The artificially inflated valuation of a donation to a museum is exactly how many paintings ended up in museums. The IRS cracked down of paintings created to be donations for tax fraud purposes. The same scheme has been tried with, property, cars, clothing, furniture, horses, and boats. The main issue is FMV, fair market value. You can't claim it's worth $100,000 if nobody will pay that. It's especially difficult without comparable sales of the item to value your item. There have been cases of dealers trading items among themselves to establish an artificial market value. No money changed hands just paperwork. Mike mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu