Hello.

I worked for Park West Galleries and I have no hard facts to substantiate some of these claims apart from what happened at training and conferences, which I was witness to myself. However so much of what you say rings true. They are a bunch of sharks. The sales techniques we were taught during training were full throttle.

There was very little art knowledge required, as one of the articles stated.

The amount of times a "unique" mixed media by Peter Max would suddenly be back onboard the ship was amazing, but oddly enough we could never get an Oil on Canvas from him, even if (and I had two such occasions) the client specifically wanted one. Strange!

At one of the conferences one of the other auctioneers wandered downstairs by mistake and walked into a room with a whole lot of young people painting. They were painting (copying) Tarkay from one on an easel. The auctioneer that stumbled upon them asked: So did Tarkay do that one? To which the reply was: "No, 'Jeff' did that one." Now who is Jeff???? So during the conference every toast was made to Jeff as a joke but this is a fairly serious matter when people are dropping a few thousand on his so called authentic watercolors.

At the next conference there was security, so that situation could not happen again.

During the training or conferences whenever somebody asked a valid question about, for example how many Rembrandts are we going to pull, we were always given wishy-washy answers that implied we didn't need to know or simply couldn't understand the complexity of the "inner" art dealings.

At the time we were all making money but almost everybody knew it was a scam. We even joked about suing them after we were done on the cruise line.

We had the auctions taped but we were specifically told that the selling happens outside the auction and were trained as such. "Checkout" for people that had bid or won prizes was the selling time not the auction.

Feel free to quote me but please keep it anonymous. I'm done with the company and don't feel like having any further dealing with them.

Regards

(auctioneer)