I discovered something yesterday while looking at Etsy, to see whether or not that might be a good place to commercialize my large painted canvases, like this one I finished yesterday. The thing I discovered is that Etsy is absolutely riddled with knock-offs and outright forgeries, which are being sold with vague disclaimers like this:

The artwork is offered as after the artist, sold as is.

You would be forgiven for not knowing what that means, as I did not until I found this Reddit thread. One user gave an excellent explanation which dovetails nicely with what I was saying about “authorship” being only a relatively recent invention (last few hundred years) of art history:

[–]zellieh 13 points 11 months ago 

To give you a wider explanation, artists worked as traders running workshops as a business. They would hire employees, assistants, and trainees, just like, say, modern plumbers.

Some artists ran schools or apprenticeships where they would train people, and it can be very hard to tell who did what since you traditionally learned by literally copying other’s work – including your trainer/Master.

Then there’s artists who grouped together to save money and worked in collectives or studios. (Like Andy Warhol, or the Impressionists). Artists often try out each other’s styles and techniques when they work together, and collaborate creatively.

When artists run a business, school, or workshop where they work alongside other people, the works produced can also be called “after” or “school of” [artist name].

This is usually done when the work shows a strong link to [artist name] – made in their lifetime, signed by their hand, from exactly the right region and in the right style/materials – but can’t be verified strictly enough to say it was definitely made by them.

Okay, so this would all be well and fine to sell reproductions on Etsy, provided they are clearly labelled as such to avoid any confusion. But that is not the case, they bear titles like: “Very rare art – Unique Cubist oil still life painting, Signed Picasso.”

And the paintings are signed on the front (usually) to make it seem to the foolish like these *just might be* the genuine article. Sometimes the artists’ names are even misspelled in the signature:

(Picasso has two ss’s and one c, while the image above shows the opposite.)

It’s difficult without deep reach into the platform’s data, but I would bet dollars to donuts that many/most/all of the “happy buyer” testimonials on these accounts are also fraudulent. But that’s just me.

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