Lik is following the painter Tom Kincaid's business model, who got into building sticky sweet theme subdivisions where everything was designed and color matched by him. Halfway into that project he was indicted, and drank himself to death. Lots of "investors" in his artwork had already lost their retirement savings, imagining that mass-produced works would hold value as if real paintings. But that was all dependent on more and more and more people buying into the same trend, just like a pyramid scheme. What actually ended the run is a little more complicated - stiffing his own gallery franchisees to make up the loss, as his decor empire rapidly caved in on itself. His life story would make an interesting movie, with a sad Shakespearian ending.
Lik is more cautious than that, but has had his near-misses with the law. He's opening up a gallery where Michael Fatali shut one down, who is presumably now retired. Fatali could make seamless big Ciba prints of Southwestern subjects that truly were almost psychedelically colored in nature - entirely credible if one has themselves encountered similar things in that part of the world - actual iridescent reflections in desert-varnished slot canyon streams, and so forth. No Photoshop needed. But he too was tourist oriented, and got tempted into sandwiched composite images, yet highly detailed due to optical rather than digital printing, based on stacked 8x10 chromes - quite a qualitative contrast to Lik's comparatively smudgy and grossly artificially colorized inkjet work.
Fatali was quite a BS marketer too, claiming extraordinary "appraisal values" for some of his prints, and having "waited for the light" days on end at "secret" locations actually visited by many, who see the same things, but just don't have the big camera or darkroom facility to render it that way. Then there was his serious altercation with Smokey the Bear, which ruined his reputation among other outdoor photographers, and got him banned from Natl Parks for awhile. So it goes. The sad thing is that none of that nonsense was really necessary. Someone either likes your work or they don't, when they walk into the gallery.
