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.

Florida Will Soon Be a “Constitutional-Carry” State.

Should I and My Fellow Floridians Be Worried? 

Last month, Florida passed House Bill 543, which eliminated the requirement for Floridians to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

RF, my brother-in-law, who is not a DeSantis fan, was not happy about it. “Did you hear what your boy just did?” he asked me.

I hadn’t. He told me.

“That’s scary,” I admitted. I imagined all hell breaking loose when it takes effect on July 2, with people shooting one another in malls, on supermarket checkout lines, in movie theaters, and up and down the entirety of I-95.

Since I had recently done a bit of research on the general effect of gun control laws and found only the weakest evidence that they reduced injuries and deaths, I thought I’d do another, more specific, search. I wanted to find out if the violence increases when citizens are allowed to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s not easy to study the issue. Like just about everything else today, gun control has become so politicized that the stuff you find when you go scouting – reports, and anecdotal evidence, and summaries of studies – is almost always biased.

One way this happens is with the terminology. In the legal literature, a distinction is made between “shall-issue” states and “may-issue” states. (Shall-issue states are those that allow citizens to carry without permits.) In the political literature, “shall-issue” laws are called “constitutional-carry” (versus “no-permit”). And other sources equate “may-issue” with “right-to-carry.”

Another problem is that some studies are countrywide and statewide, but gun control regulations often vary by smaller jurisdictions (like counties).

But the biggest problem is that there have been so many studies on the subject, from many different perspectives and using different metrics. On top of that, the results of those studies are often misinterpreted.

For example, the idea that “more guns = less violence” originated from a study published in 1997 that compared gun violence to permit-less concealed-carry regulations from 1977 to 1992. The study concluded that “states implementing shall-issue laws saw significant decreases in rates of violent crime, murder, rape, and assault.”

Apparently, this finding did not sit well with gun control advocates, who raised funding for several more studies that found the opposite result: States that legalized permit-less concealed-carry protocols saw increases in gun assaults by 11% to 15%.

Today, those studies are quoted by gun control advocates. But when I looked at them, I noticed the same “trick” you see in studies published by the medical-industrial complex. They quote differences in relative terms, which is misleading. In the case of those 11% to 15% increases, the actual numbers were something like 5.6 assaults for every 100,000 people, versus 4.9 assaults. That sort of difference is statistically meaningless.

More recently, two meta-studies were done of most of the previous studies – one by the National Research Council and one by the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. They both came to the same conclusion: If there is a difference between jurisdictions that have shall-carry versus will-carry regulations, it is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

That made me feel better. And here’s a second thing that eased my mind: In becoming a shall-carry state, Florida will not be some rogue outlier. It turns out that 25 other states already have shall-carry regulations.

So where does that leave me?

I’m not going to worry about getting caught in a gun fight every time I walk into a 7-Eleven. But I need to remember that anyone anywhere might be packing.

As for gun control regulation? I’m in favor of it. Notwithstanding the data, which I do believe, I’d like to see more, not fewer, requirements. I like the child-protection requirements. I like the cool-down provisions. I also like required gun safety training.

I respect the Second Amendment. Americans have a right to carry guns. But gun control doesn’t negate that right. People also have a right to start businesses, drive cars, operate heavy machinery, and cut hair. And all of those activities require permits and training. (Interesting: In Florida today, it takes 1,200 hours of training to obtain a license to cut hair, 500 hours of training to obtain a massage therapist license, and 240 hours of training to become a licensed manicurist.)

And yes, the bad guys will be able to buy guns without permits and even guns without serial numbers. That won’t prevent the good guys from having guns, too. Everyone will have guns. But if the bad guys get caught carrying illegally, they can be prosecuted. And if they get caught using their guns to commit crimes, they’ll get extra years attached to their sentences.