In France, a museum curator is not allowed to appraise works of art belonging to private persons, unless they are destined to enter national collections by purchase, donation, or gift. His appraisal is then required to guarantee that the pieces are not fakes and that they have some relevance to cultural heritage.
In the United States, in contrast, a museum curator is not just permitted, but even required to appraise art for private persons. It is part of the civic service that the museum should perform for its visitors as an institution for the community. Thus, when I was an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, I was asked every morning to greet collectors and advise them regarding their purchases. And so for weeks I would see dozens of works emerge from luxurious leather briefcases or relatively carefully tied packages signed Manet, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, and so on. All of them were more or less skillful copies; in other words, fakes.
Confronted with the deception—as well as the disbelief—of my visitors, who for the most part had bought these pieces at a very high price, I had to convince them. I had to put before their very eyes the plates in the systematic catalogs that proved the original was hanging somewhere else, or showed how subtle but definitely visible differences established the quality of the one and the mediocrity of the other. Thousands of fakes passed through my hands in a month, raising the dizzying question: how many millions of fakes are there in circulation worldwide and hanging on the walls of amateurs, pieces of a market that is virtually incalculable in terms of the billions of dollars it is worth…