No other member of Team Norsigian (according to their resumés) knows anything at all about photography, or claims such knowledge. So this trio — Patrick Alt, Robert Moeller, and David Streets — represents the total expertise on photography brought to bear on this find by Team Norsigian. I estimate the cumulative value of that expertise as less than zero. It’s worth pointing out, too, that even in those ranks there’s dissension. Moeller has said of Street’s $200 million estimate, “I find it rather puzzling.” Alt, to his credit, is refreshingly straightforward: “It’s the biggest bunch of crap I’ve heard in my life.” […]
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There’s a dark comedy emerging here, a sardonic parable of wishful self-reinvention by middle-aged men: wall painter Rick Norsigian as an autodidact photo connoisseur, nudie photographer Patrick Alt as a “photography expert,” museum curator Robert Moeller as another, and art hustler David Streets as yet another. I don’t want a piece of the action from Norsigian’s print sales and licensing revenues; all that may end up going to the Adams Trust, depending on how the rights issue shakes down. I want an option on the Hollywood film of the story; that’s where the big bucks lie hidden. I’m talking starring roles for Jeff Bridges, John Travolta, Jim Belushi . . . […] |
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Team Norsigian Accentuates the Negative (6)
Team Norsigian’s strategy has been haplessly ass-backwards from the git-go. They should have started quietly, with a serious forensic investigation by recognized experts, using the resources at the Center for Creative Photography (where Adams’s archive resides) to verify or disprove Adams’s authorship of the negatives. Based on the results, they could have moved forward to announce Adams’s authorship, if hard evidence justified that. Then they could perhaps have negotiated some agreement about rights licensing with the Adams Trust and Adams Gallery. Instead, they sent in the clowns — a more improbable and implausible cluster of self-styled experts than I could have invented ― for a comedy of errors. […]