Art Fraud! - NYT: Art Auctions on Cruise Ships Lead to Anger, Accusations and Lawsuits
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By JORI FINKEL
New York Times
Published: July 16, 2008
Correction Appended
When most people think of art auctions, they think of Christie’s or
Sotheby’s in New York or London, not a cruise ship. But over the last
two decades, auctioning “fine art” on cruises, often to first-time
bidders who have never met a reserve or inspected a provenance, has
become big business.
The biggest player by far, with more than $300 million in annual
revenue and nearly 300,000 artworks sold each year, is Park West
Gallery, based in Southfield, Mich. It handles such a high volume of
art sales at sea that it bills itself as “the world’s largest art
dealer.”
Park West sells art on the Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Norwegian,
Carnival, Disney, Holland America, Regent and Oceania lines. (Princess
runs its own auctions in-house.)
For the cruise-ship companies, Park West’s auctions have become a
revenue source like any other concession. For the passengers the
auctions are a popular form of onboard entertainment, like gambling or
shopping or catching the shows.
Yet some Park West customers say they did not get what they bargained
for.
One is Luis Maldonado, a businessman from the La Jolla section of San
Diego with interests in finance and construction and a penchant for
Latin American art. He was touring the Mediterranean with his wife,
Karina, on the Regent Seven Seas Voyager in November 2006 when they
decided to stop by the Park West art auction promoted onboard.
He was surprised to find artworks by Picasso and Rembrandt in the
auction area, a lounge near the casino, where they were greeted with
Champagne. He gravitated toward the Picassos.
There, he said, the auctioneer talked up two “museum-quality” Picasso
prints appraised at more than $35,000 each and a trilogy of Salvador
Dalí prints valued at $35,000 as a set. Mr. Maldonado said the
auctioneer described the works as “good investments,” explaining that
they were being offered at 40 percent off their “appraised value,”
with no sales tax.
When he asked about the nature of Park West, he said he was told it
was on par with Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
It was easy to make the leap. After all, he thought, it was a
prestigious cruise, and he had gotten discounts on good wines onboard
before. He started bidding, with little competition from the room, and
stopped at several thousand dollars below Park West’s appraised value
on each. He received an invoice marked “All sales are final.”
It was only after Mr. Maldonado landed back in California that he did
some research on his purchases. Including the buyer’s premium, he had
paid $24,265 for a 1964 “Clown” print by Picasso. He found that
Sotheby’s had sold the exact same print (also numbered 132 of 200) in
London for about $6,150 in 2004.
In addition, he had paid $31,110 for a 1968 print, “Le Clown” by
Picasso; Artprice.com, an online art database, showed it going for
about $5,000.
Perhaps most disturbing, he learned from The Official Catalog of the
Graphic Works of Salvador Dalí, by the Dalí archivist Albert Field,
that the pencil signatures on Mr. Maldonado’s prints from Dalí’s
“Divine Comedy” series (prints without a signature in the woodblock
itself) put them in Mr. Field’s column of “unacceptable” prints.
“Since Dalí did not sign any of these prints in black pencil, a pencil
signature on one must be a forgery,” Mr. Field wrote.
“It was very upsetting,” Mr. Maldonado said. “I’m not mad about
spending $73,000. I’m mad about spending $73,000 for works that I was
told are worth more than $100,000 and are probably worth $10,000, if
they’re even real.”
He said he contacted Park West “dozens” of times requesting a refund,
beginning in early 2007 with multiple e-mail messages to the
auctioneer, who responded that all sales were final. More recently, he
has pressed Park West’s customer service department for a full refund,
without success.
Reached by phone in Michigan, Albert Scaglione, the founder of Park
West, said he stood by the company’s certificates of authenticity and
its appraisals. “I am absolutely confident that if we had the
opportunity to give Mr. Maldonado the history of our pricing, he would
have a different view,” Mr. Scaglione said on Monday.
But about two hours after The New York Times asked Mr. Scaglione about
Mr. Maldonado’s case, Park West phoned Mr. Maldonado to offer him a
full refund.
It may take more effort to satisfy other customers. In April a Florida
resident and a California resident filed class action lawsuits against
Park West that could potentially cover tens of thousands of residents
of those states.
They have accused the company of misrepresenting the value of its
artwork and are seeking unspecified damages for unfair trade
practices, breach of contract and unjust enrichment.
Appraisals in Question
While overcharging for a product is not in itself illegal,
misrepresenting the goods sold can be. The plaintiffs’ central
argument hinges on Park West’s description of its appraisals.
On the back of Park West invoices, issued on the ship, the appraised
value is described as “the price a client would have to pay to replace
the work through a reputable retail art gallery.” Yet on the Park West
appraisals themselves, shipped to buyers along with their artwork, the
appraised value refers to the “current Park West Gallery retail
replacement price.”
A lawyer for the plaintiffs in both states, Shawn Khorrami in Los
Angeles, said there was a big difference between the two. “It’s the
difference between saying, ‘My house is worth $50 million because
that’s what the market would pay for it,’ and, ‘My house is worth $50
million because I say so,” he said.
But a lawyer for Park West, Robert Burlington of Miami, emphasized
that the courts have not yet certified the proposed classes in the
suits and might not ever do so. He mentioned a 2001 complaint filed in
New Jersey against Park West, accusing it of chandelier bidding (the
art market term for plucking a bid from thin air), that was kicked
around the courts for years before the class was denied certification,
partly because the purchases at issue took place at sea.
As for sales pitches by auctioneers, Mr. Burlington pointed to
language in the invoice saying that “no verbal agreements or
representations shall be of any force of effect unless set forth in
writing in this invoice.”
Mr. Scaglione called the class action suits groundless. “We’ve got
over a million clients and we make an effort to satisfy every one of
them,” he said. “Sometimes you have disingenuous people who buy things
for not good reasons, and we get set up.”
“With our size, it’s unfortunate we’ve now become a target,” he added.
Still, other Park West customers who are not involved in the class
action suits have made similar allegations of misrepresentation of
value.
Dr. Venkatraman Srinivasan, a Pittsburgh cardiologist, has published
an account of his experience with Park West at the Web site
FineArtRegistry.com. He said he paid around $30,000 for “Better
World,” by Peter Max, while on a Celebrity cruise from Vancouver,
British Columbia, to Anchorage last August.
According to his account, he was told that it was an “original”
painting worth about $50,000 and was dismayed to discover, when back
on terra firma, that variations from the same series were priced as
low as $3,000 or $4,000. (Dr. Srinivasan declined to be interviewed
for this article because of a confidentiality agreement he signed to
obtain a refund from Park West.)
Debra and Timothy Vruble, a couple from Elgin, Ill., who both work in
manufacturing engineering, took a Royal Caribbean cruise to the
Bahamas in October 2006. Onboard they bought a set of three “Divine
Comedy” prints by Dalí from Park West for $19,468.
An Auctioneer’s Advice
“The auctioneer told us we could walk off the boat and sell them for
20 percent more, and they would go up 20 percent a year,” Mrs. Vruble
said. Back home, an outside appraisal for the resale value of one of
the three prints came in at $850 to $1,000.
Mrs. Vruble said she had gone to great lengths to obtain a refund over
the last 18 months, making “dozens of calls” and writing “several
letters” to Park West customer service representatives and managers.
Asked on Monday about her complaint, Mr. Scaglione said that any
auctioneer who said such things “would be an auctioneer with us no
longer.” Later that afternoon Mrs. Vruble said she received a call
“out of the blue” from Mr. Shapiro, Park West’s gallery director,
offering a refund. (She got the call about a refund five minutes after
Mr. Maldonado did; Mr. Shapiro confirmed later by e-mail that a
“refund is in process and will be issued upon receipt of release.”)
Both the Vrubles and Dr. Srinivasan pointed to atypical elements of
the auction process, like placing stickers on artwork of interest to
them before the auction or negotiating a sales price with the
auctioneer before bidding.
Along with nearly 100 other disgruntled Park West customers, Dr.
Srinivasan and the Vrubles both turned for help to the Fine Art
Registry Web site, based in Phoenix.
For a $10 annual membership fee, Fine Art Registry offers subscribers
a system for tagging and registering artworks so they can be tracked
over the years. It has also made it a mission to publish “buyer
beware” articles on collecting — many of which focus on Park West.
The site’s founder, Theresa Franks, first commissioned an article for
her site about art auctions at sea in April 2007 after an
investigative newspaper article on Park West in The Arizona Republic.
She has since fielded 45 complaints from passengers about Park West’s
sales of Dalí artwork and 50 more about other purchases from Park
West.
A common complaint, she said, is that the rarity or value of an
artwork has been misrepresented. “If you’re paying for a Mercedes, you
should get a Mercedes, not a ’65 Volkswagen,” she said.
A former paralegal, Ms. Franks tracks the customers’ complaints and
provides basic advice to members on getting refunds. (Mainly, she
said, we tell them “not to give up.”)
She described the Park West buyers as “newbies,” inexperienced in the
art market, let alone the prints market, with its profusion of
technology and terminology. Few of the buyers were aware, for
instance, that forged Dalí prints flooded the market in the 1970s, she
said.
Attracted by Famous Names
“When they hear the names Picasso, Rembrandt, Dalí, they recognize
them,” she said. “It’s easy to fall into that trap.” And, she added,
it is not easy for these vacationers to do due diligence on the
cruise, where phone calls can be very expensive and Internet access
very slow.
Park West’s response to Fine Art Registry is a matter of public
record. In April the company sued Ms. Franks; Fine Art Registry’s lead
writer, David Phillips; and a Dalí specialist that the site quoted,
Bruce Hochman, for defamation.
By phone, Mr. Scalglione also accused the Web site of “poisoning” his
customers against him as retaliation for Park West’s not delivering
business to Fine Art Registry by registering art works with them. Ms.
Franks called this an “absolute, bald-faced lie,” adding, “I wouldn’t
want their artwork tagged and registered with Fine Art Registry.”
For his part, Mr. Maldonado said he discovered Fine Art Registry
“after doing lots of research on my own.” And Mrs. Vruble said she had
not visited the Web site until this year: “We were already way
hysterical before we heard of Fine Art Registry,” she said.
As for the Park West appraisals under scrutiny, Mr. Scaglione said the
company determines values through a network of independent appraisers
who “cross reference — they cross check.”
“We have literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this,”
he said.
And he denied that the company promotes art to passengers as an
investment. “We make no claim that somehow they’re going to go out and
make money or they’re going to become instant millionaires,” he said.
Mr. Scaglione left a position teaching mechanical engineering at Wayne
State University to open Park West as a gallery in Michigan in 1969.
“My big early hit was Escher,” he said. “I caught him as he was very
old, buying prints for $50, selling them easily for hundreds. I wound
up handling the estate.” In 1993 he began selling art on cruise ships.
Because Park West is privately held, it does not issue revenue or
earnings reports. But Mr. Scaglione said the company posted between
$300 million and $400 million in annual revenue last year, with cruise-
ship sales by 85 auctioneers accounting for roughly half that volume.
The rest comes from gallery sales in Michigan and special events like
hotel auctions, he said.
Asked about his financial arrangements with the cruise lines, he
confirmed that they receive an undisclosed percentage of Park West
revenue onboard. They are also guaranteed “a certain minimum against a
percentage of the gross” that he compared to rent.
On the question of refunds, Mr. Scaglione said Park West considers
refunds case by case. He would not disclose, he said, “the number or
nature” of them except to say “there is never an admission of
wrongdoing.”
The refunds do, however, typically come with confidentiality
agreements, which Ms. Franks calls another Park West tactic intended
to silence its critics and to make sure “nobody’s going to be able to
walk into a lawyer’s office.” She denounced the defamation lawsuit
against her and her colleagues in similar terms. “Park West has enough
money to blot out the sun,” she said.
Consulting With Experts
Park West’s suit against Fine Art Registry revolves in part around the
Web site’s allegations that the company’s Dalí prints are inauthentic.
The suit quotes, for example, a Fine Art Registry interview in which
Mr. Hochman said of the signatures on these pieces: “They’re all the
same. And we feel they’re done with an auto pencil device.”
Mr. Scaglione called those assertions “bogus.” He cited the
credentials of his Dalí appraiser, Bernard Ewell, and described his
Dalí material as “perfectly” authenticated — “our documentation is
sometimes five or six inches thick.”
When asked about the Dalí expert Mr. Field’s exclusion of certain
“Divine Comedy” prints with pencil signatures, Mr. Scaglione said,
“That man was so senile at the end of his life, it’s insane.” (Mr.
Field died in 2003, seven years after the catalog was published.)
Mr. Scaglione also dismissed Mr. Field’s “official” catalog as “the
most unofficial thing you can imagine,” adding that there are “150
well-known fakes in that book” that are presented as authentic.
Frank Hunter, Mr. Field’s successor at the Salvador Dalí Archives in
New York, countered indignantly in a telephone interview, “That is
absurd,” adding with emphasis, “I’d like him to show me one.”
Despite the libel lawsuit, Ms. Franks has continued to investigate the
authenticity of Park West’s Dalís. In May she traveled with her writer
Mr. Phillips to Stuttgart, Germany, to meet Ernst Schöller, a senior
art fraud detective with the Baden-Württemberg state police, who has
been working to remove fake Dalís from the market there. They took for
his inspection two of Dalí’s “Biblia Sacra” prints that they said were
sold by Park West as hand-signed lithographs.
Mr. Schöller’s verdict, captured on video and in an article by Mr.
Phillips, was that both works were photomechanical reproductions, not
lithographs, and were not hand-signed by Dalí. He called them “poster
art.”
Jessica Darraby, a Los Angeles lawyer who recently helped two clients
secure refunds for art purchases at sea from a company she would not
identify, said the cruise lines should take more responsibility for
the onboard art sales.
“People are not watching their wallets like they would on Times
Square,” she said. ‘They are lulled into this belief they are in a
very safe place.”
A spokesman for Regent declined to comment on customers’ complaints
against Park West. A spokesman for Royal Caribbean and Celebrity said
that in the case of a dispute, they would work with Park West “to
resolve the matter in a manner that is mutually agreeable to all
parties involved.”
Neither company would disclose its financial arrangement with Park
West; nor would Carnival, Norwegian, Oceania, Disney or Holland
America.
The cruise-ship setting also poses a challenge for law enforcement.
“There’s a steady stream of people who have complaints about how these
art auctions are being handled on cruise ships,” said Don Hrycyk, a
detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. But he said he could
not investigate because international waters are well outside his
territory.
“I usually refer these people to the F.B.I.,” he said.
In May an F.B.I. agent took part in a panel discussion in Los Angeles
with Ms. Darraby, among others, about art fraud and forgery. Most of
the session focused on purchases aboard cruise ships. Asked afterward
by this reporter if the F.B.I. had opened an investigation into the
cruise-ship sales, the agent, Christopher Calarco, said, “I can’t talk
about current cases.”
Contacted by telephone and asked if the agency was investigating, an
F.B.I. spokeswoman in Los Angeles said, “We don’t confirm or deny
investigations.”
As for Mr. Maldonado, he hopes an investigation is under way. “Buying
art from Park West,” he said, “was the only part of my cruise
experience that was a bad experience.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 18, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about complaints
by customers who bought works of art, like prints attributed to
Salvador Dalí, at auctions aboard cruise ships misstated the year in
which Albert Field, a Dalí expert, died. It was 2003, not 1998.
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Fine Art Registry® Press Release
Fine Art Registry Prevails Against Park West Gallery in Federal Court
in
Michigan in Classic David and Goliath Trial
(USA, Port Huron, MI — 21 April 2010) A Federal Court jury decided
completely in favor of Phoenix based Fine Art Registry® and three
individual defendants in a defamation and business interference case
brought by Southfield Michigan company, Park West Gallery, and also
awarded $500,000 in damages to Fine Art Registry for Park West
Gallery's illegal use of the web based art registration company's
trademarks on the internet.
The case (No. 2:08-CV-12274) finally ended after a marathon five and a
half week trial in Federal Court in the Eastern District of Michigan,
Southern Division, in Port Huron, with Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff
presiding. The 8-person jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of
defendants Fine Art Registry, Theresa Franks, David Phillips and Bruce
Hochman and awarded FAR® half a million dollars in damages in their
counter-claim. Bruce Hochman, who was represented by attorneys Ian
Simpson and Rachel Bissett of Troy, MI based Garan Lucow Miller P.C.,
was vindicated on all counts and had not filed a counter-claim.
Despite the virtually unlimited resources which Park West Gallery
devoted to the case, including a battalion of lawyers, an ex-FBI
"investigator" and various hired experts, the defense presented by
Fine Art Registry and the other defendants, based solely on the truth
and including testimony from a number of national and international
experts on Dali, a noted handwriting expert, along with many victims
and ex-employees, auctioneers and trainees of Park West Gallery,
convinced the jury of the truth of the statements made by FAR: to wit,
that Park West Gallery has been selling inauthentic art bearing forged
signatures (including prints by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador
Dalí) as well as grossly overpriced art, employs fraudulent and
deceptive sales techniques in its cruise ship based art auctions which
generate the majority of the art gallery's $300+ million annual
revenues, and has failed to deal with complaints from dissatisfied
customers.
The case was a typical SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public
Participation) lawsuit filed by Park West Gallery to silence an
outspoken critic (FAR) which has been investigating and reporting on
its practices as well as offering advocacy to Park West Gallery
victims since the latter part of 2007. As with many SLAPP lawsuits, it
backfired when it came before an impartial jury who recognized it for
what it was and found in favor of Fine Art Registry and the other
defendants on all counts.
The defendants, Fine Art Registry and two individuals, were
represented by lead attorney Don Payton assisted by attorney Jonathan
Schwartz of Kaufman, Payton & Chapa, based in the Detroit, Michigan
area. Don Payton said: "After a lengthy five and one half week
defamation trial brought by Park West Gallery (PWG) against Fine Art
Registry (FAR), and three individual defendants, the jury rendered its
verdict completely in favor of FAR and further awarded FAR $500,000
against PWG for trademark violations. It was definitely a David going
up against a multimillion dollar Goliath and for a change, truth won
out and the little guy triumphed. This verdict is extremely important,
not only for the named defendants, but for art collectors, art
enthusiasts, cruise ship passengers and the art world in general.
Finally, the sales tactics and their consequences have been revealed
and will have a ripple effect around the globe."
Jonathan Schwartz, who has been actively involved in the case since
its inception in early 2008, said: "The jury's verdict is a huge win
for truth, justice, and freedom of speech. I am so proud of our
clients, Fine Art Registry, Theresa Franks, and David Phillips, who
persevered with all the odds stacked against them. Fortunately, we
were assisted in our defense by world-renowned experts, former art-
buyers of Park West, and Park West insiders who stepped up to ensure
that the right side would prevail. Our law firm, Kaufman, Payton &
Chapa, is humbled and honored to have played a part in defeating the
unjust $46 million dollar lawsuit filed by Park West, and in achieving
a very successful result on the counter-claim."
Ian Simpson of Garan Lucow Miller, who, along with Rachel Bissett
defended Bruce Hochman in the case, said: "I am grateful for the
jury's verdict in this case. We believe that our defense, the truth,
obviously prevailed. The fact that this was a unanimous verdict in
favor of the defense was very gratifying."
Theresa Franks, CEO of Fine Art Registry, said: "It is a great victory
for the art industry as a whole and also for free speech in this
country. The honorable jury of eight that served for well over a month
on this case are nothing short of heroes. They sent a powerful message
to Park West and the cruise lines that sheer greed and deceptive,
fraudulent and unfair trade practices by big business will not be
tolerated."
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On the cruise of a lifetime came the chance of a fortune. Cahal Milmo
reports on a family who claim they were 'swindled' out of $400,000
The Independent (UK)
Saturday, 18 July 2009
When Sharon Day decided to go on holiday two years ago to help her
recuperate from a minor operation that went wrong and nearly killed
her, the idea of sailing the seas with her family on board a luxurious
cruise liner seemed the perfect answer.
The Adventure of the Seas, a 138,000-tonne floating pleasure palace
owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises, occupies its 3,100 passengers with
attractions such as a nine-hole golf course, a climbing wall and even
a wedding chapel.
What caught the attention of Mrs Day, a London lawyer and mother-of-
three, were the art auctions held in the vessel's public rooms by Park
West Gallery, an American company which bills itself as the world's
biggest seller of art. It sells 300,000 paintings and prints each
year, half of them on cruise ships (it holds sales on more than 80
vessels), and has annual revenues of $300m (£182m).
Among the items on offer to passengers entering Park West's ocean
liner auctions, where the sales patter of an expert auctioneer comes
with complimentary champagne, are woodcuts by Rembrandt, Picasso
lithographs and Salvador Dali prints.
Within a week, Mrs Day, 46, a long-standing art lover, and her husband
Julian Howard, 48, a senior City lawyer, had spent nearly $98,000
(£60,000) and begun the $422,000 (£258,000) acquisition of a complete
set of Dali's Divine Comedy – six-volumes of prints originally
commissioned by the Italian government in the 1950s to mark the 700th
anniversary of Dante's birth.
Park West's auctioneer described it as a "masterpiece and a part of
history". What the couple did not know at the time was that their
purchase would also be the departure point for a bitter transatlantic
court case in which they, along with a number of other cruise-ship art
buyers, claim in a legal summons they are victims of a carefully
orchestrated fraud which has left them with pictures that are either
valueless fakes, or genuine but commonly available works that are
worth a fraction of their eye-watering sale price.
A journey intended to celebrate Sharon's recovery from life-
threatening damage to her intestines has become part of a legal tussle
that goes to the heart of the global cruise industry – which is worth
an estimated £30bn a year and makes a substantial proportion of its
profits from selling goods on board its "shopping malls with
lifeboats". At stake is the reputation of the third-largest source of
such revenues, namely the huge art trade conducted on the ocean waves.
Of the world's nine largest and most lucrative cruise lines, all but
one has a contract with Park West to sell art on board their ships.
The Fine Art Registry (FAR), an American art registration company that
has set up a website publicising what it says is Park West's penchant
for sharp selling practices, insists that it has been approached by
more than 200 former cruise-line passengers who believe they have been
sold dud prints and pictures.
Donald L Payton, the American lawyer leading the court case, spelt out
the scope of the legal claim: "Our clients believed they were buying
an investment, when what they received was virtually worthless. The
purpose of this litigation is not just to get well-deserved
compensation for these victims, but to expose the self-proclaimed
experts who have for years intentionally pawned off supposedly famous
and valuable artworks on the unsuspecting public, including our
clients."
Park West, which is run out of a vast exhibition space in Michigan,
insists that it has "never sold a non-authentic work of art" in its 40-
year history, and has launched a countersuit against the Britons,
their co-claimants and FAR, whose articles about the gallery's sales
techniques are described as a "smear campaign" aimed at destroying its
reputation.
For Sharon and her husband, their ill-fated encounter began a day
before New Year's Eve in 2007, when the family left their home in
south-west London, and boarded the Adventure of the Seas for a seven-
day tour of the Caribbean.
Intrigued by an offer to attend a masters art exhibition offering
works by Picasso, Dali, Rembrandt, Chagall and Miro, the couple
eventually bought a selection of what was on offer after being
persuaded, they say, by the auctioneer, that their purchases were
"rare" and represented an "excellent investment". Among their initial
buys were 11 prints from Dali's Divine Comedy, apparently signed in
pencil by the Spanish Surrealist. Park West insists that it never
sells art on the basis of claims about its future value.
During the sales, Mr Howard, a lifelong fan of Dali, asked whether it
was ever possible to buy a whole set of the Divine Comedy. He thought
little more about his enquiry until the couple received a phone call
after returning to London from Morris Shapiro, gallery director at
Park West, who said he had managed to obtained an "exceedingly rare"
example of the entire series. After much to-ing and fro-ing over 10
weeks in which Mr Shapiro went into detail about the provenance of the
art, describing the date it was produced and the type of paper used,
the couple agreed to pay a total of $422,601 for the collection of 100
prints in six books, complete with an appraisal valuing it at $510,000
and a certificate of authenticity.
Sharon, a US citizen who has lived in London for more than a decade,
said: "We had gone on this cruise and had a wonderful time. When you
are on holiday, you relax and make purchases that perhaps you wouldn't
normally. That is precisely why a company like Park West sets up shop
on cruise ships. The money we used for the Dali prints was set aside
for our children – it was their inheritance. We were genuinely
persuaded that this was a great investment which would grow in value.
It was my family's investment for the future."
The couple were so sure of the impeccable credentials of their
purchase that they took little notice of the apparently unusual
arrangements put in place to pay for the prints. They were sent an
invoice placing Mr Howard, who was in London at the time, on board
another Royal Caribbean ship, the Legend of the Seas, complete, they
claim, with a cabin number and bidder code for an auction he did not
attend. The money for the prints was paid into a bank account held by
Royal Caribbean, which receives a percentage of every sale made by
Park West. Court documents show that the couple now believe the
fabricated auction invoice was produced to ensure they paid a $67,000
buyer's premium and the sale was categorised as taking place in
international waters, where American or British consumer law does not
automatically apply. Park West insists that the invoice was generated
to ensure Royal Caribbean received its commission for any "post-
cruise" sale and did not include cabin or auction numbers.
It was not until Sharon and her husband decided a few months later
that they unexpectedly needed to cash in their investment to pay for
one of their daughters, a talented ice skater, to attend an American
figure-skating academy, that their confidence in their acquisition
began to take on a very different complexion.
An approach to Mr Shapiro to either buy back the prints or help with
their sale was met with a polite but firm refusal to have anything
more to do with the artwork he himself had described just nine months
earlier as "an exceptional collecting opportunity".
When Sharon contacted a Sotheby's expert to find out the true value of
the sale, the reply astonished her – the auction house had sold the
Divine Comedy set many times and it normally raised $60,000 to
$80,000. Her concerns deepened dramatically when she travelled to the
New Jersey art repository holding the prints with two experts on
Salvador Dali, including Nicolas Descharnes, the son of one of Dali's
close associates.
The experts agreed that the prints were authentic but when it came to
the artist's pencil signature on the bottom of each of the pictures
they were equally certain that whoever had signed them, it was not
Salvador Dali. The court claim filed on behalf of the couple said: "In
fact these signatures were unanimously identified by the experts as
forged and faked Salvador Dali signatures. These experts also
concluded that the Divine Comedy series purchased by the plaintiffs is
worthless."
Sharon said: "It was absolutely devastating news. I went through the
whole gamut of emotions. I felt stupid that I had bought these
artworks and invested so much in them only to find they were
worthless. Now I'm angry. Angry that we have been treated in this way
and that the only way to prove our case is to go through a very tough
court case. We have had to put everything at risk. Park West is
throwing everything at us."
Rather than being an isolated case, the British-based couple have
eight co-claimants on their joint action who variously allege that
they were sold fake or grossly over-valued art by Park West. One
couple, Albert and Vivian Best, bought two Chagall lithographs which
they kept in their frames until April last year, when they decided to
check their condition ahead of a possible sale. Upon taking out the
pictures, Before the Mirror and Man in House, they found that rather
than being genuine prints they were in fact pages from a French art
magazine and "essentially worth nothing", according to court
documents.
Teri Franks, chief executive of FAR, said: "These people were not
sophisticated buyers of art. They were told certain things about what
they were buying and believed they were getting something special. We
say the reality is quite the opposite."
A second, separate, class action was launched in April this year on
behalf of two New York-based cruise art buyers making similar claims
against Park West.
The response from Park West to the claims has been robust. The company
has issued a succession of counter-claims for defamation against its
former customers and FAR, which the gallery claims is acting out of
malice because it turned down an approach to sign up to its art
tagging service in 2007. The claim is strongly denied by FAR. The
gallery said it can produce multiple examples of sales of Divine
Comedy prints for prices comparable or higher than that paid by Mrs
Day and her husband. It added that it had obtained further evidence to
demonstrate the authenticity of the Dali signatures, which it would
present in court.
In a statement, Park West said: "We are the largest at-sea gallery in
the world and are proud of the relationships we have developed with
more than 1.2 million clients over our 40 years in business. We stand
behind the authenticity of every work of art we sell, including the
works sold to Mrs Howard and Mr Day, and we are confident we will
prevail in court."
Royal Caribbean, which made a profit of $703m in 2007 and this year
launches a new class of vessel that can carry more than 6,000
passengers, said: "Royal Caribbean denies any allegation or suggestion
that it has done anything wrong. We take very seriously the issues
that have recently been raised regarding some of Park West's business
practices."
In the meantime, Sharon Day awaits the beginning of the trial of her
case later this year. "All we did was get on board a ship and buy some
pictures," she said. "Now we are having to stand up and fight for our
children's inheritance."