An engrossing read about brazen, artful scams.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Amore is privy to more information on the subject of forgeries than the average art collector or dealer, and he shares a number of those stories in this engrossing account... a bracing and highly informative assessment of a very real problem, sure to resonate with art fans and curators alike.” —Publisher's Weekly
“A riveting, fast-moving account of shameless fraudsters who wreak havoc on the art world. A must read!” —Brian T. Kelly, former Assistant United States Attorney
“The Art of the Con is must reading for any true-crime fan. Brazen museum thefts get all the headlines, but Anthony M. Amore makes it clear that the real money in art crime is to be made from forgeries, fakes, online auctions, laser printers and other 21st-century technologies. And Amore's diverse, colorful crew of art-gallery grifters and scammers have been reaping the kind of ill-gotten gains that old-school criminals could only dream of. Highly recommended!” —Howie Carr, New York Times bestselling author of THE BROTHERS BULGER and HITMAN
“What is most fascinating about The Art of the Con is that you haven't heard these stories before. The tales of these unknown scams are woven into a narrative that reads like a thriller. The attention to detail takes the reader inside the investigations and allows them to play armchair detective. Read this book!” —Jon Leiberman, radio and television host and author of WHITEY ON TRIAL: SECRETS, CORRUPTION, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
“It takes a lot to pull off an art world con. But it might take even more to tell the unvarnished story behind those swindles, and there's no doubt that Anthony Amore has done it in this definitive page-turner. The Art of the Con is wonderfully investigated-and highly paced-and provides a jaw-hitting-the-floor examination of art world fraud.” —Ulrich Boser, author of THE GARDNER HEIST: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST UNSOLVED ART THEFT
“Not only is The Art of the Con a wild ride through a rogue's gallery of colorful art forgers, entertainingly written by a master of prose. It is that. But it's also an object lesson in how art is made, what makes art valuable, and how some of the smartest minds in the business could be suckered by deals that ultimately proved just too good to be true.” —Michael Blanding, author of THE MAP THIEF: THE GRIPPING STORY OF AN ESTEEMED RARE-MAP DEALER WHO MADE MILLIONS STEALING PRICELESS MAPS
“A fascinating account of some of the biggest scams that have taken place in the art world over the last century” —ArtNet News
2015-04-02
The big business of art fraud. Former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving once declared that 40 percent of art in museums is fake. The FBI has a special, highly trained Art Crime Team, and the London-based Art Loss Register has compiled a database of nearly 200,000 stolen artworks. Amore (co-author: Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists, 2011, etc.), head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, offers riveting profiles of ingenious con men and women who have duped gallery owners, collectors, museum officials, and appraisers to pass off forged paintings as originals by the most famous artists in the world. Among them are Pei-Shen Qian, a talented Chinese immigrant in need of money who produced abstract expressionist paintings complete with the signatures of Pollack, Rothko, and de Kooning; and the brilliant Wolfgang Beltracchi, who claimed that he "channeled" the spirits of the artists whose works he imitated. Forgers, Amore notes, are usually "middle-aged men frustrated by their own failures as artists (or perhaps the failure of the art world to recognize their greatness)." They tend to produce impressionist or abstract expressionist paintings since they are easier to make than old masters; and they work in oils, not the more delicate watercolors. To sell forgeries, they must come up with each work's provenance, or record of ownership, producing documents that themselves are fake. Art scams require buyers: one con man who auctioned worthless paintings on eBay believed that buyers were motivated by "optimistic self-delusion" that "they have found something good." That self-delusion might even explain why the head of New York's famed Knoedler Gallery was taken in by forgers: probably, writes the author, "she was intoxicated by the prospect of being part of the unleashing of a heretofore unknown collection on the world." An engrossing read about brazen, artful scams.
