling a PDF copy of a book a "forgery". Well, you got the same information out of it, didn't you? If the forgery imparted the same emotion and it's gonna last longer than the original, isn't that a bonus? :)

Those are called reproductions and are legal.

Sometimes legal, if they've gone out of copyright. But nevertheless, this is an important distinction: The reason the reproductions were forgeries is because of the deception involved.

Wouldn't this technically fall under copyright infringement? If there were any copyright holders (I assume Da Vinci and Van Gogh's expired a long time ago)... Since they copy someone else's stuff and claim it as the real thing, making money from their sale.

No, it's fraud. You can make and sell the Mona Lisa all day long as long as you're not trying to pass it off as the Mona Lisa by da Vinci.

Nope.

Reproductions are fine, so long as they are out of copyright or if you have permission of the copyright holder. (I don't usually give permission for folks to copy my paintings, but almost always give permission to copy my photos, for example).

Copyright itself is different, though: It often means you can't make money off of copyrighted work, but it can just as easily mean that you can't post a reproduction or fan art on social media - but lots of things are out of copyright.

Selling a reproduction and passing it off as the original is fraud, and since there is fraud involved, it makes a reproduction a forgery. In general, you use different materials to make a reproduction than you do a forgery as well: A good reproduction might use some materials that folks used in the past, but often mixes it with modern materials. A forger might use things that were never used to trick the tests the experts used and use techniques to make the painting age faster.

You could argue that the forger actually is the better craftsman with these distinctions: It is too bad that there is so much deceit involved. I'd buy an honest "forgery" that tricks the experts, but would be angry if someone passes it off as an original.

No: it's not like calling a PDF copy of book a "forgery". A forgery is created with intent to deceive. A PDF copy of a book doesn't seek to convince anyone it is an actual book.

People have reasons to buy art other than to treat it is a decoration. For some, it is about the feeling of a direct connection to the artist. For others, it's about owning something that's unique, or more prosaically as a store of value.

I think your book analogy would be much more accurate if the hypothetical forger were to print and bind their own hard copy of the book, and then pass it off as an original printing.

Plenty of people are perfectly fine with buying replications of artwork, books, etc., when they know this is the case. Our human nature to place a much higher value on original items is probably more of an emotional response than a logical one.

Related: I just watched "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" starring Melissa McCarthy which was entertaining and informative: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4595882/

Interesting career, forgery. But more interesting is the people that buy them.

In particularly the work of Ralston Crawford, which looks uncannily like computer generated drawings. A novelty at the time (1970's?) I suppose, but very ordinary today. Why would anyone value that now? You can make it with Paint or something in minutes.

Probably paying off student debt from an MFA.

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