Look, the term original Dali' is a joke in the Art community because the term fake Dali' is considered a tautology. There are so many fakes, most experts consider any Dali to be bogus unless proven otherwise - and maybe proven again. Oh but it's signed, one hears. Sidesplitting, really. Dali' was discovered back in the 80's signing thousands and thousands of blank pieces of paper and selling them to forgers who got rich selling them to the gullible as 'original' Dali' work. Indeed sculpture made from drawings or paintings by Dali' are sold as "original" even though the artist never saw them and may have died before they were cast -- and yet some accept them as being "original Dali'" To me, the Dali' market is a bit like a mirrored carnival fun house. What you see may or may not be what you get and original is damned hard to define. Many people, some people I know, went to jail for Dali' scams and hearing "Original Dali' print" still makes any dealer or collector active in the late 20th century smile - or wince as the case may be. OK, I admit to having one hanging here in my office as a reminder or the roaring 80's, but I bought it knowingly because I was madly in love with the dealer. Money well spent, but that's another story.
Look -- an etching, a wood block, a stone lithograph or even a silk screen may be original, but a number of copies are made, sometimes by the artist himself, sometimes with a professional to do the final printing. A photo-reproduction done with the artist's approval and cooperation is less original even if part of a limited edition, but faking a print with today's technology is easy enough even without the cooperation of someone like Dali'. Caveat Emptor and please don't confuse a limited edition print, as CNN is breathlessly doing today, with some $20,000,000 painting from the 1940's that Sotheby's or Christie's may offer from time to time. You can afford a Rembrandt etching, you can't afford a Rembrandt painting.
Much of the public is still unaware of the fake art industry, although the business all but collapsed in 1989 with the general collapse of the art bubble. I hear there was a resurgence of Dalimania when peddlers began to clear out storage lockers and put the stuff back on the market in 2007. Scams seem to go in cycles. They burn out but recur periodically as Mr. Barnum told us, when a new generation of suckers enters the market. They never go away, sad to say and Fine Art fraud will always be with us. Even the experts get fooled. Scammers can and often do take a photo-reproduction - a poster and forge a signature and edition number on it. A few weeks ago I got all excited about a "signed" Wilfredo Lam painting -- a really beautiful one offered by a dealer in Peru, but thinking it through and carefully comparing the signature with a few in my collection, I decided it was a fake from the wicked 80's. Some other bargain hunter got burned, or perhaps turned it around and flipped it to some parvenu. Caveat Emptor and if it's too good to be true. . . it is.
So I wouldn't be surprised if many Dali' prints showed up - Miro, Picasso, Matisse are all common even fake Dali' with legitimate signatures, in charity shops. Although I'm too lazy to look it up in a catalog raisonne' I think think the Goodwill item is as real as any Dali' from his declining years. I doubt it could be worth nearly the $12,705 it's going for at their auction website, this Saturday morning. It's from 1979, late in the artist's life when he was recycling bits of images from his iconic paintings from the 1930's and 40's. I can buy a Cycles of Life retail from a legitimate dealer I know for under $10k, but who knows? Art is only worth what someone is willing to pay, but that truism obtains when they go to resell it as well. Did I say Caveat Emptor?
More copy book comments followed in quick non-sequitur: about Republican lobbyists, the foolishness of art in general and other populist drivel scarcely worthy of having been scribbled on the walls of the worst toilet in Scotland, although I suspect the grammar, spelling and logic might be better in that venue. The rabble are only to happy to pay their dues.
Of course it is a most uninspiring painting and it's proposed value would have been more appropriate to the late 1980's when Japanese corporations were buying up Western art and Van Gogh in particular as part of a scheme to transfer money illegally between corporations. I doubt it could be sold at nearly that price today, yet still; one of the uncountable things that mystify the untaught crowd is art and it's monetary value. That which is not understood needs to be denounced as worthy of only fools -- and of course Liberals. If you want to belong to the Vulgus Indoctum after all, you need to pay your dues. I wonder if one could earn life membership by offering to finance the expulsion ( as a Liberal elitist parasite ) of anyone who might distinguish between Van Eyck and Van Dyke or perhaps have a nice little solution for Fermat's theorem. I might in fact, apply for the deportation so kindly offered, but that any of these folk-slingers could afford the sort of place in Monte Carlo I have in mind, I have serious doubts.