Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Artist Wins $2.5M After Being Sued Over Painting That Wasn't His" video.

Yes, although if he wasn't a famous artist with that kind of money, the gallery wouldn't have bothered, so there's that.
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Yes, although when you've got a judge giving you legal advice about your case, that should be an incredibly strong sign that you're wasting everybody's time and should just do as suggested. I think at that point, they might have gotten off without any further expenses or possible just some legal costs to the defendant rather than millions of dollars.
22
It probably shouldn't. With the exception of pieces that are historically important because they were innovative in some fashion or tied to a historical event, the artist is pretty much the only thing differentiating a lot of these works. I remember when learning to paint that our teacher pointed out that anybody in the room could be a professional painter. It would just require working multiple jobs and pouring most of our free time into it and hoping to attract enough attention that people would pay for it. But, most of the value of a piece is either from the artist that created it or from the rich people bidding it up in the hopes of having an expensive piece of art to keep locked away in a vault for when they need to transfer a large sum of money without records.
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I'm guessing that there wasn't a signature on there that matched the rest of Mr. Doig's paintings which would make it extremely valuable if it were in fact a painting that he did. But, this whole thing seems like them looking to justify their initial belief rather than trying to figure out the truth and it should make people doubt the authenticity of other items that the gallery is selling if they screwed something this big up.
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I'd imagine that the social security administration also deals with that sort of thing pretty much every month. Then there's the case where somebody goes missing, but no body is found, so they're "alive" until either a body is found or the time is up and they're declared to be dead by a court. In which case, they'd have spent years dead and a live for all practical purposes.
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That's a good question and the answer is probably. Sometimes stores and galleries will take work on consignment and basically just handle the display and sales transaction in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. But, I'd imagine that in this case that they had bought the painting as this is a lot of money to put on the line over something that's on consignment where they've just lost a bit of potential revenue and possibly reputation if it turned out to be real.
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@gavnonadoroge3092 Yes, but filing frivolous suits can lead to disbarment and being banned from submitting things to the court. I suspect in the long term that they'll still wind up making more money from the gallery to justify this expense though.
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People don't find the things they are paid not to find. I'm guessing that they were more concerned about future legal work for the gallery, and less so about the details of this one. Really, it's a pretty damning indictment of the standards of both the legal firm and the gallery that this was allowed to proceed past the judge's warning that the case was falling apart.
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@chrisbaker8533 Yes, either due to a clerical error or being missing and declared to be dead, but still alive and either in hiding or stranded in the middle of nowhere. (Admitted, being that stranded is less and less common as time goes by and the ability to search effectively gets better, I'd expect that before too long we'll have computers scanning through large volumes of satellite imaging just in general and picking out potential signs of missing people)
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There's various reasons why it happens, although with a painting that's incredibly strange. It's most common with movies where the academy will allow a director to put an alias on a movie under specific circumstances. Basically, if the studio influence was so strong as to ruin the director's efforts the director will be allowed to have a specific alias put on there. It's not enough for it to be a terrible movie, it effectively has to be the result of the director not having the creative control to make a different film.(Not even necessarily a good film, just not the one that was made) Typically for the sake of everybody involved once you've got a name, it's very hard to change it in any notable way. Sure, you do get people like Jim Carey going from James to Jim, but that hardly confuses anybody.
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This why people need to demand evidence of such people that the money is owed, that they are entitled to collect on it and that you are the party that's on the hook for the money. IANAL, so these things are generally a bit more complicated, but if they can't prove all of those things, they're not going to be able to collect on it.
1
Mostly because fine art is a scam. It's mostly used for money laundering and as a way of transferring wealth without having a record of having done so. Take a painting in my vault and put it into your vault and now we've transferred potentially millions of dollars without any record of it having been done.
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He wasn't getting a cut of it and the more work is out there the more it dilutes the value of the work he's doing. But, that would be extremely weak justification for doing it and I doubt any artist would do it over simply wanting fewer works out there. It being an early work would make it marginally more likely, but still.
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Presumably he could be the same way that you can be compelled to tell the court if you were driving that car. There's a relatively small number of things that are germane to a civil case that you can't be required to answer.
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