ARTnews is reporting that someone in England is auctioning off ten 1970s Salvador Dalí lithographs found in their Mayfair garage. The £300–£500 they’re expected to bring will not help much toward funding their retirement abroad, but they’re probably selling the garage, too.
Unmentioned in it all is how the Dalí print market is a fifty-year-old joke ever since it became known that the artist pre-signed thousands—tens of thousands, some say hundreds of thousands—of blank sheets of paper, which were then printed with whatever.
The printsellers at Artsy are too ingenuous by saying Dalí “accidentally sabotaged his print market” with the practice. Dalí’s manager eventually claimed the artist signed 350,000 sheets of blank paper. That takes discipline, time, a system. And a way to monetize it—if not, what’s even the point? And none of that sounds like an accident. Maybe Dalí just dgaf about his resale market, and why should he, when there’s paper to sign?
And that’s not even getting near the forgeries. During the last decade of his life, one of Dalí’s former printers went rogue and secretly flooded the market with unauthorized prints; he was joined by straightup forgers operating a network of mall and tourist trap galleries. So he accidentally sabotaged his market by being forged? Or easy to forge?
TBH, the only thing less interesting than Dalí’s print market is Dalí’s prints. What I low-key want to see is his blank paper. Where are some? Did any survive intact? Dalí had a multiyear durational performance of signing blank paper, and it has disappeared without a trace. Worse than that, it was defaced, dismembered, and destroyed, then diluted by a deluge of fakes. Unless there’s a forgotten ream somewhere, sitting unnoticed since the 70s in a British garage, waiting to make some auctioneer’s day.
Oh wait, no, it was in France, and someone’s been auctioning it off in little batches since 2022. Also, Dalí was a Hitler- and Franco-loving fascist, so never mind.
[NEXT DAY UPDATE: ok, thank you Joshua Caleb Weibley for bringing in the work of Tyler Coburn, who in 2010 showed Thumbprints and Other Takeaways, a sculpture that included a stack of blank print paper, each printed with one of the hundreds of supposedly authentic signature variants Dalí used. 10/10, no notes.]