Online sales bring business and art together

Irish art, it seems, has never had it so good. In the space of a single week last month, Roderic O'Connor's Paysage, Pont-Aven, which had not been seen in public for over a century, sold at Christie's of London for £289,750 sterling (€455,295); Played!! by Sir John Lavery made £575,750, and Louis Le Brocquy's Traveller Woman with Newspaper set a record at Sotheby's for the highest price yet paid for a living Irish artist. It made £1,158,500 sterling.

Joe and Josephine Soap may well sigh for the painting in the spot above their fireplace is likely to be an altogether less valuable affair. On the other hand, if they are enthusiastic amateur collectors, they may already have chosen to eschew the extravagant world of real time auctions and ventured online, visiting any one of a burgeoning number of Internet sites where original art is available for as little as £10.

If such is the case, the hypothetical couple would do well to bear in mind one such auction, which recently mystified the US media. Just last April, a California resident using the handle "golfpoorly" posted a motley collection of items for sale on eBay, the online auction company.

Alongside an unopened roll of twine, a never-inflated basketball and a Mexican voodoo mask, he offered a "great big wild abstract painting", which he claimed to have bought some years ago at a local garage sale.

The painting was distinguished by a small hole in the bottom right hand corner (resulting from a chance encounter with a toddler's tricycle), and golfpoorly was offloading it, golfpoorly said, because he said his wife couldn't stand the sight of it. The opening bid for each of the items was 25 US cents.

By mid-May, bidding for the painting - an abstract landscape - had soared to $135,805 (€140,950). Closely inspected, the accompanying photograph apparently bore a signature - "R.D. '52" - prompting speculation that the lot was a 1952 work by the late Californian painter, Richard Diebenkorn.

As recently as 1998, Horizon: Ocean Park, another of Diebenkorn's works, sold at Sotheby's for $3.9 million.

Two weeks and 94 bids after his posting, golfpoorly's garage junk had metamorphosed into a potential goldmine.

Contacted by the New York Times, the seller revealed that he had hired an attorney, and restated eBay's central "buyer beware" sales clause.

The painting, he said, "requires full payment within seven days of the auction, in advance of delivery to the buyer, and is sold as described in the auction without representation as to authorship or authenticity." It may have been a Diebenkorn; it may not. It was up to the buyer to decide.

According to Art and Auction magazine, the highest price thus far achieved on an art site transaction is $168,000 - for a 1959 watercolour by Lucio Fontana, which sold on artnet.com in 1999.

Artnet.com, however, hires "reputable dealers" to vet all sales. Moreover, the Internet arms of auctioneers Christie's and Sotheby's guarantee the authenticity of all works sold online. EBay does not. Given the pot-pourri of items available for auction at any one time - from postage stamps to Purple Hearts - and the sheer volume of its customers, all deals negotiated by users are considered to be "private transactions".

EBid, a similar site based in Ireland, works to the same legal criteria. For sale at the time of writing there are, among other items, original paintings by George Dunne (£1,000), Juan de Perez (£500) and Markey Robinson (£1,025).

The last is offered for sale by someone using the handle "eseller", and can be paid for using a spectacular range of credit cards, money order, personal or certified cheque, or cash on delivery.

A quick tour of eseller's virtual car boot finds a further seven paintings, golf membership on the Costa del Sol (£15,000) and a Peugeot 406 1.9L Diesel (also £15,000).

Quite literally, eseller could be anything or anyone, so how does eBid establish his or her bona fides? Quite simply, it doesn't. "EBid is very much a venue," according to Ms Maeve Harrington, chief operations officer at the site.

"Venturing into a bid is a legally binding contract and it's up to users to make themselves aware of our terms and conditions." Those terms and conditions, in the main, assert that eBid is not involved in the physical transactions or interactions between its customers; it merely facilitates them.

"What we try and do however," Ms Harrington says, "is post as many opportunities for buyer and seller to talk to each other as possible".

Sellers are encouraged to list all the details one would require in authenticating an item, and both buyers and sellers are offered the facility to rate fellow users online.

"We encourage members to read those ratings - negative or positive - that's what they're there for."

EBid has registered 30,000 members since its arrival last January, and, though problems are rare according to Ms Harrington, "they can happen".

It's inevitable really that you'll get one or two chancers out there, but we monitor everything that goes on the site, and if we come into contact with such a person, he or she would be issued with a warning.

"If their negative ratings continue, their registration is deleted or their status denied."

In cases where high-value items are involved, users are encouraged to use "Escrow" - an online mediator, which, for a 6 per cent fee, takes control of the item and the cash until all outstanding matters have been approved, agreed and authenticated.

Of course, it is unlikely that eseller or any other user of eBid's facilities is untrustworthy, but the disclaimers should put potential purchasers on their guard.

The case of golfpoorly and the Diebenkorn will illustrate why.

Following further investigation by the New York Times, it subsequently transpired that golfpoorly was himself a lawyer - Mr Kenneth A. Walton, with a practice in Sacramento, California - and, under another handle "advice", had sold a raft of paintings on the Internet.

One lot, an Impressionist work purporting to be from the brush of Henry Percy Gray, sold for $7,600. It was later proved a fake.

Though golfpoorly has never proffered himself as an expert in matters artistic, and there is no evidence to suggest that he was responsible for the fake, his story was vulnerable in other areas too.

He was not married, as he claimed, nor was the hole in the alleged Diebenkorn due to the wandering wheel of a child's tricycle.

Under pressure, and given the sum involved, he agreed to allow the $135,805 bidder, a collector from the Netherlands, bring in an expert to authenticate the painting.

If it was found to be authentic, the deal would proceed, if not, they would call it off.

The meeting would not transpire. Just last week, it emerged that golfpoorly had himself entered a bid of $4,500 on his own painting - a practice known as shill bidding - a revelation which prompted eBay to suspend the seller and void the sale.

Clearly, the Dutchman was fortunate - it's not every day, after all, that the New York Times intervenes to investigate a painting's authenticity.

In any other situation, and had the transaction gone ahead, he would not have had a legal leg to stand on.

According to lawyers, a party who feels wronged in an auction on sites like eBay or eBid, which do not vouch for the authenticity of sellers' merchandise, can prevail legally only if the seller makes materially false statements in the item's description.

Though the Diebenkorn's authenticity remains unconfirmed, in the meantime, Irish art has continued to escalate in value.

For the Dr Tony O'Reilly's amongst us with £24 million to spend on a given Monet, establishing authenticity may not be a problem, but for the regular online punter out there, mouse drawn almost heliotropically towards the latest bidding frenzy, that one great sales' truth applies more than ever: caveat emptor.