$100 Million Caravaggio Pulled From Salander's Show

The Salander - O'Reilly affair has further dissolved:

Yesterday, Clovis Whitfield, a London dealer who was collaborating with dealer Lawrence Salander on two exhibitions that included a Caravaggio (actually, its authenticity is disputed) priced at $100 million, pulled about half of the pieces from the shows (including the Caravaggio) because he "didn't feel secure after the experience of the last four days." Salander has been embroiled in some 15 lawsuits that variously accuse him of failing to repay debts and operating a Ponzi scheme. On October 11th, a court ordered his gallery to be padlocked after allegations that he had ignored instructions not to remove art from the tony Upper East Side townhouse.

For the lurid details, read this, this, and this. (Everybody's latched on to the spectacle, which the New York Observer Mario Naves suggests may be "the Enron of the art world.")

What took Whitfield so long to figure out that no upstanding collector is going to buy an exceptionally overpriced — it may be a masterpiece, but it's still overpriced — painting of questionable provenance?