Author: Derek Fincham

Looting and Cultural Destruction Happens in Big Prosperous Cities Too

The environmental justice movement got its start here in Houston when communities saw the unjust impact of hazardous siting decisions. Today this same neighborhood is at risk of gentrification, historical destruction, and architectural looting. I made a case and talked about the idea of cultural justice for areas like this in a forthcoming piece.

But I suspect Lenwood Johnson, in this terrific video report by Houston’s alt-weekly, the Free Press, makes a more compelling case than I ever could:

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

New Book on the Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities

I’ve been forwarded information on what looks to be an excellent new work by Janet Ulph and Ian Smith, The Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities: International Recovery and Criminal and Civil Liability, published by Hart. The publisher has kindly offered readers of this blog a discount. Here are the details:

This new text provides practical guidance on the modern law relating to cultural objects which have been stolen, looted or illegally exported. It explains how English criminal law principles, including money laundering measures, apply to those who deal in cultural objects in a domestic or international setting. It discusses the recovery of works of art and antiquities in the English courts where there are competing claims between private individuals, or between individuals and the UK Government or a foreign State. Significantly, this text also provides an exposition of the law where a British law enforcement agency, or a foreign law enforcement agency, is involved in the course of criminal or civil proceedings in an English court. The growth of relevant international instruments, which include not only those devoted to the protection of mankind’s cultural heritage but also those concerned with money laundering and serious organised crime, provide a backdrop to this discussion. The UK’s ratification of the UNESCO Convention on Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property 1970 in 2002 is considered. The problems posed in attempting to curb trafficking in art and antiquities are explored and the effectiveness of the current law is analysed. Janet Ulph is Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Leicester and the main author ofCommercial Fraud: Civil Liability, Human Rights, and Money Laundering (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Ian Smith is a barrister based in London at 11 Stone Buildings, and co-author of Smith, Owen and Bodnar, Asset Recovery: Criminal Confiscation and Civil Recovery (2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2007).
 Link to table of contentshttp://www.hartpub.co.uk/pdf/9781841139647.pdf
Oct 2012   352pp   Hbk   9781841139647RSP: £75 / €97 / US$150 / CDN$150DISCOUNT PRICE FOR BLOG READERS: £60 / €78 / US $120 /  CDN $120
http://www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?isbn=9781841139647
Order OnlineIf you would like to place an order you can do so through the Hart Publishing website (link above). To receive the discount please mention ref:‘ULPH_SMITHBLOG’ in the special instructions field. Please note that the discount will not be shown on your order but will be applied when your order is processed.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Reactions to the Kunsthal Theft

Yesterday we learned that the Kunsthal Museum (I’ve also heard it described as essentially a gallery) had suffered a theft of seven works of art in a late night theft, likely aided by the building’s difficult-to-secure windows. The tireless Catherine Sezgin has a good roundup of all the news reports at the ARCA blog.  Here’s some reactions from the security and law enforcement experts I found thoughtful:

Anthony Amore, the director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston debunks the popular impression of art thieves in an Op-Ed for the New York Times:

As usual, a combination of master art thieves and faulty security was blamed. But this seductive scenario is often, in fact, far from the truth. Most of us envision balaclava-clad cat burglars rappelling through skylights into museums and, like Hollywood characters, contorting their bodies around motion-detecting laser beams. Of course, few of us have valuable paintings on our walls, and even fewer have suffered the loss of a masterpiece. But in the real world, thieves who steal art are not debonair “Thomas Crown Affair” types. Instead, they are the same crooks who rob armored cars for cash, pharmacies for drugs and homes for jewelry. They are often opportunistic and almost always shortsighted.

Chris Marinello of the Art Loss Register tells NPR’s Morning Edition:

MONTAGNE: And do insurers pay ransom?  
MARINELLO: Absolutely not, they do not want to encourage further art theft and then the thieves are going to have to go to Plan C. They usually contact me and see if I have any ability to pay them to return the works. They won’t succeed there, either. The pieces are likely to travel in the underworld at a fraction of their true value, maybe five or 10 percent, used as currency for drugs, weapons, even something called a Get Out of Jail Free card. If a criminal thinks that they’re going to be arrested, they may try to make a deal with the prosecutor for a lesser sentence, if they have information that leads to the recovery of the seven paintings.   
MONTAGNE: Is it likely than that they will resurface eventually?  
MARINELLO: Well, I have a lot of faith in the Dutch police and they are meticulous. We might see something over the next few weeks. I mean sometimes when they realize they can’t get rid of the haul that they just brought home, they just return them. But if we don’t see that happening in the next few weeks, it could be decades before these resurface.

Bob Wittman, formerly of the FBI’s art crime team talks to the Atlantic:

Here’s the story on selling stolen art. Paintings that are stolen like last night, those pieces that were taken out of the Kuhnsthal museum, are not going to get sold on any kind of market, whether it’s a black market or any kind of market. They’re going to get recovered. But what happens with pieces that are worth much less — let’s say the $10,000 and less market, pieces that aren’t well known — is a burglar goes into a home and steals a $5,000 painting. That can be sold in a flea market, that can be sold on what they call the secondary art market, because it’s not well known. And that’s the vast majority of art heists. It’s not these once a year museum thefts. It’s burglaries around the world. And that’s the major part of the art theft business and the collectibles business. Even the smaller works of art have no value if they have no provenance, authenticity, or legal title. But when you talk about pieces that are under that amount, people don’t do the due diligence. When people go in and pay $5 million for a Cézannes, they’re going to do the due diligence to make sure everything is right. If a piece is $300 at a flea market, it’s not done.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Massive Art Theft at the Kunsthal museum in the Netherlands

One of the 7 stolen works

In what is being called a well-planned and bold theft, thieves stole seven works in a pre-dawn theft from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. Alarms went off at the museum after 3 am, and security found there were 7 missing works.

Ton Cremers told the Dutch outlet De Volkskrant that the problem may be with the layout of the museum itself, which while great to view art is difficult to secure: “As a gallery it is a gem. But it is an awful building to have to protect. If you hold your face up to the window at the back you have a good view of the paintings, which makes it all too easy for thieves to plot taking them from the walls”.

The large windows at the Kunsthal museum

Many will likely begin imagining what high sums these stolen works could bring on the market. And there will of course be much of the usual speculation about why the works were stolen and how the thieves plan to benefit from their theft. But much of that discussion is moot because these stolen works are now well-known. Images of the stolen works are surely being given to the Art Loss Register, law enforcement agencies, and art dealers, so these works can never be sold in a legitimate market. In one sense then their market value means little.

 They have a kind of value though, in that they are so precious, that the museum, the owners, and the authorities may be willing to take—or at least the thief thinks they will take—the unwise step of paying a ransom. Or other criminals may try to launder some or all of the works through different individuals, in much the same way the Leonardo Yarnwinder was transferred. As a kind of a very beautiful set of poker chips.
It might be possible that a rich mastermind has so-enjoyed these works that he or she hired thieves to steal the art.But these real-life Dr. No’s don’t really exist. I admit it makes for good Bond villains, but there has been no convincing evidence that this is why people are stealing rare objects. Most likely of all, these beautiful clear windows made for such an easy target that the thieves stole first and will decide to worry about selling the works later.

Here is the current list of stolen works:

Pablo Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin;
Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune;
Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London, and Charing Cross Bridge, London;
Paul Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte,
Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait and
Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Footnotes

  • The oft-stolen Ghent altarpiece is being restored at a cost of $1.3 million, only a piece or two will be removed from display at a time. But if you can’t make it to Ghent you can view the whole altarpiece in 100 billion pixels here.
  • The now-closed Knoedler art gallery has settled a suit involving an allegedly forged Jackson Pollock. 
  • In case you missed it, Arnold Peter Weiss, a prominent physician and coin collector wrote an essay on buying ancient coins as part of a plea agreement. Chasing Aphrodite has published the essay on scribd.
  • Public lands officials in Idaho are urging people not to disturb the increasing number of antiquities and other sites which are being revealed by the plague of forest fires.
  • Apparently some use their art to secure loans.
  • The four thieves in the theft of Chinese art from the Fitzwilliam in Cambridgeshire have been convicted, but where’s the art?
  • Art forger Ken Perenyi continues to claim he’s doing everyone a favor by forgin’ art. I’ve got his book sitting on my desk but haven’t had a chance to read it just yet. In an interview with Janice Harper he claims:

“My lawyers said at the time, ‘Ken, when your own victims circle the wagons to prevent you from being indicted, that’s got to be the definition of the perfect crime.'” Why would they protect him? Perhaps a better question is why would they turn him in? To do so would reveal not only the fact that they were duped. It would also mean they could not continue profiting from his work. “I would say from the art world establishment… the money is immaterial. They’re not interested in trying to recover money at all. What they are worried about is their reputation. … At the time of [the FBI] investigation, they had several important paintings that had gone through the auction houses that they knew were authored by me. And by looking at those paintings they would say, ‘Oh my God, if he was good enough to do this, this certainly wasn’t the first. So if he’s indicted, what is this going to open up?'” What it would open up, Perenyi suggests, is that there are well over a thousand of his paintings out there right now, masquerading as “authentic.” How does that impact the buyers of these works?

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Tushnet on Images in Design Patents

The 1937 design patent for the coke bottle

Rebecca Tushnet of Georgetown Law has an essay titled: “The Eye Alone is the Judge: Images and Design patents“, 19 J. Intell. Prop. L. 409 (2012).

Design patents are an area of intellectual property law focused entirely on the visual, unlike copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, or the various sui generis protections that have occasionally been enacted for specific types of innovation. Judges and lawyers in general are highly uncomfortable with images, yet design patents force direct legal engagement with images. This short piece offers an outsider’s view of what design patent law has to say about the use of images as legal tools, why tests for design patent infringement are likely to stay unsatisfactory, and what lessons other fields of intellectual property, specifically copyright, might take from design patent.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Rothko Vandalized at the Tate Modern

The defaced Rothko

On Sunday afternoon at the Tate Modern a man walked up to this untitled Mark Rothko mural and painted over the work. The man then left the building. The Guardian report has the reaction of a witness to the criminal act:

Tim Wright, who posted a picture on Twitter of the canvas after it was defaced, said that he saw the man sitting quietly in front of the painting beforehand. “Then we heard the sound of a pen, but by the time we turned around he was pretty much finished with his tag,” said Wright, who was with his girlfriend on a weekend visit to London from Bristol. “The pen ink then just dripped down the painting. Once we realised what had happened, we went to find a member of staff. They were really shocked when they came and saw what he had done.” The museum said in a statement: “Tate can confirm that at 15.25 this afternoon there was an incident at Tate Modern in which a visitor defaced one of Rothko’s Seagram murals by applying a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting. The police are currently investigating the incident.” The gallery was closed for a short time after the incident. The canvas, one of a number by Rothko owned by the Tate, was in a room with several other works painted by the Russian-born artist, who emigrated to the US at the age of 10 and went on to become one of America’s most important postwar artists.

These incidents keep happening with alarming regularity. Proactive museum security may have been able to prevent this. The museum will certainly be taking a look at its own security, but the very small amount of time it probably takes to deface a work in this way makes the task difficult. Large museums which are very accessible to the public are a real challenge for security. Given the Menil tagging here in our neighborhood in Houston this summer, are we exaggerating too much to say the street art tagging movement is moving inside museums.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

More Reports of Damaged Heritage in Syria

Aleppo’s Souk in Better Days
The Souk on fire Saturday

There are more and more reports emerging from Syria which tell of destruction, looted museums, and smuggling salable objects. On Saturday Aleppo’s souk was caught in the middle of fighting between rebels and government forces and the souk burned. The old city of Aleppo, where the souk is located is a UNESCO world heritage site. UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova criticized the destruction over the weekend:

The human suffering caused by this situation is already extreme. That the fighting is now destroying cultural heritage that bears witness to the country’s millenary history – valued and admired the world over – makes it even more tragic. The Aleppo souks have been a thriving part of Syria’s economic and social life since the city’s beginnings. They stand as testimony to Aleppo’s importance as a cultural crossroads since the second millennium B.C.

The souk is situated underneath Aleppo’s 13th century citadel. There are reports that government forces have taken up positions in the ancient building. Rodrigo Martin, an expert on Syrian sites said the Souk “was a unique example of medieval commercial architecture” because it offered a progression of hundreds of years of architectural periods, and had been well-preserved.

There have also been reports that items from the National Museum of Aleppo have been moved into the central bank in Damascus for safekeeping. But there have also been reports in Time that museums elsewhere in the country are being looted and arms are being traded for antiquities at the Syria/Lebanon border. In Cairo there will be an emergency meeting to discuss possible efforts the international community can take in response to the damage and looting according to a report in ahram.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com