Art Auctions on Cruise Ships Lead to Anger, Accusations and LawsuitsJuly 16, 2008
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.
>>>>the complete article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/arts/design/16crui.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&sq=Crui&scp=1
