Fake Art Auctions on Luxury Cruises

Park West sued by customers
Plaintiffs demand refunds for “fake” works as gallery dismisses “smear campaign”

Note: This is a developing story and we check for more indepth news about this scandal. (February 7th 2009, this is an important story because potentially the market could get flooded with fake art prints and etchings in the near future and for years to come.)

(Source The Art Newspaper)
MICHIGAN. Park West Gallery, which says it sells 300,000 works annually and earns more than $300m in annual art sales revenue, including through auctions on 85 cruise ships, has been sued by ten customers seeking refunds.
According to the complaint, filed in state court in Oakland County, Michigan, on 23 December, the gallery has refused to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchase prices allegedly collectively paid by the plaintiffs for works by Dalí, Rembrandt and others. The art “was later found by experts to either be fake or have forged signatures, or to be heavily overpriced and misrepresented as bargains and investments”, the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Kaufman Payton & Chapa of Farmington Hills, Michigan, said in a statement on 8 January.
Park West, which is based in Southfield, Michigan, and is headed by Albert Scaglione, dismisses the allegations as false and malicious, and says that the suit is meritless.

“Over the past 40 years, Park West Gallery has served more than 1.2 million satisfied customers,” the gallery said in a statement on 9 January. “We stand behind the authenticity of everything we sell.” The gallery said the lawsuit was “organised to advance the business interests” of an organisation, Fine Art Registry, which Park West sued for defamation in Florida and Michigan in April 2008, citing material on the FAR website that is critical of the gallery. FAR’s assertions are “baseless,” says Rodger Young, the gallery’s lawyer in Southfield, Michigan.
...
In the Michigan case, the ten plaintiffs allege that they paid amounts ranging from $7,000 to over $400,000 to Park West to buy one or more works represented to be by Goya, Marc Chagall, Dürer, Tomasz Rut and other artists, purportedly including etchings by Rembrandt and lithographs by Salvador Dalí. The transactions included purchases at cruise ship auctions and at Park West’s Michigan gallery, the allegations say. The plaintiffs say that they received certificates of authenticity and in a number of cases appraisals, and were also told in a number of cases that the art would go up in value over time. Instead, the complaint alleges, much of it is “worthless”, purportedly including in one case “images removed from an art magazine” and in other cases “digital prints which were nothing more than glorified posters”. The complaint alleges that the plaintiffs are not sophisticated art buyers, and relied on the representations the gallery made to them.

Divine Comedy? Divine Tragedy? Or Divine Farce?
The Great Park West Dali Half Million Dollar Swindle. A Short Summary.

A short summary of a full length documentary in which experts examine a set of Salvador Dali Divine Comedy prints, sold by Park West to two London based lawyers, for over half a million dollars. Examination of the prints show them to be genuine Dali woodblock prints BUT each with a FORGED Dali signature. The prints without the signatures would be worth about $10,000. The prints with genuine Dali signatures would be worth $30-50,000. The prints as they are, with forged signatures, are worth nothing. The video shows how Park West and Royal Caribbean International swindled Sharon Day and Julian Howard out of over half a million dollars. But the story is not over.


Park West Gallery under fire in lawsuit