What do you think is the biggest art scandal in the past century?

Seems unethical and a conflict of interest. Helping to blow up the art world bubble. At one point, it's going to pop.

A Hack Has Revealed What Many Long Suspected: The Owners of Auction Houses Are Also Some of Their Best Customers

A former auctioneer has pleaded guilty to selling fake Jean Michel-Basquiat paintings, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

Michael Barzman, 45, of North Hollywood, California, was charged with making false statements to the FBI about the origin of the paintings, which were taken from the Orlando Museum of Art last year.

In 2012, Barzman and a second man, known as "J.F.," began making the counterfeit artworks and selling them on eBay and through Barzman's auction business.

"[Barzman] and J.F. agreed to split the money that they made from selling the Fraudulent Paintings," the DOJ said. "J.F. and [Barzman] created approximately 20-30 artworks by using various art materials to create colorful images on cardboard."

Barzman further admitted that he lied about where the paintings came from, and said he found them in a well-known screenwriter's storage unit, the DOJ said.

The fake artwork Barzman sold passed through the art industry and made its way to an exhibit in the Orlando Museum of Art.

Installations by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan are famously provocative, but his signature work — a banana taped to a wall — fell prey to a basic impulse: the hunger it provoked in a South Korean college student.

The art in question, Comedian, is a (frequently replaced) duct-taped banana that is meant to evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy to the fruit's status as an emblem of global trade.

It spoke to Noh Huyn-soo in simpler terms, reminding him that he had skipped breakfast that morning. So as his visit to Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art stretched past noon late last week, Noh seized the yellow fruit and ate it, ignoring the alarmed cry of a museum staffer.

It took Noh around 1 minute to yank the banana and eat it. When he was done, he reattached the peel to its spot on the wall.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will expand its efforts to identify looted items in its vast collection and prevent the acquisition of antiquities that have been obtained abroad illegally, the museum’s director announced.

The initiative follows pressure from law enforcement in New York, the art community and the international press, which have shined a spotlight on the museum’s failure to police its collection for looted works.

Max Hollein, the director of the Met, told Gothamist the museum plans to hire four people tasked with researching the provenance of artworks, including a new manager of provenance research, who would help the institution respond to evidence.

“We want to make sure that we can act on it and react on it swiftly and diligently,” said Hollein, who first announced the initiative in an article titled “Reflections on The Met Collection and Cultural Property,” which was posted on the museum’s website.

A former auctioneer has pleaded guilty to selling fake Jean Michel-Basquiat paintings, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

Palm Beach art dealer Daniel Elie Bouaziz has been sentenced to 27 months in federal prison, followed by three years’ probation, for a money laundering scheme to sell counterfeit contemporary artworks, including pieces purportedly by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Banksy

The wealthy have taken the art market and turned it into the art racket and we are left holding the bag. The only ones left in the cold are artists who don't get paid much in the first sale and get nothing from the secondary market where the real money is to be made.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Friday that it had agreed to return 16 major Khmer era artworks to Cambodia and Thailand. The works are associated with Douglas A.J. Latchford, a Met donor and prolific dealer who was indicted as an illegal trafficker of ancient artifacts shortly before his death in 2020.

In recent years, the Met has come under pressure from the Cambodian government, which said dozens of items in the museum’s collections had been taken from the country illicitly from the 1970s onward during Cambodia’s decades of civil war and violent turmoil.

Among the artworks being handed back — 14 to Cambodia and two to Thailand — are important pieces that the museum has described as being among the finest surviving examples of sculptures from the Angkor period. Some of them are still on view at the Met, and will remain on view, the museum said, before their eventual return to the countries of origin. The museum said the wall text is being adjusted to note the objects’ repatriation.