Couple Charged with Selling Fake Warhol Paintings of Non-existent Baldwin Brother

Warhol's "200 One Dollar Bills"

The fever from the high price tag of $43.7 million paid for Andy Warhol’s  “200 One Dollar Bills” at the Sotheby’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Auction on November 11 must have trickled down to the darkest, most gullible corners of the collecting world. Boing Boing reports that last week a couple was charged with selling six fake Warhols to an unidentified art collector. The couple, a 65-year-old man and a 24-year-old-woman, told the art collector that the paintings were of Mathew Baldwin, one of the famous Baldwin brothers. The paintings were signed 1996. The collector put a down payment of $25,000 on the works. THEN he took the Warhols to an appraiser.

Though it does seem at times  that there are too many Baldwin brothers to keep track of, there is certainly no Mathew in the brood. Oh, and about the signature on the works dated 1996: Warhol died in 1987. There is little that  explains this moment of idiocy as well the phrase coined by English poet and farmer, Thomas Tusser in 1557:  “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

via Couple Charged with Trying to Sell Fake Warhols–Boing Boing.