I don't believe that a "Man walks out of San Francisco art gallery with Salvador Dali painting worth $20K."

But that's an NBC headline. I'm just going to guess that NBC doesn't know the difference between a painting a print. A Salvador Dali painting isn't going to cost so little. A Dali print might sell for that. Whether it's worth so much is open to question.

Here's ABC News: "Brazen thief caught on camera with stolen Salvador Dali etching 'Burning Giraffe' from San Francisco gallery." Key word: "etching." It's a print. How many copies of Dali's etching "Burning Giraffe" are there?

And, actually, that print seems to be called "Surrealistic Bullfight — Burning Giraffe."

Dali had a burning giraffe in a painting called "Burning Giraffe," and "Dalí first used the burning giraffe image in his 1930 film L'Âge d'Or (The Golden Age). It appears again in 1937 in the painting The Invention of Monsters. Dalí described this image as 'the masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster.' He believed it to be a premonition of war."

So let's not get too confused about the burning giraffe.

Here's the original (and incredibly dumb) appearance of Dali's burning giraffe in "L'Âge d'Or":



Here's a 1998 article from the NYT, "Putting Some Order To All the Dali Prints, Both Real and Fake":

''Le more confusion is more better,'' said Salvador Dali, charming his devotees and laying down a formidable challenge to posterity. His dizzying output of nearly 2,000 graphics, often executed with workshop artisans and widely faked by a flourishing counterfeiting industry, has left art dealers, collectors and law enforcement agents agonizing over what is an authentic Dali print....

For more than 40 years, [Albert] Field, a teacher, mountain climber, art scholar, singer, nudist and devoted Dalinian, has worked to reduce the confusion, cataloguing the thousands of authentic works and fakes...

He debunked accounts that the ailing Dali had undermined the integrity of his own work by signing thousands of blank sheets in the early 1980's. ''This is a lie spread by crooks,'' Mr. Field said. ''When he signed a blank, it was accounted for by his lawyers.''

Oh? Okaaaay. Lawyers. I get it. "Crooks" are lying, but he did sign blanks, but he had lawyers.

But he said unscrupulous associates and even Dali's wife, Gala, took advantage of his infirmities by signing dubious deals for unsupervised publication of his works, opening the way to widespread fakery.

It is Dali's great popularity and marketability that have made him irresistible to art forgers, Mr. Field said, especially since Dali often left it to artisans to make the printing plates for reproducing his work by lithography, relief, intaglio or seri graphy. Thus, he said, aside from paintings, not all Dalis can be called original.

Others are what Mr. Field calls ''cooperative prints,'' a phrase that makes some other experts cringe. But Mr. Field said that such a print could be ''genuine'' if not ''original'' if three conditions were met: the artist intended his original to be turned into a print, supervised the process and signed the result....