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Posted By: Scott

What if you had been trying forever to find a painting by Picasso and you finally purchased one that was "just right". Several years after it's been hanging on your living room wall, impressing your friends, a source of great pleasure to you and your family...you find out that someone associated with the person you bought it from was busted for forging Picasso paintings...ouch!

I think you might just say to yourself "I have LOA's and provenance, therefore it is real"...but you would never do any further research to determine if that was in fact the case. Or perhaps you yourself are a Picasso expert and you always had misgivings about that painting - it never looked exactly right, but you avoided giving it the same close inspection you would if you were asked to authenticate someone else's Picasso. Now you never get closer to it than ten feet.