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Show CONSUMER ; NEW WAY TO PROTECT ART PURCHASES WHICH PRINT IS VALUABLE? It would bo almost impossible to tell that only the middle one is an original orig-inal strike without a new "fingerprinting" system. An fraud doesn't affect ju.si dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It cun hurt anyone who has ever purchased a piece of art, including a limited lim-ited edition print. But a new system in art security can protect pro-tect the consumer against this kind of fraud. With a burgeoning market in print and lithographs, fraud has taken on multi-million multi-million dollar proportions. Limited editions traditionally tradition-ally are the numbered strikes of an artist's work, priced anywhere from $5.00 to $200,000. Without proper identification and authentication, authenti-cation, fraudulent reproductions reproduc-tions can, and often do, swamp the art market, and that's where the consumer geu stuck. Alan J. Baer. President of The International Art Registry Ltd., recently demonstrated a new system for identifying limited edition prints, thus protecting the consumer against forgeries or unauthorized prints and establishing that the consumer con-sumer is getting w hat he paid for. The new process is an offshoot off-shoot of The International Art Registry's present "fingerprinting" system. The system "fingerpnntji" and registers originul works of art and antiques. This photo-grammetric photo-grammetric technique establishes estab-lishes positive identification of individual reproductions. The process is available to publishers of prints who, in many cases, are themselves unwilling victims of fraud. Baer stresses that the purchaser pur-chaser should, at the very least, expect that his purchase pur-chase is properly identified and registered. He points out that the process is equally applicable for two and three dimensional limited editions such as porcelain, silver and statuary. Once the work is identified and registered the likelihood of fraud vanishes and the consumer knows what he or she is getting. A file on the print is maintained in IAR's vaults and duplicate files are maintained at the international interna-tional headquarters of Interpol Inter-pol the International Criminal Crim-inal Police Organization. In the event of a theft, this makes recovery of the art work much easier. It's a matter of keeping art for art's sake and out of the hands of the criminal. For more information, write to The International Art Registry Regis-try Limited, 111 John St., New York, N.Y. 10038. |