Provenance - Laney Salisbury, Ali Sujo

The true story of one of the most elaborate and wide-spread cons in the history of art forgery.

Main characters:
John Drewe: professor, physicist with a "pencil-thin moustache and gray-blue-eyes". A man of many guises. He is often seen in London riding in a "chauffeured Bentley and lunching at the most exclusive restaurants with members of the art world's aristocracy. It was said that it had amassed an extensive art collection and lived extremely well." During the next chapters his true-self is revealed: a pathological liar who is inventing stories about his knowledge related to guns and his experience in MI5; an abusive husband who wants to scare his wife and take away the kids.
John Myatt: "At 41, Myatt felt his life was over. A failed songwriter, portraitist, and landscape painter, he'd been reduced to part-time work teaching children how to draw, and now he was a failed husband too." After placing an add in a satirical magazine offering "genuine fakes", he gets a call from John Drewe.

The two authors write about the art world in a way that is easy to understand for the everyday reader. They also highlight a notable shift in the art world from a focus on artistic expression and cultural value toward a more business-oriented model.
Terms encountered:
- catalogue raisonné: created as a scholarly record of an artist’s complete body of work, now it is more of a tool for authentication, market control, and prestige.
- droit moral: the legal rights of artists to protect the personal and reputational integrity of their work. In France, it is a legally binding concept that allows artists to object to alterations, misattributions, or uses of their work that they feel distort their original vision—even after the work has been sold.

Quotes:
"It was said that Sotheby's was filled with dealers fobbing themselves off as gentleman while Christie's was a bastion of gentleman who desperately wanted to be dealers."
"Unlike the Mafia, the art world glitters."
"If a drawing is a good one, does it have an intrinsic worth even if it is not by the artist it purports to be by? (...) If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine?"