“Buy low and sell high” has long been the businessperson’s creed. And “caveat emptor”—let the buyer beware—absolves those looking to make a profit from taking responsibility for unscrupulous deals. Fairness doesn’t come into play, being less of an economic concept than a moral one, and those who shout “But that’s unfair!” in matters of business can, wrongly or rightly, come off as whiners. Money talks in the art market, and flipping art is at this point only mildly controversial.

“But that’s fraud!” might be the more apt lament, if only sometimes. A number of lawsuits have been filed in recent years by upset people who sold artwork for relatively modest amounts of money only to see the buyers quickly sell it again for much larger amounts. Occasionally, these litigants have been successful. Most often, they haven’t been.

One can pity the elderly couple in France, identified in court papers only as Mr. and Mrs. Fournier, who sold an old wooden mask they had kept in their attic to an antiques dealer for $165, who then turned around and sold the mask—now identified as a rare Gabonese Ngil mask—for $4.6 million at auction. The couple brought a lawsuit against the dealer for not informing them of what they had, but lost last month. Adding insult to injury, the judge criticized the Fourniers for “their carelessness and casualness,” since they hadn’t made any efforts, such as hiring an expert, to learn “the true historic and artistic value” of the mask.

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On the other hand, in 2008, a New York district court found that Canadian widow Lorette Jolles Shefner was tricked into selling a painting by renowned French painter Chaim Soutine to two experts on the artist—Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow—for $1 million in the spring of 2004. They resold the 1923 work titled Piece of Beef to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. within a few months for $2 million. The court ordered the museum to return the painting to the now deceased woman’s estate and the two experts were fined.

But you win some, you lose some. Yet another lawsuit, this one filed in 2008 by a group of........

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