It reminded me of Erin Crowe's
50 portraits of Alan Greenspan, but I'm not sure her work was quite this "finished."
Though if it is hers, there's kind of a double appropriation, given the issue as to whether she had the "right" to market his image without his permission.
We were at an upscale Beijing market once, where one dealer was selling some kind of top American-branded winter parka -- I can't recall the brand -- and it looked great and was a fraction of what you'd expect to pay. Our driver, an employee of the Chinese division of the company, stopped us, took the jacket and turned it inside out, and pointed to the telltale flawed stitching that (to his keen, practiced eye) branded the item a fake. He had a few words with the dealer (a lot more Mandarin than we knew) and off we went.
We were later challenged by a company representative in Taipei to look at the box and the contents of an American company's software product (Microsoft, actually) and a second. They were utterly indistinguishable to the eye. But in fact, one was genuine, the other a perfect copy, selling for a relative pittance -- but good money in Taiwan for stolen goods.
It's an entrenched way of doing business and making a living in much of large parts of the world. It will bring the end to paying over $100 for a pair of sports shoes that cost $6 to produce in Nicaragua, and sadly, much of the art market will go that way, too. Not only is it not thought improper in these cultures, it's encouraged and rewarded. And it's not just foreign stuff that's lifted. We didn't purchase souvenir replicas of the Terra Cotta Warriors while we were in Xi'an, because we'd already bought the same items at a traveling exhibition -- from and officially sanctioned by the Chinese government -- in Taipei. The proprietor of the shop in Xi'an assured us (unconvincingly) that we'd bought fakes, claiming that only the Xi'an site was authorized to produce and sell such things. Sheesh.
Despite the apology received from the eBayer, more likely she just didn't like getting caught and exposed in the fraud and losing face, albeit fleetingly and with respect to a stranger. Your images have probably already been relocated to another site. With the Internet, intellectual and creative property rights are pretty spongy.
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