The last Friday in June began like a normal summer day in sunny Orlando, Fla.: The weather was hot and sticky; obedient crowds filed into Disney World as if on a spiritual pilgrimage. At the Orlando Museum of Art (OMA), a much-hyped exhibition was in its final days. Billed as a stash of previously unseen pieces by the late '80s star Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose neoexpressionist paintings sell for tens of millions of dollars, the Heroes and Monsters show of 25 artworks was to be a splashy coup for the museum, a quiet regional institution unaccustomed to the national spotlight. After all, Basquiat's paintings are not only highly coveted, but his subversive start as a graffiti artist, his crossover appeal—Madonna dated him; Jay-Z rapped about owning his doodle-like work—and his death from a drug overdose at the age of 27 have made him a pop-culture icon. OMA had banked on the show to raise its profile, trumpeting the paintings in the media and developing fundraising opportunities, such as Basquiat's 1982 Heroes and Monsters Ball, replete with a DJ, a GIF-machine booth and a live art demo.
But in the middle of that June day, a team of FBI agents arrived at OMA with a search warrant. Agents proceeded to pack up the entire contents of the exhibition, carting off the curated canvas contraband like so many sacks of heroin as ejected visitors gaped through the museum's windows, straining to catch a glimpse of the action. The paintings—all 25 of them—were fake, the government alleged.
That an accredited museum, even a modest one, could get swept up in a major forgery investigation in 2022 might come as a shock to many, but suspect works have become so common that, just weeks earlier, a Palm Beach dealer had been charged with selling bogus Warhols, Lichtensteins, Banksys and yet more Basquiats from his galleries on tony Worth Avenue. As Chris McKeogh, an agent with the FBI's Art Crime Team, tells Robb Report, “Whenever there's a fraud scheme or fakes-and-forgeries ring, if you become aware of two or three, multiply by 10, at least.” If a forger is skilled, “they'll make 20 or 50—or a thousand.”
The sheer ubiquity of shams has altered his thinking. “I've become skeptical whenever I see a new piece of art,” McKeogh adds. “I will assume that it's fake until I can prove that it's real. That speaks to just how many fake artworks are out there.”
And forgeries are but one type of big-dollar crime plaguing the art world with head-spinning frequency these days. Lucrative fraud schemes, systematic thefts and money-laundering cases have all roiled the field in recent years, and global authorities are cracking down on the trade of looted antiquities that spiked as wars in the Middle East
