Why Salvador Dalí Is the Most Counterfeited Artist in the World

In the early 1980s, soon after my first retirement, I got into the art business, buying a half-interest in an art gallery in Boca Raton. I met lots of interesting characters through this relationship – none more interesting than B, an art broker and dealer, who, among other credentials, claimed to have had some sort of exclusive deal with Salvador Dalí to sell the master’s limited edition prints and lithographs during the prior decade.

B was not an aesthete. Nor a student of art history. He didn’t speak like an art critic. Nor did he dress like one (whatever that means). Instead, like so many art dealers and brokers I have met, B struck me as a used car salesman that had figured out he could make more money and work less energetically by cultivating a customer base of a few dozen wealthy buyers and selling them more art than they could ever hope to hang in their lifetimes.

I was (still am) a big fan of Dalí. I believed then that he was a genius, and I still do. But he ruined his reputation as one of the greatest modern artists by developing an addiction to the rock and roll lifestyle, which diminished his production of oil paintings and diminished, too, the quality of everything he did.

During the 1960s, he was developing a reputation as an artistic sellout when he began to pay for his expensive and degenerate lifestyle by selling quickly executed, half-assed paintings, gouaches, and drawings. During the 1970s, he began producing signed lithographs and prints, which, he figured, could bring in more money faster than creating original pieces, however shabby.

And he was right about that. Rather than spending, say, a month on an original oil that might sell for $50,000, he could spend a day making a limited-edition lithograph of 500 pieces and another day signing them, and then sell each for $1,000.

B was one of the brokers he sold those pieces to. “In the beginning, Dalí was satisfied with editions of 200 or 300 or 500,” B told me. “But when he realized he could make much more with editions of 500, 1,500, or 2,500 – by investing only the additional time it took to sign the prints – well, he couldn’t resist the temptation.

“Larger editions were fine with me. He could make more money. And so could I. So, he’d do a print, and I’d pay him for it and then pay the printmaker to have a bunch made. I was out ten or twenty thousand dollars, but that was okay. There was a strong market for his prints. I’d make my profit after I got them signed.

“The problem was, his partying was getting crazy. When I’d visit him to get him to sign the prints, he’d be gone. For days. Sometimes for weeks! So, I told him, ‘Enough is enough!’ I told him that, from then on, he had to sign the blank paper first. He’d sign the blanks. I’d pay him. Then I’d take them to the printer. It was a perfect solution.”

Dalí liked it, too. And he realized that B was not the only dealer that would pay him for signed blanks. So, in the 1960s, he began making similar deals with other dealers. And before long, he was signing thousands of blanks.

With aides at each elbow, one shoving the paper in front of Dalí and the other pulling the signed sheet onto another stack, there was a rumor that he once signed 1,800 sheets an hour for $72,000.

Many of these signed sheets were sold off to dealers who had no connection with Dalí, but went ahead and had the multiples printed themselves. This then led to some crooked dealers producing blank sheets with forged signatures on them.

All told, according to one expert, Dalí signed 40,000 to 60,000 blank sheets that made their way into the market. And that prompted tens of thousands more forgeries to satisfy the public’s demand for authentic Dalís.

By the time I met B, these stories were already out there, and the market for Dalí multiples had become very weak. Pieces that once sold for $10,000 were selling for $1,000. Larger edition pieces that once sold for $1,500 were selling for $150.

You can read more about all of this here.

And here.

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The Digital Dollar Is Getting Nearer

The federal government’s plans to replace the paper dollar with a digital one continues apace. Recently, Biden and his appointees have been talking up the CBDC (central bank digital currency).

As I predicted, they are touting it as something that will reduce crime, reduce tax cheating, and make business transactions safer and easier. But some states, like Florida, are pushing back. Click here for Ron DeSantis, in Taki’s Magazine, talking about Florida’s new legislation to preserve the paper dollar.

 

Bad Science 

Don’t spend too much time reading this. I’m recommending it as an example of how easy it is for scientists, presumably well-intentioned scientists, to screw up “scientific” studies.

We have to be very careful about taking any scientific “fact” derived from a single test or study as gospel. In fact, we would be wiser to assume the conclusion is invalid until we’ve looked at a half-dozen related studies with differing conclusions.

Click here.

 

Don’t You Touch My Cell Phone! 

I don’t know if this is an official “thing” yet, but reports are surfacing about young people getting very upset when they are told to desist from using their iPhones. Some have suggested it’s a post-lockdown effect of spending two years with phones 24/7. Others are arguing that it’s bad parenting.

Here’s one example.

 

“I Want You to Call Me Loretta!” 


Fifty years ago, I saw this Monty Python skit and thought it was hysterical and absurd.

It’s still very funny, but not quite so absurd. Click here.

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Making America Great, the Peter Thiel Way

I knew very little about Peter Thiel. I knew he was one of the founders of PayPal. I knew he took some of that money and invested it in a new startup called Facebook, among others (LinkedIn, SpaceX, etc.).

I didn’t know he was gay. I didn’t know he was Republican. And I didn’t know he was reviled in Silicon Valley.

Click here for an interesting interview with him from Bari Weiss.

 

AI vs. Copywriters 

A colleague recently took up the subject of how AI is going to affect advertising writers. He fed some commands into Chat-GPT, seeking to get strong headlines for a particular financial topic. The machine spit out a dozen titles in no time flat. They were all decent, he admitted. Some were stronger than others, but none was exceptionally strong.

I looked at his examples and agreed with him. None of the headlines generated were amazing. But most of them were, IMHO, solid. Solid to good. They were B’s, representing probably 90% of what you would get from most professional copywriters, including top B2B copywriters.

I think they were in the B range because the algorithms Chat-GPT uses are still based on simplistic instructions. The best headlines take a level of imagination that Chat-GPT is not able to achieve… right now.

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Pop-Up Classical Music Performances 

DF, my elder sister, sent an issue of The Marginalia, where Maria Popova included this link to a pop-up performance of Beethoven’s final symphony. Click here.

I’ve covered a few of these before. I especially like it when they are orchestrated in a way that really surprises the audience.

Click here for a link to more of them, with a bit of history on how they came about.

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From JC, re self-defense for daughters (and sisters and mothers): 

“I know you have a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I also know that you had your boys learn it when they were young. I have a nine-year-old daughter. If you had a daughter, what martial art or self-defense system would you recommend?”

My Response: If I had a daughter, I’d want her to become proficient in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. First, because it’s a great and improving sport. Second, because it is an extremely efficient way to be in top shape. And third, because it is the only self-defense system that makes any sense for girls and women.

It’s more effective for women than any other form of grappling and any form of striking, including boxing, kickboxing, Mui Thai, etc. Regardless of how effective a woman becomes in those other martial arts, she will have little chance of defending herself against a larger, stronger man. But Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was created specifically to enable smaller weaker fighters to defeat larger stronger ones by using leverage and technique.

I’m not saying that a woman that is a black belt in BJJ can defeat all men that don’t know BJJ. I’m saying that if she is really good at it, she has a chance – a small chance, but a real chance – against an aggressive and determined male attacker.

To give you an idea of the disadvantage women have in fighting, take a look at this clip. The woman is a brown belt (second-highest level). The man is a blue belt (second-lowest level). She does well in this exchange. But if it was an all-out fight with striking, it’s highly unlikely she would survive.

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