Florida State Court Orders Removal of Fake Keith Harings

by Corinna Kirsch on March 14, 2013 · 1 comment Newswire

View of the sparse "Haring Miami" exhibition after the removal of 165 artworks. Courtesy "Miami New Times".

If you’re paying $30 to attend a Keith Haring exhibition, you’d at least expect that exhibition to show some real Keith Harings. That wasn’t the case with “Haring Miami”. Florida state court, at the behest of The Keith Haring Foundation, ordered the removal of 165 allegedly inauthentic artworks by the exhibition organizers, the Colored Thumb production company.

The Art Market Monitor reports that a board member attended the “Haring Miami” opening party and during his covert operation “found only 10 of the works to be authentic.” Regarding the remaining 165 works, the Foundation had previously issued certificates of inauthenticity to 43 of them.

According to court documents, “Haring Miami” was allowed to keep its doors open to the public over the weekend, but forced to remove all but the ten authentic works. In addition to removing the works, the court order specified that the event organizers “remove all copies of the brochure and/or catalog for the ‘Haring Miami’…and attend to their prompt destruction.”

Since the close of the four-day-long exhibition, an attorney for “Haring Miami” has released a statement regarding the exhibition. He rebuts the claims of the Foundation and remarks that because the foundation no longer performs in-house authentication services, it “leaves open the question of whether or not the art displayed by Colored Thumb were all legitimate pieces by Keith Haring, which the owners of the art continue to maintain are legitimate.”

{ 1 comment }

Cole Robertson March 14, 2013 at 4:55 pm

“Regarding the remaining 165 works, the Foundation had previously issued certificates of inauthenticity to 43 of them.”

Holy crap how do I get a “certificate of inauthenticity”?!

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