单选题 Christophe Petyt is sitting in a Paris caré, listing the adornments of his private art collection: several Van Goghs, and a comprehensive selection of the better impressionists. "I can," he says quietly, "really get to know any painting I like, and so can you. " Half an hour later I am sitting in his office with Degas' The Jockeys on my lap. If fine art looks good in a gallery, believe me, it feels even better in your hands. Petyt is the world's leading dealer in fake masterpieces, a man whose activities provoke both admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the painting and for as little as $1,000 he will deliver you a copy so well executed that even the original artist might have been taken in.
Petyt's company employs over eighty painters, each ordered in the style of a particular artist or school. "We choose them very carefully," he says. "They're usually people with very good technique but not much creativity, who are unlikely to make it as artists in their own right. But they love the great works and have real insight into what's gone into them. " Every work is individually ordered, using new canvases and traditional oil paints, before being artificially aged by a variety of simple but ingenious techniques.
The notional value of the original is not the determining factor, however, when it comes to setting the retail value of Petyt's paintings. This is actually linked to the amount of effort and expertise that has gone into producing the copy. An obscure miniature may therefore cost much more than a bigger, better-known painting by a grand master. The Degas I'm holding looks as though it came off the artist's easel yesterday. Before being sold it has to be aged, and this, so to speak, is the real "art" of the copy. A few minutes in a hot oven can put years on a canvas, black tea apparently stains it beautifully and new frames can be buried underground, then sprayed with acid.
The view when Petyt started out was that very little of this could be legal. He was pursued through the French courts by museums and by descendants of the artists. This concern was perhaps understandable in a country that has been rocked by numerous art fraud scandals. " The establishment was suspicious of us," huffs Petyt, "but for the wrong reasons, I think Some people want to keep all the best art for themselves. " He won the case and as the law now stands, the works and signatures of any artist who has been dead for seventy years can be freely copied. The main proviso is that the copy cannot be passed off to dealers as the real thing. To prevent this every new painting is indelibly marked on the back of the canvas, and as an additional precaution a tiny hidden piece of gold leaf is worked into the paint.
Until he started the business ten years ago, Paetyt, a former business-school student, barely knew one artist from another. Then one particular painting by Van Gogh caught his eye. At $10 million, it was well beyond his reach so he came up with the iclea of getting an art-student friend to paint him a copy. In an old frame it looked absolutely wonderful, and Petyt began to wonder what market there might be for it. He picked up a coffee-table book of well-known paintings, earmarked a random selection of works and got his friend to knock them off. "Within a few months I had about twenty good copies. " he says, "so I organised an exhibition. In two weeks we'd sold the lot, and got commissions for sixty more. " It became clear that a huge and lucrative market existed for fake art.

单选题 In the first paragraph, the writer indicates that he shares ______.

A. Petyt's criticism of the work of a range of painters
B. the art world's suspicious attitude towards Petyt's activities
C. the general inability to distinguish copies from real paintings
D. Petyt's desire to appreciate great works of art

单选题 The painters employed by Petyt ______.

A. have been specially trained in the techniques of forgery
B. were chosen because of the quality of their original work
C. have to be versatile in terms of the range of styles they reproduce
D. make copies of those paintings customers specifically request

单选题 The price of the of Petyt's painting depends on ______.

A. the status of the original artist
B. the time and skill needed to create it
C. the degree to which it has to be artificially aged
D. the extent to which the copy truly replicates the original

单选题 As a result of the court case he won, Petyt ______.

A. no longer reproduces fake signatures on paintings he sells
B. has been able to copy the work of more contemporary artists
C. is obliged to make sure his products can be identified as copies
D. has agreed not to market his products through certain channels

单选题 What do we learn about the way Petyt selected the paintings that would appear in his exhibition?

A. It was not something that he'd carefully chosen.
B. They needed to be ones that could be reproduced quickly.
C. They had to be pictures that would appeal to the buying public.
D. He did some research into the work of artists he'd always admire&