The single most permeating problem of arts journalism is that the vast majority of it is promotional. In an ideal world, a major news outlet could ignore, say, a new big budget action movie—or even just relegate it to a capsule review—just on the grounds that there was nothing interesting to say about it.

That, of course, will never happen, but that’s the world we live in. In that context, the real test of quality in any newspaper, however, is whether it ever does stories that aren’t promotional.

Do the junket interviews, the big splashy Friday arts-section spread on the new Will Smith movie. But do you ever do a story that in one way or another isn’t tied to a product’s being put on sale to the public?

A good example of what arts sections should be doing is in the NYT today, a story about complaints from passengers on cruise ships that they got ripped off by a company that stages art auctions on board.

(I’d love to hear nominations from readers of stories published in their cities that show reporting and initiative.)

The disgruntled passengers say that the scam is to tell people they are being offered works appraised at some high figure; when they get back on shore, they find they’ve purchased works routinely sold for a fraction of that amount. One case study by the Times centers around a San Diego businessman named Luis Maldonado:

Reached by phone in Michigan, Albert Scaglione, the founder of Park West, said he stood by the company’s certificates of authenticity and its appraisals. “I am absolutely confident that if we had the opportunity to give Mr. Maldonado the history of our pricing, he would have a different view,” Mr. Scaglione said on Monday.

But about two hours after The New York Times asked Mr. Scaglione about Mr. Maldonado’s case, Park West phoned Mr. Maldonado to offer him a full refund.

The Times story notes that the Arizona Republic, the metro daily in Phoenix, did a similar investigation of the company last year. I had to search a half-dozen ways before it came up on the paper’s web site—and then only to tell me I had to buy it. No sense in letting people know about the paper’s investigative journalism!

An apparent reprint of the story, published in the Arizona Daily Star, in Tucson, is here. It deserves mention as well; reporter Dennis Wagner describes an aspect of the way the company does business that isn’t mentioned in the Times story:

If [the customer] had read the invoice on his purchase, he would have found a disclaimer: “No verbal agreements or representations (by Park West agents) shall be of any force or effect unless set forth in writing.”

If he had read the certificate of authenticity, he would have learned that it does not apply to guarantees about the work’s title, lot size, rarity, provenance or importance.

And if he had inspected the appraisal, he would have seen that Park West “assumes no liability for claims that our appraisal is inaccurate.”