Poster Collecting: Authentication

Video Transcript

"Welcome to starting a poster collection. Today we're going to talk about authenticating your item. One of the biggest difficulties in collecting posters of any genre is the fact that there is just a mountain of fakes and phonies out there. As with almost anything you buy in today?s world. Like when you're dealing in concert posters that are signed and numbered by artists usually they're on a much thicker paper. You can see the signature. You can actually almost smudge the artist?s signature on them to make sure that they're real but then you're smudging the artist?s signature. There are things which you can use to tell that they're actually authentic. You can tell just by looking at a piece of paper. Does it have an age. So if you're looking at a concert poster from the 60's if it looks like it was made on a piece of paper which was made yesterday you know that it's just not real. You know that this is a fake. On commercial posters there are, you can usually tell by the fact that it's a grainy, not distinct image. It's something which, it's not vivid. It's not bright. It's kind of dull and the paper is usually incredibly thin and very, very cheap. If you take a look at this poster you can see that their guns look like guns but kind of not. They're kind of fuzzy. Their hair, their eyes, the whole image, it's just kind of blurry and very cheap. Compared to the actual poster which it is ripping off. See how you can see the, John Travolta's and Samuel L. Jackson's eyes and you can see their guns, you can see the outlines of their hands. You get a much more vivid image of what the true actual poster is supposed to look like. So, to give you a good example of what's an original, here's this. And to give a good example of something which is a cheap imitation there is this."