James Meyer, a longtime assistant to the famous contemporary artist Jasper Johns, has recently been arrested for the sale of some twenty-two unfinished artworks to an unnamed art gallery in Manhattan. As Johns’s assistant for over twenty-five years, Meyer had access to numerous unfinished works by the artist, many of which were located within a file drawer in Sharon, Connecticut. According to several reports, Meyer had sold the work under the agreement that purchasers would not exhibit or sell the work for at least eight years.
The unnamed art gallery in question had received a substantial sum of about $6.5 million for the collection, of which $3.4 million went directly into Meyer’s own pocket. Oh, and if that wasn’t ridiculous enough James Meyer who is an artist himself, directly cites Johns’s as an ongoing source of inspiration for his own work. Meyer himself defends that the twenty-two unauthorized works were “gifts.” (Image: ArtChive)
