Philip Mould has a brief conversation with London Magazine. Here are two of the more art-world-related comments:
The most profound change in the art world has been the internet. You no longer need to travel to buy art. I just spent £75,000 on a Gainsborough that I haven’t seen. You can buy things all over the world but the only problem is, so can thousands of others.
I don’t agree with the practice of destroying forgeries. On an episode of BBC One’s Fake or Fortune in 2014 we had a Chagall painting that turned out to be a forgery. It was then seized and the Chagall Committee ordered for it to be destroyed. Destroying forgeries is an anti-academic practice and it is ethically highly questionable. What is widely deemed a fake in one generation can be reversed in the next with the benefit of research technology which is developing apace and you can’t reprieve a destroyed picture.
