Selling prints to vacationers must be a very lucrative business because no matter how much trouble the trade has caused cruise lines and Park West Gallery, it continues unabated. Bloomberg details the story:
“You can throw people off cruise ships if they’re security risks; you can throw them off if they misbehave,” Ware Cornell, 62, a trial lawyer, said in a telephone interview. Carnival “wanted to retaliate against my wife and against me because of the suit, which was a commercial suit against a related company. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
The Cornells complained to the Federal Maritime Commission, a five-member independent regulator used to dealing with disputes between companies over cargo rates and other business agreements. The complaint was filed Jan. 30 and first appeared on the commission’s public docket yesterday. […]
The Cornells’ saga started six years ago when Lisa Cornell, cruising with her sister on the Carnival Imagination, spent more than $5,000 to buy two pieces of lithograph artwork for her husband to celebrate their first anniversary.
The salesperson and the cruise’s on-ship newsletter said on-board art purchases came with a full money-back guarantee, Lisa Cornell said.
When she returned to land, Lisa Cornell changed her mind after reading about fraudulent cruise-ship art sales. She was told $585, or 15 percent of the purchase price, would be kept as a commission under the buying contract, she said.
Ware Cornell, as his wife’s lawyer, sued Global Fine Arts, a Carnival unit that was the ship’s art vendor. Carnival lawyers defended the case, according to the Cornells’ complaint with the maritime commission.
Couple Banned Over Art Dispute Adds to Carnival’s Woes (Bloomberg)
