It depends who paints the painting.  The artist or his impersonator.

The United States has indicted a forger and his accomplices for fraud and evasion of taxes.  The hundred year old Knoedler Gallery in New York closed as part of this disclosure.  One humorous piece of the proceedings is the statement that the artists copied — Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, were easy to copy.

“The defendants earned more than $33 million from the scheme to create and sell the Fake Works. To conceal the illegal nature and origin of the proceeds from the scheme, Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz and Jesus Angel Bergantinos Diaz, the defendants, and Rosales worked together to launder the proceeds by transferring the proceeds through foreign and domestic bank accounts that they controlled.

In addition, as set forth below, to increase the amount of proceeds he kept from the unlawful scheme, Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, the defendant, unlawfully impeded and obstructed the Internal Revenue Service (‘IRS’) by hiding millions of dollars in his unlawful income from the IRS and by knowingly failing to report the existence of the foreign bank accounts that he controlled or maintained an interest in, as required by law.

Finally, in an effort to hide his role in the unlawful scheme, Pei Shen Qian, the defendant, lied to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his role in the fraud. In particular, during an interview with FBI agents investigating the scheme, Qian falsely claimed, among other things, that he did not recognize Rosales’s name; that Qian was unfamiliar with the names of certain artists (including artists whose names Qian had repeatedly and fraudulently signed on paintings QIAN created, in order to trick purchasers into believing those artists had created the paintings); and that Qian had never attempted to create paintings mimicking the style of certain abstract expressionist artists.”