Dali Planet #166: Plaza de Dali
In 1986 the City of Madrid opened Plaza de Dali. Guidebooks and websites have little to say about it despite the square being occupied by his one-tonne sculpture “Homage to Newton”, dubbed “a salute to gravity”. Google Earth users can find a Sketchup model of the plaza, created by “Demian”, here.
This was not a good period for the Dali legacy. For years every mention of his name in the papers seemed to involve litigation. In 1986 a New York grand jury indicted seven people for misrepresenting Dali copies as lithographs. The following year the owners of the Shelby Fine Arts Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were convicted of fraud, criminal conspiracy and criminal solicitation over the sale of Dali graphics, and a Manhattan couple were found guilty on similar charges in a separate case.
In 1990 the Hawaiian conmen William Mett and Marvin Wiseman were convicted in history’s largest art-scam trial, a five-month marathon in which Dali’s memory was repeatedly shamed for his own avarice.
For all the anguish in the art market over whether Dali prints were really Dali prints, his paintings’ value soared. In 1987 Japanese investors paid $2.3 million for “Lincoln in Dalivision”, a version of “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea”, and soon after that, $2.4 million for “The Battle of Tetuan”.
