If Fletcher had better evidence, this would be a fascinating court case. But as it stands, the fact that they've located the family of the real Peter Doige (talk about burying the lede) makes it laughably open and shut.
>Mr. Doig and his lawyers say they have identified the real artist, a man named Peter Edward Doige. He died in 2012, but his sister said he had attended Lakehead University, served time in Thunder Bay and painted.
>“I believe that Mr. Fletcher is mistaken and that he actually met my brother, Peter, who I believe did this painting,” the sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, said in a court declaration. She said the work’s desert scene appeared to show the area in Arizona where her mother moved after a divorce and where her brother spent some time. She recognized, she said, the saguaro cactus in the painting.
>The prison’s former art teacher recognized a photograph of Ms. Bovard’s brother as a man who had been in his class and said he had watched him paint the painting, according to the teacher’s affidavit."
I'm looking at the paintings of Peter Doig but I have a hard time finding something that looks like the painting of Peter Edward Doige. The strokes, technique, use of color. They are all different.
Well this picture is proposed be from when he was a teenager, before he ever went to art school and long before he became a professional artist. It's not unreasonable to assume that his art style and technique can have changed significantly since then.
Ok, I see. That makes the attribution totally bogus of course, because it could be attributable to just anyone then. Like taking the paintings of a 5 year old and saying it's a very early Renoir or something.
Weird coincidence. Just today I was reading about South Korean artist Lee Ufan who in another very rare case concerning authentication of his work decided that 13 paintings in an investigation are indeed his—even after a forger was arrested and confessed to having painted them himself.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-a-forger-confe...
I take it you're not up on the 1917 news, about that Duchamp character who bought a hardware store urinal, laid it horizontal and exhibited it as 'Fountain'?
The more I look at it, the more I find the whole modern art ecosystem similar to bitcoin: abstrusely useless work arbitrarily attributed value by consensus, used for portable and state-independent storage of money.
> ...abstrusely useless work arbitrarily attributed value by consensus
I can't recommend 'Modern Art' highly enough. It's a card game by Reiner Knizia in which the players bid up the value of art works by various fictional artists. It's a classic and a firm family favourite of ours.
Not really that strange. Famous painters (at least rembrandt) were walt disneys of their time. they had workshops with lots of assistants who did the gruntwork and they assisted, oversaw and signed the works. So, one could argue this is in the same tradition - the artist recognizes that the works follow his methods and are so well executed that he will gladly sign them.
There really is no difference in cartoons and traditional art in the sense that both are essentially works of formulaic conception. Cartoons make the formula simple and explicit, whereas in traditional painting the formulas are a bit more complex.
Was anyone else floored by this? Even in the extremely unlikely scenario of Doig actually painting a piece he would disavow, how is the greater good served by going forward with the case? The can of worms the precedent would set are shocking. I would have a genuinely hard time proving my whereabouts 4 years ago, let alone 4 decades. This just seems like such an unreasonable expectation.
> The can of worms the precedent would set are shocking.
Not really.
> I would have a genuinely hard time proving my whereabouts 4 years ago, let alone 4 decades.
Its a civil case, and the standard of proof on either side is just a "preponderance of the evidence" -- that is, better evidence than the other side has. Its not proof in any kind of absolute sense.
And the judge, in ruling the case had to go to trial, seemed to think Doig had pretty strong proof, just not so indisputable as to make a trial unnecessary.
There's a big gap between getting to trial and winning.
There's also a big question about whether winning is actually necessary in the typical case.
Think about it: if this sets precedent, anyone with enough money who dislikes you for any reason can ruin you by filing a bogus lawsuit about something you putatively did a few decades ago. Sure, in theory you could eventually win based on preponderance of the evidence. In practice, unless you're a multimillionaire like Doig, the legal costs will bankrupt you before that.
Still think it was okay for the judge to send this to trial?
The judge sending this to trial was following well established law; even if trial court decisions did set precedent, there would be nothing new for it to set: that anyone can file a lawsuit based on actions that are current enough to be within the relevant statute of limitations even if what is necessary to present a colorable legal claim is a disputed claim about facts in the distant past is not only settled law, it's hard to see how the legal system could function if it weren't the case. If it weren't, all you would need to prevent a perfectly valid case from being prosecuted is to identify a critical fact to the case that occurred far enough in the past and invent a bogus dispute over it.
Assuming the plaintiff is somehow correct and it is a Peter Doig painting, this doesn't sound remotely fair to me:
Some 16 year old kid paints something, figures it's worth $100 and sells it for that amount. 40 years later it's now worth ~25 million dollars. The original creator never promised that value to the buyer. On the very remote chance that Peter Doig loses the case, what could he realistically owe? The buyer still has exactly what they paid for, and nothing less. The buyer didn't buy the painting with the expectation that it would someday be worth millions. I can't go out and buy stock and sue the company if it doesn't give me a 250,000:1 return on investment.
Doig was a nobody at age 16, else the painting wouldn't have sold for $100. The buyer bought a nice-looking painting from some kid in a correctional facility, not a world-famous painter. There was no promise or expectation that it would significantly increase in value.
The value at purchase time is irrelevant to this case, the same way the purchase price of stock is irrelevant to its current value when sold. If it is by Doig, it would have a current value >>> its value otherwise. If Doig says he didn't paint it when he did, he is directly destroying that difference in value.
I agree with this, but can someone really be held liable for something like this? I assume the painting did not come with a contract that states the artist/seller must always claim the work, from now to forever?
Not claiming his work is different from actively denying having made it. You don't need a contract to be sued for causing damages by knowingly making false claims.
Assuming he's actually the author, he's in a way "defaming the painting".
If the market value is what people are willing to pay, then you've just ignored any responsibility for answering the question "what are people willing to pay for", which is exactly what the question "where is the value" is supposed to be answered by.
In other words, you've just swept a messy question under a rug and acted like we'd all be smarter if we just called the mess "a rug" and ignored the details. Economists talk like that because they don't care about the art (they care about economic abstractions.) But you can't think like that if you want to answer questions about art, because those abstractions break down if you do.
> I can't go out and buy stock and sue the company if it doesn't give me a 250,000:1 return on investment
But if you buy stock which explodes in value - even if you didn't expect its value to go up - you'd expect to be able to sell it at the market value as genuine stock, no?
Fletcher and I are suing Doig not for merely disavowing the painting. After a year of research and ridicule from Doig and his dealer, we put it in auction. They threatened lawsuit and killed the sale. Our complaint is for interference of business. He can't do that if he is the real artist. What he will owe us is what we would have gotten if he had stayed out of it. We have plenty of evidence and his behavior and character is quite consistent with what made him a guest of the Correctional Centre in the first place. Wait for the real story when the book comes out.
That's not what this case is about. This is about who painted a work of art that could potentially be worth many millions of dollars. Peter Doig was living a pretty nomadic life at the time, and a lot of public records haven't been digitized due to time and cost. So at the moment, this is a he said/she said game, and a lawsuit like this is one of the only ways to be able to file the proper requests to search through the boxes and boxes of old records to get documentation one way or another as to who painted it.
I don't see any reason why the court system should be used to resolve this kind of question. The value of a painting is entirely subjective, and if the person who painted it is used as a factor in the price, that is just a failing of the evaluator. If I priced a painting based on the weather in Guam in 1920, there shouldn't need to be a court ruling concerning attempts to figure out what the weather was like that year.
I can't go out and buy stock and sue the company if it doesn't give me a 250,000:1 return on investment.
No, but if you bought stock in a tiny startup that later increase 250,000:1 you can sue the company if they claim that the stock you claim to own isn't valid any more. That was basically half the plot of that Facebook movie they made.
The person who bought the painting is not losing millions of dollars, only failing to gain them.
Unless of course the original price they paid for the painting was millions of dollars. I doubt that, given they bought it off of a 17-year-old fresh out of prison.
By the time the case is over, they'll probably be in the negative. Pure sunk cost fallacy.
> The person who bought the painting is not losing millions of dollars, only failing to gain them. By the time the case is over, they'll probably be in the negative. Pure sunk cost fallacy
This is an example of the endowment effect (fear of losing value that one perceives to already have), not sunk cost. Sunk cost would be if they continue the trial based on the amount of money they have already spent in fees, as opposed to the money they believe they can recoup later.
(Even that isn't necessarily sunk cost, because legal fees can be covered by the losing party in egregious cases, though that's unlikely here).
>Unless of course the original price they paid for the painting was millions of dollars.
The retired corrections officer, Robert Fletcher, 62, said he bought the painting for $100 from a man named Pete Doige (spelled with an e), whom he met in 1975 in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
But that's beside the point. If it's worth $Xm, it can be used as collateral for a loan. And it's probably also insured for a certain amount.
There's a difference economically, because the derivative of marginal utility with respect to income is (generally) negative. In other words, utility is concave with respect to the origin[0].
This makes a difference because, in many circumstances, people are more willing to insure against loss than they are to insure against gain.
It also makes difference legally, as well as financially, because assets can be used to collateralize loans, etc.
[0](That's the first derivative of marginal utility, which is the second derivative of the income-utility function).
> There's a difference economically, because the derivative of marginal utility with respect to income is (generally) negative. In other words, utility is concave with respect to the origin[0].
Sure.. many economic models make this simplifying assumption. But each man defines his own utility functions, by their very nature.
From the article, it sounds like there are. It's pretty clear that it was painted by someone called Peter Doige, who has nothing to do with Peter Doig.
But the owner of this painting isn't happy with that, and wants to appeal to authorities. At some point, courts are the authority you reach.
>It's pretty clear that it was painted by someone called Peter Doige, who has nothing to do with Peter Doig.
I noticed the extra "e" on the painting too. Either that is common for Peter to sign, he changed his name to drop the "e", or he forgot how to spell his own name when he was 17. Or someone forged his name as a signature onto the painting but didn't know how to spell "Doig" and didn't bother to look it up hoping they could pass the painting off for millions of dollars.
The article has quite clearly proven there was a man named Peter Doige who was in that correctional institution at the correct time and who painted landscapes.
It's just a different man from Peter Doig.
It's not a "forgery" made after Peter Doig became famous, there was no purposeful deceit here; it's simply another painting from another person who happens to have a similar name. It's coincidence.
Not proven, merely provided evidence. They didn't actually search the records back far enough to prove there was a Peter Doige in the prison at the time in question. Nor do they have anything other than the sister's word that he painted landscapes.
I must say that it's one of the most remarkable coincidences I've heard of.
Nor do they have anything other than the sister's word that he painted landscapes.
The prisons former art teacher also claims to recognize Doige (with an E) as a former student and claims to remember him painting a painting at least very similar to the one in question. The owner of the painting also claims that the person he bought the painting off of joined the Seafarers International Union shortly after he bought the painting off of him and the Seafarers have a record of a Peter Doige during that time, but not a Peter Doig.
>There was no purposeful deceit here; it's simply another painting from another person who happens to have a similar name. It's coincidence.
I'm not sure why you so quickly cross that idea out when there are millions of dollars on the line. I'm sure if Doig's paintings were worthless this case wouldn't be seeing the light of day. There is a plausible reason for purposeful deceit in trying to pass Doige's painting off as Doig's painting so the owner could profit millions.
If the painting was completely worthless I'd be inclined to believe that there isn't a chance in hell of purposeful deceit going on because there wouldn't be motivation to do so.
Do you honestly think the owner of the painting would be arguing it is Doig's painting and not Doige's painting if there was no money to be made from it and Doig (currently, in the modern day, not 40 years ago) was a noname artist who's paintings were worthless?
I'm confused by your comment. The article mentions an entirely different person (now deceased) with that name (Peter Doige) and his sister has supported the whereabouts (high school, prison, etc). Are you suggesting that the painting is (a) authentic Peter Doig, but he is lying about it, or (b) that it is a bad forgery?
I'm suggesting it is the wrong person. With the suggestion that due to the amount of money involved there is motivation to pass off artwork as Doig's when it is not.
People have a history of scamming for a personal profit. Throwing some artist's name on a painting when their paintings are worth millions, claiming they painted it decades ago, and trying to sell it for millions isn't too far-fetched of a scam. Maybe the artist doesn't remember 40 years ago and just says "Yeah, sure, whatever. I painted that 40 years ago." and you just made yourself $8,000,000 for paying someone down the street $80 for a painting.
Your original comment seems very much to suggest anything but that you believe it is the wrong person. That is the source of my confusion and I think possibly the others that replied.
The art world is full of forgeries. Normally the artist is long dead, so the authenticity of a work is evaluated by experts. If a work is deemed fake, the owner will just have to swallow his losses.
In this case, one would expect the artist himself to be the most credible expert... But apparently someone disagrees.
The person who bought the painting paid $100 for it in the 1970s.
The only money he's "missing" is theoretical money that might exist if it turns out the painting is actually by Doig. Right now, there's no damages, and it's ridiculous that the judge accepted this case.
How do you expect the painting to "turn out" to be by Peter Doig, if he is lying? What he would have us believe is that there was another young man with 90% the same name who painted a landscape that the senior Contemporary expert called "Wonderful early Peter Doig", and by coincidence they were both from Canada and it just happened to be the one year of his life when Doig was not in school or working.
Oh, and the inmate had been busted for LSD. Doig has paintings named Blotter, Windowpane and Orange Sunshine.
About a third of the way down the article it says:
>The retired corrections officer, Robert Fletcher, 62, said he bought the painting for $100 from a man named Pete Doige (spelled with an e), whom he met in 1975 in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
I'm very confused.. let's say Doig did paint this, and he's denying it.. what kind of damages does he owe?
Is he supposed to owe the difference in sale price between if he painted it, and if he didn't?
Is he just supposed to acknowledge it publicly? If so, is that really the best use of the courts? Force someone to admit something that, in the end, has no bearing in the real world?
> Is he supposed to owe the difference in sale price between if he painted it, and if he didn't?
Damages should be limited to the sale price, not fluctuating market value. What if a painting loses its value because the author does something disgraceful - can the buyer sue the painter for damages? Should all painters be careful about their public standing or anything they do that might affect the market valuation of their work, on threat of lawsuit from their buyers?
The buyer should have exercised due diligence and obtained proof of authorship 40 years ago. He only bought the painting itself, with no paperwork. So that's what he has now, just a painting, with no proof. He has exactly what he paid for.
Can a court really forbid you from doing such a thing? What if someone wants to create art but not be forced to put their name on it afterwards. This is just impossible?
I suspect that you can create art and release it anonymously, and nobody can force you to say you painted it. That would be covered in the US under freedom of speech, I think. On the other hand, claiming that you painted something that you didn't, or didn't paint something that you did, may be fraudulent?
Right? I could see being sued for claiming you painted something that you didn't. I think that is pretty standard faire. But the reverse? That sounds crazy to me.
At any rate, my freedom of speech definitely covers both cases.
IANAL. You can surely be compelled to tell the truth. I can't imagine how the court could compel somebody to admit or deny this type of fact though. But not speaking at all is different from lying.
If you do not follow the courts order, it could be charge of civil contempt, which could be jail time until you promise to no longer ignore the courts orders and/or could include fines.
A judge has leeway to order you to do pretty much anything. You can appeal such judgments, but you can't stop him from issuing one. This sort of thing is called prior restraint, and is mostly illegal, but that doesn't stop judges from doing it all the time.
Popehat has discussed prior restraint many times. Sometimes judges get away with it, sometimes they don't, and often Popehat themselves has to make the difference.
Tortious interference I would guess. Plaintiff wants to sell a "Doig painting", but defendant is preventing the sale by making a "false claim". So basically he'd owe damages for the lost sale proceeds.
This is so ass backwards. With this one could try to sell anything fake as part of someones works and if pointed to be wrong just sue for damages. Imo this should be treated as forgery and the guy selling the painting should be punished.
That doesn't make sense. Either he seeks $5M in damages OR gets the authenticity confirmed. If the name is cleared on the painting, the value of the artwork is not decreased.
But lets say the "authenticity" is "confirmed" by the courts.
Is it? I mean, if you are a true arts collector, there will always be a taint on this painting now. Everyone will know the story, and there would always be a sense it could be a fake...
If you have the cash, the story may be the most interesting part. Art collecting is at least a tiny bit more complex than just a race to own the most X by Y.
> His suit contends that Mr. Doig is either confused or lying and that his denials blew up a plan to sell the work for millions of dollars.
Presumably the damages are being sought not for affecting the value of the painting, but for ruining the sale.
I don't see why the guy deserves damages on the order of the value of the painting though - if it's a true Doig, he can still sell the painting for the same amount (probably more given the spectacle around it), and the only loss would be the time wasted in setting up the sale.
You know the whole painting business is a scam when the name of the person who painted the painting matters way more than whether the painting is beautiful or not...
First world disputes. Not enough gold and diamonds in this world for people to spend their money on something futile. They need to create new "rare commodities", more tulips. Little to do with art.
There are entire classes of goods which serve as assets or stores of wealth rather than as goods in their own right.
These require some (though not necessarily all) of the features of money: utility/value, portability, indestructibility, homogeneity, divisibility, stability, cognizability.
What fine arts offer is (relative) indestructabilty (they don't simply fall apart hanging on a wall), they have a high creation cost -- workfactor, and particularly if of a dead artist, cannot be created again, though that depends on being able to detect forgeries. Art lacks homogeneity and divisibility, but with auctions it is relatively liquid and can be recognized ("cognizability") as a thing having value.
These aren't wealth themselves -- the value is imbued by the market. But they are vehicles for moving wealth.
But there is something intrinsic in gold. Because of its physical properties (it doesn't oxidise, it's sort of eternal), and it is rare. A painting is more like fiat money. The painter can pull more paintings out of his ass (and some litterally do). And if the painter is dead, we'll find another fashionable genius. Feels more like tulips than gold.
That's not (necessarily) a trick question. I've been digging at the matter, and there's considerable dispute. W.F. Lloyd, 1833, states that "all value is relative", with Smith and Jevons making similar statements in their own works.
There's also the question of whether we're talking about any of three attributes, and how comprehensively those are defined:
1. Cost using the definition that all costs are opportunity costs (Krugman, Economics, 2008).
2. Price, here meaning market exchange price or what Smith termed exchange value.
3. Value, which is to say, the utility, affinity, preference, or usefulness to the owner, which Smith termed use value.
Market value (price) often bears only a very loose relationship to cost or value. See water/diamonds paradox, externalities, or environmental services and their value, cost, and price.
You don't think people inherently value art & beauty? That would be the "intrinsic" value of the painting.
Now, if we were really getting down to it, I would argue there is no "intrinsic" value for gold (or anything else). It's only worth what value different people may assign to it, which depends on entirely on the historical, cultural, and technological context in which we live, and varies greatly from person to person.
Sure, there are some aspects or properties of objects for which there is relatively high amounts of agreement about the valuation, however that doesn't make those properties or their valuations "intrinsic". And of course, there will never be 100% agreement about anything.
Well, that's my point. If beauty was really the reason for it being worth that, I could understand, but it is not, it is only about who made the painting.
Actually I am less appaled by modern art than by the exercise of using random painting as a form of commodity to store value. Like keeping some paintings in a safe like if it was a gold bar.
In a way everyone likes going shopping. What people like is spending too much money, not so much that they ruin themselves but enough that it still hurts. That's why people who cannot afford luxury products will still buy something small in a luxury shop.
But how do you get that satisfaction when you have a billion in your bank account?
Comes Mr Artist, or often Mr Art Dealer (or both) who will create a new rare commodity for you. Art is good, you don't have to justify it. In fact any critic of art is an uneducated idiot who lacks imagination and sensitivity.
So Mr Art Dealer will sell you a painting for a few dozen millions, just enough that it still hurts you and provides you with the satisfaction to do shopping.
I am not a socialist but it does feel like there is too much money in the system...
Car purchases are about more than the product: durability, warranty and availability matter. The same goes for clothes. Restaurants are about the experience and health reputation.
While I may purchase a lesser shirt from a known brand when a superior one was at the same price from a street shop, I may be justified in that choice because I cannot know in advance that the better shirt is as durable. I may even purchase an Arduino when a cheaper Chinese replica has the same specs, in order to contribute to their R&D.
Of course, there will be some to knowingly spend on lesser products for fame's sake. But I'm not convinced this is the case here. Firstly, the owner may have been told he could make a fortune, and spent more than he could afford hoping to make that money back tenfold. Secondly, some markets act as implicit international currencies, such as gold, and tangible art. This is similar to owning a forged €500 bill.
Wow, regardless of the facts in this case, this highlights the possibility of a fascinating new type of "extortion" where one party can destroy an asset of another party's by disavowing its authenticity, and may be able to extract payment under this threat.
Picasso was apparently known to do this, not as a form of extortion but simply because he could sometimes be a butthead.
The story, as I remember reading it, was that a dealer approached Picasso with some drawings and asked him to authenticate them. "All fake.", he said. A friend who observed this had his doubts -- they looked genuine enough to him. He gave one of his own Picassos to the dealer and asked him to try that one.
"Fake.", said Picasso. The friend said "But Pablo, I saw you draw that myself! You gave it to me with your own hands!". Picasso's reply: "Anyone can do a fake Picasso. I sometimes do them myself."
Or it could simply be viewed as a form of "rights management," where even though you already paid for a work of art, now that some time has passed, you have to pay the creator again. Oh, and for any copies of it that you make, whether you sell them or not.
No, that's crazy. No one would ever agree to such a scheme. [/s]
Nope, blackmail is when you demand money or other things in return for not divulging information about someone, whereas extortion is obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats, which is what is described here.
How can there be a punishment for not having perfect memory and remembering everything you ever created? That does not make sense to me, you'd have to prove that he actually knew that he created it and is intentionally lying to warrant any compensation for lost value, which sounds hard to me.
That's one of the things the court decides. The plaintiff is saying that what Mr Doig said has caused him five million dollars in damages. One of the things that the jurors will determine is what the actual value of those damages are. They could decide $5 million, or they could decide $5.
What kind of BS case is this? Why wasn't it thrown out at the first chance by the judge?
5 millions for damage? So if Peter Doig was forced to admit ownership, he would have to pay 5 millions? And if he won, he would still have to pay 5 millions because his word caused the evaporation of the presumed value of the fake?
What will his punishment be if the court will decide it's his painting?
In that case price of the picture will be high again and no damage was done, so nothing to punish for :)
P.S.
Funny thing, nobody actually cares about the painting itself, how good/bad it is etc, kinda shows top-art industry state...
>The plaintiffs, who include the correction officer and the art dealer who agreed to help him sell the work, are suing the painter for at least $5 million in damages and seek a court declaration that it is authentic.
Not sure if this is exposing an absurdity in the law, or in the art trade. Maybe both. All of this stinks of a publicity stunt to inflate the painting's value either way.
The whole story could have been designed to inflate the value of all Peter Doig's paintings.
From that PR perspective it might make sense to actually pay $5M in damages in order to attract even more attention and sell the paintings on that hype.
Perfect forward secrecy. Signal's 3DH key exchange does it.
The authentication output is only meaningful to the original conversation participants, because the only discernable difference between a real and a fake authentication even with access to all user keys and ciphertext is provenance - you know this output originated from a direct response to your cryptographic challenge, but nobody else can be sure you didn't just compose it yourself.
(Only the key-holders in a conversation between the "authenticatee" and challenger can generate valid looking answers for their specific pair of keys - either mutually between each other, or all by themselves in order to achieve repudiation)
Clarifying: 3DH only assures authentication to the original participants itself.
However if a message payload itself consisted of, say, a PGP-signed message, then that could be authenticated independently (either on receipt, or if/when the public key was disclosed).
The article links to Peter Bartlow's youtube channel. I checked out some of the videos with an open mind, but he presents horrible evidence. Good luck, you're going to need it!!
This has me wondering: could a situation ever possible happen to someone who was born in the 90s or later? Our lives are so much more documented in modern times that I can't imagine "a hole" in one's teenage years being possible.
It would be a lot harder. This case pretty much only exists because neither party has the documentation need to prove or disprove that Pete(r) Doig(e) was or was not incarcerated during the timespan the painting was made. Nowadays, asking the prison and/or asking former employers is pretty much a triviality.
I believe...
"Strangest" is a superlative and would imply this case is equally as strange as any other case in the group being labelled "strangest cases". All cases in this group are equally strange and also stranger than any other cases not in the group.
"Stranger" is a comparative and implies this case is in a group of more-strange-than-typical cases, but may or may not be exactly as strange as any in that grouping. There is the possibility that some cases are stranger than this one.
In this case "stranger" is probably more correct, as labelling an art case "strangest" is really a personal judgement. This story is unusual, but is it provably any more unusual than other unusual art cases?
So many replies here! In my opinion none of them make a case that either -er or -est is more grammatical than the other.
Even if this case is not the singular strangest, that does not mean it cannot be a member of ("one of") the singularly strangest group of all the cases. That is, the phrase "one of the strangest cases" would ask the reader to imagine that there is a group of cases, each stranger than any case outside of the group, which contains the case in question. (There would presumably be a group of moderately strange cases and a group of uninteresting cases.) It is a phrase so lacking in precision — appropriate for a subjective statement — that it matters not at all if "stranger" is used in places of "strangest," as the NYT opted to do, except that "stranger" only implies the existence of _one_ group of cases that is less interesting than the one containing the Doig case.
There can be only one "strangest" case, while there are many "stranger" cases. Because of this, saying "one of the strangest cases" is grammaticly nonsensical, even though it's in common enough usage.
"One of the strangest cases" is perfectly grammatical. There is only one "strangest case", but the "strangest cases" can refer to any set such that every case it contains is stranger than every case it does not contain.
It's not grammatical nonsense. There can be a number of "strangest cases", either because they're all equally strange, or because you're referring to, say, "the top 10 strangest cases" and simply omitted the number. In common usage, saying "this is one of the strangest cases" generally means that if you were to rank all cases by strangeness, and then pick some arbitrary small number of cases that rank at the top, this case would be a member of that group, and it implies that the speaker has not in fact ranked cases like this but merely believes that this is likely to be true, hence the imprecise language.
If it's in common usage, then it is in fact grammatically sensical. The strangest cases can refer to those cases that, as a group, are all stranger than cases outside the group.
No, the person making the claim says that the painting was painted by Peter Doig, who, that person claims, was known as Peter Doige at the time.
(The fact that there are records of an actual Peter Doige, who is now deceased, who has life events that fit the narrative of the person from whom the painting was bought, while there doesn't seem to be substantial evidence connecting Peter Doig to those events, or to ever having used the name Peter Doige, seems likely to a be problem for the plaintiff at trial, however.)
> This is the crux - is there any evidence of this?
Yes, though what's reported in the article is fairly weak indirect evidence, and there seems to be much stronger evidence on the other side.
> How did this get to court!
As soon as someone files a lawsuit, it "gets to court". The threshold for that is extremely low. Even for going to trial, the threshold is low: essentially, the complaint needs to state a legal claim and there needs to be some evidence from which one might conclude that the claim is true -- evaluating the relative credibility of that evidence against other evidence is what trials are for.
Its recounted in the article, involving artistic analysis and other things. Its quite indirect, and seems much less substantial than the apparent evidence that it was painted by a very different person with a similar name, but again, weighing the opposing evidence is what a trial is for.
>Mr. Doig and his lawyers say they have identified the real artist, a man named Peter Edward Doige. He died in 2012, but his sister said he had attended Lakehead University, served time in Thunder Bay and painted.
>“I believe that Mr. Fletcher is mistaken and that he actually met my brother, Peter, who I believe did this painting,” the sister, Marilyn Doige Bovard, said in a court declaration. She said the work’s desert scene appeared to show the area in Arizona where her mother moved after a divorce and where her brother spent some time. She recognized, she said, the saguaro cactus in the painting.
>The prison’s former art teacher recognized a photograph of Ms. Bovard’s brother as a man who had been in his class and said he had watched him paint the painting, according to the teacher’s affidavit."