On a number of occasions over the last several years, I've had the privilege of convincing a friend or acquaintance
not to buy something on eBay. Something that seemed like an incredible bargain, something too good to ignore and let go.
Today, I got an email from a friend who (unbeknownst to me) has been shopping on eBay for paintings by listed artists. She's bought a few already, and the pictures she showed me looked okay. More importantly, none of them cost her more than a few hundred dollars.
This one, however, was different, which was why she emailed for advice. She was about to pay $2,500 for a watercolor that is supposed to have been done by the famous abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann.
Here is
the auction.
I told her to run, not walk, away from the sale. Here's why:
1. The auction was posted on the eBay Philippines website, even though the seller is supposed to be in the United States. A shopper searching for art eBay.com website will find the listing, but the auction itself is not hosted on eBay.com, but rather on eBay.ph. This is, in itself, suspicious. There's no reason to target the Philippines art market with this painting. It makes you wonder about the true location of the seller, and why he would be hiding his auction on this alternative eBay site instead of the main site.
2. My friend was the second-highest bidder on the auction. The seller emailed her shortly after the auction ended and told her the high bidder had dropped out, and she could purchase it for her high bid. This is very suspicious, and makes it seem as if the high bidder and the seller were in collusion, and the high bidder's mission was simply to find out the maximum amount my friend was willing to pay.
3. There is very little information about the painting. It was purchased from an "outdoor estate sale," which sounds a lot like a yard sale or flea market to me. No serious estate is sold outside. It is supposed to have been done in watercolor, but it looks more like gouache or some other thicker paint. And the seller doesn't even say what it was painted on. Paper?
4. Although the seller mentions the artist Hans Hoffmann in his description, he never makes any guarantees. He merely says it is "signed Hans Hofmann." He has no information indicating that the painting can be inspected and returned, or that he is a legitimate licensed dealer. To the seller's credit, he does have a good eBay feedback record, but this is not necessarily an indication that everything he sells is real. If my friend had purchased this piece from him without being the high bidder on the auction, for instance, she wouldn't have been allowed to leave feedback, since eBay would not have known she was the buyer.
5. The seller spells the artist's name two different ways in the auction, "Hans Hoffmann" (the name of a different artist from the 16th Century), and "Hans Hofmann" (the name of the 20th Century modernists whose work the painting resembles). This could be merely carelessness, it could be part of a ploy to seem unsophisticated, or it could be a clever way to later claim he didn't mean it was by the Hans Hofmann people think painted it. In any event, it's yet another red flag.
6. The price is way too low. If this painting were real, it would sell for far more. If the seller thought it was real, he would try to get it authenticated so he could cash in. It doesn't make any sense for him to sell it for so little if he thinks it really may have been done by Hofmann.
7. The seller is selling other paintings by "listed artists" in the same way, with very little information and no guarantees. How is he finding all these great paintings at estate sales and why is he selling them for so much less than market value? Look, for instance, at this "Salvador Dali" drawing he sold recently:
http://www.ebay.ph/viItem?ItemId=74148062148. I'm no expert on Hofmann, but the piece itself looks a bit amateurish. He did do some paintings that looked similar to this in the early 60s, but this is a style that is easy to copy, and a lot of other artists painted things like this. This is one of the problems with buying art in the modern era - it's all so easily copied.
I think I've talked my friend out of proceeding with this purchase, but she was really excited about it, and probably would have gone through with it if she hadn't contacted me. I should add that this person is not a "sucker." She's well-educated, intelligent, savvy, and has some knowledge of art. Like a lot of people on eBay, she was simply mesmerized by the idea of buying something that seemed like an unbelieveable bargain. The problem, though, is that most of the time, unbelievable bargains in the eBay art market are unbelievable for a reason - they shouldn't be believed.
Sadly, this stuff happens all the time. A Danish art dealer tracks fakes sold on eBay every day on his blog at
http://artfakes.dk.
Please, be careful out there.
