Indigenous art online – beware the unscrupulous online seller

If you enter “indigenous art online” as a Google search query you may be quite surprised by how many results come up. There are hundreds. Actually, if Google is to be trusted, there are over eighteen million relevant results. Eighteen million! That is a lot of options. Some would say too many. And they would likely be correct.

If the traditional art market has taught us anything, it’s that there are always going to be those who are willing to take advantage of a shift in the art buying market toward a particular style, genre, medium or subject. No doubt when Picasso’s cubist pieces really started to garner attention, copycat artist emerged all over the world, trying desperately to make a name for themselves as an equally talented cubist, or simply trying to make a buck by selling look-a likes and copies. More recently, the same can be said about Banksy. With the rapid growth in popularity of Banky’s work has come an even more rapid growth of wannabe artists and unscrupulous business people simply trying to take advantage. Now the artists can be excused. It’s hard enough to read the interest of a changing market, and if artists need to reference the success of another artist in an attempt to survive and continue their art, so be it. But for business people to step in, make money and do nothing to support the arts or artists, that is an entirely different thing. Given Google’s results for “indigenous art online” and “aboriginal art online”, we assume there is a lot of the latter going on. And that makes us sad.

Organizations like the Art Consulting Association of Australia are doing what they can to address some of the most unscrupulous conduct when it comes to selling indigenous art and aboriginal art off and online, but it is still difficult to police. In August last year the ACAA approved standards which it believed should become the standard for use by all auction houses, dealers and valuers. By respecting the cultural and artistic practices of Aboriginal artists in the creation of the standards, the ACAA hoped to bring some stability to the aboriginal art and indigenous art markets. Days after the proclamation of those standards, artFido, the first online art gallery to do so, openly acknowledged their validity and published them on this very blog. Unfortunately, few of the eighteen million other sites selling “aboriginal art” and “indigenous art” online have done the same, and criminal and misleading conduct persists.

There is little that can be done to permanently eradicate the fakes and forgeries that exist in the art market today. The same thing happened hundreds of years ago, and will persist in the years, decades and centuries to come. All we can do is hope that with more information available to them than ever before, those willing buy art online or otherwise, will have a better understanding of the risks and therefore be better equipped to take advantage of the rewards.