Author: Derek Fincham

Netherlands Returns Iraqi Objects

The BBC reports on the transfer of ownership of 69 objects from the Netherlands to Iraq which had been illegally removed from that country after the 2003 invasion.

The objects were taken from Dutch art dealers and will likely be displayed in the Dutch National Museum for Antiquities until they can be returned to Iraq.

Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, said the world should “cherish and honour” Iraq’s history as the cradle of civilisation. 
“These objects lose a lot of their value if they are stolen from their site,” he said. 
Mr Plasterk said the items were surrendered by Dutch art dealers once police informed them they had been stolen.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Increase in Visitorship to Historic Sites

In the Art Newspaper, Brook S. Mason reports on the increase in visitors to artist sites and historic homes in the US and the UK—a product perhaps of the economic downturn.  Though the art market may be suffering, people may be staying closer to home and visiting the historic sites and areas near them:

“Staycations” in the US seem to be driving attendance at some National Trust properties. “We have anecdotal evidence confirming that people are spending less, staying closer to home and visiting more of our sites,” says James Vaughan, National Trust vice president for historic sites in Washington, DC. But the US National Trust, with a membership of only 250,000, pales in comparison to the British National Trust, which has 3.6m members . . .


“We were passive before, but now we’re building an entire community by asking literally everyone to support preservation and modernism,” says Glass House executive director Christie MacLear. “Considering that none of the people giving $1,000 and under had ever supported us before, those figures are really compelling,” she says . . .  


“There’s a recalibration of consumer spending from buying a bigger house or jazzy designer handbag to now focusing on cultural experiences instead,” says Ms MacLear. She has found that visitors characterise the Glass House as “inspiring”. Artists Julian Schnabel, Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman and Frank Stella have all visited within the past year.

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

Bookkeeper Embezzled $1M

The Arizona Capitol Times roports on the embezzlement of $1 Million from the Tucson Museum of Art:

The Attorney General’s Office announced a 65-year-old Tucson woman faces up to 12-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty to charges stemming from her theft of almost $1 million from a southern Arizona museum.

According to Attorney General Terry Goddard, Ruth Sons began working as a bookkeeper for the Tucson Museum of Art in 1990, but an internal audit of the institution completed last year found that Sons had embezzled $975,000 over the course of a five-year span ending in 2008.

Sons pleaded guilty to a single count of theft and fraud before a Pima County Superior Court judge on Aug.3. She was indicted in May on three counts of theft and fraud, as well as a single count of illegally conducting an enterprise.

Prosecutors and police contend Sons operated an “elaborate embezzlement scheme” that involved forging the signatures of museum’s management personnel and falsifying financial records to cover theft from the museum’s payroll, petty cash accounts and the museum shop.

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

The Chimaera of Arezzo at the Getty

In a tangible shift in the way the Getty will perhaps operate in the future, the Chimaera of Arezzo has arrived at the Getty Villa in Malibu.  It is a loan of the work which combines history, archaeology, mythology and art appreciation.  Based on the initial reviews, it is exactly the kind of exhibition an institution like the Getty should be doing—rather than persisting in acquiring potentially looted antiquities. 

The Etruscan bronze was found in Tuscany in the 16th Century and installed at the Palazzo Vecchio by Cosimo I. It had been on display in Florence before being sent to Malibu.
 

The LA Times Arts blog reviews the bronze and the exhibition:

The roaring head, encircled by curving rows of tufted fur, strains upward and bends to the right. Behind it the goat’s head mirrors this pose but in the opposite direction. So the bodily motion goes down, back, up, left and right, yielding a marvelously animated dynamism. Skin is pulled taut over powerful musculature, while parallel curves, alternating shadow with light, articulate the beast’s gaunt rib cage. This is an animal with living, breathing innards, not just a ferocious outward demeanor.

Look closely and you’ll spot a couple of stylized floral rosettes on the goat’s neck and the lion’s hind end — in fact, engorged drops of blood, spurting from stabbed flesh. The beast has been wounded, no doubt from the fatal assault by the long-lost bronze figure of the Greek hero Bellerophon riding his winged steed, Pegasus — victors in the mythical ancient battle. The Chimaera of Arezzo is what remains of a surely amazing sculptural grouping, fabricated by a supremely gifted artist and his bronze casting crew, circa 400 B.C.

It is an antiquity with a well-storied history.  At the time, Cosimo I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany was competing with Rome.  When this bronze was unearthed, he had an antiquity to rival this bronze, “La Lupa”, which depicted the mythical founding of Rome. 

But has anything really changed?  It is interesting I think that the use of antiquities as symbols of power in the Renaissance continues in Italy today.  Consider the recent controversy which erupted when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi may have revealed to an escort girl that his Villa in Sardinia may have been built on top of 30 ancient Phoenecian tombs without the necessary notification of the Culture Ministry or the Carabinieri. 

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

Ratifications

In July the Netherlands accepted the 1970 UNESCO Convention and it will enter into force on the 17th of October, 2009.

Also, Italy has ratified the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. 

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

Estimating Art Crime (UPDATE)

In her piece on the ARCA MA program for the New York Times, Elisabetta Povoledo may have done a number of cultural heritage scholars a disservice — myself included — when she criticized Noah Charney’s estimation that art crime is the third largest. The piece states:

“Citing Interpol, Mr. Charney said art crime was the third-highest-grossing illegal worldwide business, after drugs and weapons. Interpol itself says on its Web site (interpol.int) that it knows of no figures to make such a claim.”

However merely checking with Interpol did not give a full and accurate picture of the size of art crime, though Interpol is often used as the source. On the Interpol website, it states: “We do not possess any figures which would enable us to claim that trafficking in cultural property is the third or fourth most common form of trafficking, although this is frequently mentioned at international conferences and in the media.”

It is certainly true that Interpol no longer can estimate with any confidence even if it once did, that art crime is the third largest criminal enterprise. However the estimation has appeared in a number of sources, including this 2005 USA Today piece. It has been ranked as the 3rd largest, the fourth largest, and estimated between a few hundred million pounds up to billions of dollars annually by experts before the House of Commons Illicit Trade Advisory Panel.

I attempted to clear up some of this confusion with an Op-ed piece, though I was informed the paper does not publish Op-ed pieces which respond to pieces from the paper. I also submitted a letter to the editor, but received no response. I have decided instead to publish my response here. As I argued in the letter below and the longer op-ed, art crime is difficult to estimate but there is broad agreement that Charney and others are correct, that art crime is the third largest illegal trade. But we need more concrete statistics and education to highlight the problem. Povoledo’s comment about Interpol raises this issue, and I think we need better statistics and we won’t get them without increased awareness.

Here is the Letter to the Editor:


RE “A Master’s in Art Crime (No Cloak and Dagger)” July 21, 2009:

Gauging the loss we all suffer when antiquities are looted or art is stolen will always be difficult. In her piece on the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), Elisabetta Povoledo challenged the assertion made by Noah Charney that art crime is the third largest illegal trade after drugs and weapons. In doing so she highlighted one of the biggest obstacles law enforcement officers and researchers must navigate when they look at art crime. Though Interpol certainly has made no claim to that figure, the estimate has appeared in countless media outlets and works of scholarly research.
Newcomers to the art trade are often surprised to discover that basic information such as who buys art, how much they pay for it, and who has owned an object in the past is intentionally obscured from view by the market. Also, valuation of art itself is difficult. If we reflect on the generation that has been unable to see Vermeer’s The Concert, which was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, how large is that loss? If we were to collect all of the stolen works of art into one museum, that museum of art theft would easily eclipse the Met or the Louvre or any of the World’s great museums. 
If we value our collective cultural heritage, art crime is certainly at least the third-largest illegal trade; and we need solid empirical data to lend support to the anecdotal evidence. One of the difficulties is law enforcement agencies all over the world do not consistently track art crime. Italy reports the most art crimes because their Carabinieri pays careful attention. As a result of this problematic and sporadic reporting and filing, we don’t have good statistics, and need to rely on the experiential and anecdotal information of people in the field, like police, and the partial statistics available through institutions like Interpol. Though it is difficult to place a firm estimate, the broader public who enjoys and supports the arts should press for more education and awareness of the devastating consequences art crimes inflict upon our collective cultural heritage.


Derek Fincham, New Orleans Louisiana, July 24, 2009
Fellow at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com

UPDATE:

Mark Durney at Art Theft Central responds to this post by noting:

Another obstacle facing those who study art crime is the public’s fascination for the myth of the Dr. No, or the Thomas Crown, scenario. Certainly, clearing this hurdle also requires educating the public. In my experiences as a gallery officer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum I have heard from countless museum patrons who are convinced the Dutch Room’s missing paintings are “hanging on some millionaire’s wall.” Accordingly, raising awareness regarding how the illicit art trade operates is equally as important.

That is a great point I think; initially those kinds of stories help attract attention.  However they aren’t at all an accurate picture of art thieves and in the long run may help to explain why the penalties for art crime (broadly defined) are so meager, and why continued efforts, advocacy and education are so badly needed. 

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

Housekeeping

Apologies for the very light posting the last five weeks. 

One of the great advantages of teaching is if you are disciplined and get your writing done during the year, the summer is often a time for travel and research.  We’ve had a really terrific summer, travelling and eating our way through Italy, the UK, the flint hills of Kansas, Oaxaca Mexico (where we visited the Rufino Tamayo Prehispanic Museum, and saw this terrific Maya Stele). 

I have a number of posts on these post planned in the coming days, so many thanks for you readership. 

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

The FBI’s Art Crime Team

Ulrich Boser has written a piece on the FBI Art Crime Team for the recent edition of the US News and World Report; it will also likely be a popular citation for law students composing student notes on art theft and cultural property crime for the next few years.  The piece discusses the work of the FBI, and how the special art unit was instituted after the 2003 Iraq invasion.  For contrast, consider that Italy’s Carabinieri has had a special Art Squad for 40 years.

The piece focuses on the reasons for art theft, and how the FBI has worked to combat these thefts.  One of the most interesting recoveries was the theft of North Carolina’s Bill of Rights:

During the final days of the Civil War, Union Army soldiers stole North Carolina’s Bill of Rights out of the state Capitol. Commissioned by President George Washington, the document was one of only 14 copies created after Congress proposed the first amendments, and for more than 140 years, it remained missing. Then, in 2003, two antiques dealers tried to peddle the work for $4 million. A millionaire philanthropist showed interest in the document, claiming that he would buy the artifact on behalf of Philadelphia’s Constitution Center. But the philanthropist was actually an undercover FBI agent, and investigators seized the document. “It was like touching history,” one agent said.

It is an interesting piece, but one that has been written many times, without adding much new for those like me who read these kinds of pieces. 

I found the comments of Mark Durney, who blogs at Art Theft Central much more interesting.  It seems Durney was interviewed for Boser’s piece, but his comments didn’t make the final cut.  That’s a shame, because Durney had a lot of interesting things to say about why many art crimes go unreported; much of which has not been discussed before.  As Durney argued with respect to attracting traveling exhibitions, 

. . .  I described how museums and cultural institutions are often wary of reporting thefts as it can discourage other institutions and individuals from loaning works of art for special exhibitions – the cash cow for many institutions. To confirm my suspicions that special exhibitions are a source of considerable income I examined the 2006-2007 financial reports of several high-profile art museums. For example, the Philadelphia Museum of Art reported an income of $1,839,449 from special exhibitions. This amounted to a shade over 29% of the museum’s program service revenue ($6,281,637 – program service revenue is revenue from admissions, special exhibition ticket sales, concession sales etc., BUT not membership dues or government grants – usually the largest portions of an institution’s total revenue). Another institution, the Wadsworth Atheneum reported that in 2007 its income from special exhibitions was more than double its income from regular admissions ($842,218 versus $401,527 respectively). Although special exhibitions can be great sources of income for museums, they are also instrumental in sustaining and attracting donors and grants.

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

More on the ARCA Masters

Elisabetta Povoledo this morning has a piece in the New York Times on the ARCA Masters program. There is an interview with a couple of the students, and as I pointed out earlier today, this program is the first of its kind; and in a way it is surprising it took this long to create.  I imagine a number of other organizations may have had similar kinds of ideas but never really got around to creating the program or getting it off the ground.  Of course there are a number of other workships and education initiatives, but those can be scattered and frustrating to keep up with.  As I told the students, I’m jealous of the opportunity they have to listen to the speakers and instructors they have lined up this summer. 

Here’s an excerpt:

Universities around the world offer individual classes on art crime and related subjects: fakes and forgeries; intellectual- and cultural-property protection; looting. But Mr. Charney maintains that his program is the first to provide an interdisciplinary approach, and several scholars of art crime concurred, including Ngarino Ellis at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, who said the group “could make some important contributions to the awareness of art crime internationally.” The degree is not formally recognized by an accredited university, though Mr. Charney said he was in discussion with various institutions. (Tuition alone costs about $7,000.)

The first class of students includes art historians, lawyers, museum professionals, art conservators, a private investigator, even a retired United States Secret Service agent, an array that suggests that the subject has broad appeal.

“I was always interested in art, and now I can incorporate that interest in my business,” said John Vezeris of Annapolis, Md., who retired from the Secret Service and opened a strategic security and risk management firm.

For his thesis he wants to apply an analytical approach to structures at risk, like churches, and find the best — and cheapest — way to keep them secure. It was, he said, an area with a lot of potential for business.

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