Art Forgery Quotes

If I were to sign it now, I'd be committing forgery. I'd be putting my 1943 signature on a canvas painted in 1922.

I threw [Picasso's] drawing on the floor and in doing so, threw away about £50m.

I'm the guy who happened to be home the night Kat came to steal a Monet."- Hale

People are always asking me to sign my old canvases. It's ridiculous!

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market.

I thought, 'A biennial needs artists. I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world.' So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world. I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work.

I counterfeited Mark Kostabi's artworks. During the eighties, Mark didn't paint his own paintings. Instead, he had other artists painting them, and he just added his signature. So what I did was to use some of the same painters, and signed his name myself.

You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.

A bad forgery's the ultimate insult.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

Forgers can start with the same photographic images Warhol did, and sometimes knock off silkscreens only an expert can distinguish from the originals.

Clever people can copy the handwriting of an artist - it's like forging a person's signature.

Salvador Dali, lying on his deathbed in a stupor, is said to have been fed thousands of sheets of blank paper to sign for fake lithographs.

In one way or another, I always marked my pictures. But there were times when I put my signature on the back of the canvas. All my works from the cubist period, until about 1914, have my name and the date on the back side of the stretcher. I know someone spread the story that in Céret, Braque and I decided not to sign our pictures anymore. But that's just a legend!

Modern art, in particular, seems especially vulnerable to fraud. Its abstractions are sometimes difficult to understand or grasp, and a modern painting is often loved less because of its intrinsic quality - its beauty, as conventionally understood - than because of the identity of the painter, its mark of social status.

An uninspiring canvas becomes a glamorous masterpiece when it is reattributed to a better-known artist.

Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.

I probably have 15 to 20 Dalis in the store. The secret to buying Dali - never buy one made after 1970.

An art thief is a man who takes pictures.

We live in a world of copies and we're fascinated when we encounter the originals (in a museum, for instance).

A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.

If you forge a Carl Andre, it's just another Carl Andre. It's not like a Vermeer.