Scamsky Inc. (Heidi Brown/Forbes) (thanks, MK). When it comes to the "experts" who authenticate olde works:
Experts working privately can charge up to $100,000 or 5% to 10% of a painting's selling price. One expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, says a Russian dealer planning to sell a fake Malevich offered her $50,000 to authenticate it.
Even experts who've made "mistakes" usually stay in the fold. Andrei Nakov sued the Geneva Tribune in the early 1990s for its coverage of a scandal involving his certification of 1,500 pastels and drawings by Malevich contemporary Mikhail Larionov. Chicago's McCrone Research Institute, which did chemical analysis, and a Swiss court both concluded many were fake, but Nakov won the suit and stands by his authentication. He's working on a translation of his Malevich catalogue raisonne. Art world insiders question the inclusion of some works, but Nakov says his analysis is thorough and well documented.
What Forbes mentions is only the visible part of the iceberg. Check the IZO Fakes category (IZO) for some other bits-and-pieces. There are people today, I know some of them, running substantial faking operations, abetted by auction houses, dealers and collectors. Unfortunately most of the fakes encountered cannot be publicly challenged or documented as such because of libel laws, not to mention threats of violence. The fakers operate with effective impunity and have huge sums to gain and nothing to lose except the cost of some oil, canvas and an unscrupulous artist's time.
The upcoming Rodchenkova-Popova show at the Tate will perhaps give the fakers another chance to add provenance to their warez. The museums don't care too much, neither do the dealers. Triumph Gallery's Emelyan Zakharov's buck-passing is characteristic, I fear, of dealer attitudes in general: "We will sell a work as long as it's had exhibits in two museums." In fact, a museum exhibition should be understood as adding precisely zero credence to a work, ditto authentication by an artist's relative, a certificate from some of the laboratories and all the other plausibility-enhancers. If you are thinking of buying an expensive painting, here's some advice I wrote in 2006 (IZO).