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In selling a work, the reputable dealer is, in effect, staking his reputation on his belief that the work is authentic. But the client can seek as many opinions as he wants, and if still not satisfied, he can send his purchase back. The auction houses, on the other hand, while doing their knowledgeable best to avoid selling fakes, offer no guarantee. "Messrs. Sotheby's make no warranty whatever," says Sotheby's conditions of sale. The nearest they come to guaranteeing a work is to use a time-honored code. Sample: a painting that the catalogue declares is by "Peter Paul Rubens" is considered to be genuine. A "P. P. Rubens" is probably a Rubens; a plain "Rubens" is a maybe, while a "School of Rubens" may be anything at all.
Caveat Emptor. Essentially, the ruling force in any economic field is the law of supply and demand, but taste brings a vast imponderable into the art market. It is the public taste that keeps the price of the impressionists going up and up. It was taste that caused one man, at the beginning of the century, to pay 800,000 gold francs (about $1,000,000 in purchasing power today) for a Millet that would not fetch more than $20,000 today. Taste dictated that, in 1890, London's National Gallery should pay £1,312 for a Tintoretto, while paying eight times as much for Sir Edwin Landseer's postcardy Monarch of the Glen. Most U.S. artists are currently going up; but Thomas Benton, John Curry and Grant Wood are going down. Taste lavished riches upon Gainsborough and Turner, turned its back on them, is now restoring them to favor.
But beyond supply and demand and the dictates of taste, there has crept into the current art market a get-rich-quick psychology never known before. As far as the old masters are concerned, Duveen's credo still holds true: "When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap." But for an unwholesomely large slice of the rest of the market, the only fitting motto is: "Let the buyer beware." In a wry bit of hyperbole, John Walker, director of Washington's National Gallery, points out the fallacy of regarding purely as investment the ineffable delights of art. If the 1653 purchase price of Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (an estimated $7,800) had been invested at compound interest of 4% annually, notes Walker, the principal would now amount to about $1,020,000,000 more than the Metropolitan paid for it last week.