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Showing posts with label illicit antiquities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illicit antiquities. Show all posts

April 11, 2014

Simon Mackenzie Awarded ARCA's 2014 Eleanor and Anthony Vallombroso Award for Excellence in Art Crime Scholarship

Simon Mackenzie, Trafficking Culture project at the University of Glasgow, is the winner of ARCA's 2014 Eleanor and Anthony Vallombroso Award for Excellence in Art Crime Scholarship. Past winners: Norman Palmer (2009); Larry Rothfield (2010); Neil Brodie (2011); Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino (Jointly - 2012); and Duncan Chappell (2013).

Simon Mackenzie is Professor of Criminology, Law & Society in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, where he is also a member of the criminological research staff at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, a cross-institutional organization conducting national and international criminological research projects.

Prof Mackenzie co-ordinates the Trafficking Culture research group, which is a pioneering interdisciplinary collaboration producing research evidence on the scale and nature of the international market in looted cultural objects, including regional case studies of trafficking networks and evaluative measures of the effects of regulatory interventions which aim to control this form of trafficking. Trafficking Culture is funded with a €1m research grant from the European Research Council. The group employs a core group of researchers plus an affiliate Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, and four PhD research students, making it a world-leading center for study in this field. As well as producing research evidence, the team are developing educational resources for the next generation of scholars via a new course, run for the first time in 2014, on International Trafficking in Cultural Objects, offered as part of the three Criminology Masters pathways which Prof Mackenzie convenes at Glasgow: the MRes Criminology; the MSc Criminology & Criminal Justice; and the MSc Transnational Crime, Justice & Security.

Simon’s research on the international market in illicit cultural objects began with his PhD, leading to the publication in 2005 of Going, Going, Gone: Regulating the Market in Illicit Antiquities, which won the British Society of Criminology Book Prize that year. The book was mainly an empirical study of attitudes and practices of high-end dealers in relation to their engagement with looted artefacts, and an analysis of the implications for regulation and control of the various neutralizing and justificatory narratives surrounding handling illicit objects at the top end of the market.

From 2005-07, in a study with Prof Penny Green funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, Simon extended this analysis by looking at the market’s reaction to the onset of explicit criminalization in a case study of the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003. This research was published in Mackenzie and Green (eds) Criminology and Archaeology: Studies in Looted Antiquities (2009), part of the Onati International Series on Law and Society and based around the proceedings of a workshop at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law exploring the interdisciplinary possibilities of a field of study based both in archaeology and criminology.

Simon has worked with a number of international organisations, providing research-based input to support initiatives to reduce the international trade in looted cultural objects: eg. he has worked with UNODC in producing briefing documents for UN member states in their 2009 enquiry into Trafficking Cultural Property, leading to policy recommendations made at the UN Commissions and Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice; and he is currently on the editorial committee of ICOM’s International Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods.

Prof Mackenzie is a member of the Peer Review Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Associate Editor of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, and a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Criminology. His criminological research has been supported by grants and contracts from funders including the EU, ESRC, AHRC, both the UK and Scottish Governments, and the UN.

April 2, 2014

Christie's and Bonhams withdraw two objects of antiquity linked to Medici and Becchina archives

Image appears to be draft of 1987 invoice
 on sale of antiquities
by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Both Christie's and Bonhams withdrew two objects -- a 2,000 year old Greek glass wine jug (called an oinochoe) and another ancient vessel (known as a pyxis)-- from their antiquities auctions this week that forensic archaeologist Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis linked to the Medici and Becchina archives.

In an email to ARCA's blog, Dr. Tsirogiannis wrote: "I am also sending you the documents related to the pyxis, which prove that Becchina sold the object to Ariadne Galleries, something that Bonhams failed to mention in the "provenance" section of their catalogue regarding this object." 

The documents, represented by the images here to the right in a bluish tinge and below in a pinkish tinge, appear to be the draft and final copy of an invoice. The pink image is a photograph of an invoice dated November 12, 1987 from U. R. Becchina to Mr. Torkom Demirjian at Ariadne Galleries Inc. at 970 Madison Avenue in New York City “(For definitive sale/no return) no return) for 23 items — 14 terracotta statuettes + 1 Pyxis, 2 Gnathian vessels, 2 Canosan Pyxides, and 4 Corinthian vessels — at a price in U.S. dollars of $21,800 plus a restoration fee of $3,700 for a total of $25,500. The invoice included: "GUARANTEE These items are of the period of the 6th to the 3rd cent. B.C. The authenticity is unconditionally guaranteed."

This is the image of the pink invoice
from Becchina to Ariadne Galleries
regarding the sale of antiquities
Peter Watson, co-author with Cecilia Todeschini of The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (Public Affairs, 2007), wrote in The Times ("Auction houses 'handling stolen goods'", April 2):
Christos Tsirogiannis, of the Division of Archaeology at Cambridge University, and formerly a member of the Greek Task Force that oversaw the return of smuggled objects, said that the auction houses should have realised that they were handling illegal objects. “They themselves do not release all the information they have about how these objects reach the market,” he said. “These objects have no real provenance.” 
The objects are believed to be part of hauls gathered during the 1980s and 1990s by Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina, two notorious Italian dealers. Both men have been convicted of trafficking in illicit antiquities. Medici’s archive was seized in 1995 in Geneva, and Becchina’s was seized in Basle in 2002. Between them, the men supplied thousands of illegally excavated and smuggled antiquities, many of which were dug up by mechanical digger, and sold at Sotheby’s throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Some of them were priceless and many still had soil on them. They passed in their thousands through London salesrooms until the traffic was exposed, partly by The Times in 1997. Sotheby’s was forced to discontinue its sales in London. 
[...] 
Mr Tsirogiannis, who has just been awarded his PhD for a thesis on the illicit international antiquities trade, has access to two Polaroid archives of the hauls that were seized by the Italian carabinieri in Switzerland. He noticed that the two objects coming up for sale at Bonhams and Christie’s were identical to two shown in the photographs of the seized archives, in one case dirty and broken before restoration. Invoices and sales receipts also appear to confirm that the objects are illicit. He said: “The object at Christie’s was sold at Sotheby’s in 1988, and that’s all — as anyone knows in this field, that almost certainly means it came from Medici. “The Bonhams object also first surfaced in 1987 and has no provenance outside the trade. There again, that should be a warning sign that the piece was illegally excavated and smuggled. Over the past few years, I have spotted dozens of objects like this being drip-fed on to the market, testing whether the Medici scandal has been forgotten. Each time, I have informed the Italian authorities, who tell me they always contact the auction houses, asking them to withdraw the pieces. They almost never do. I think they have only acted this time because The Times is watching. At this rate, London risks regaining its unenviable position as the home of the ‘dirty’ antiquities market.”
Watson reported that Christie's said that the company would contact Scotland Yard's Art & Antiquities Unit to investigate the piece and would return it to Italy if the object was the same as the one identified in the polaroid archive confiscated from Medici.

In an email to the ARCA blog, Dr. Tsirogiannis wrote:
A spokeswoman for Christie's said, regarding Christie's ownership of the oinochoe: 
The work you are referring to was sold through another auction house in 1988. It was then sold last year by Christie’s as part of the the Saeed Motamed collection. Christie’s became the owner after the sale of the work was then cancelled due to accidental damage sustained by the work during storage. 
My comment on this would be: Christie's should have been extra careful when they were exercising their 'due diligence' before the most recent sale, since they are the consigners in their own auction: as it turns out, this is a piece which comes originally from Medici. Christie's did not mention in the 'provenance' section of their catalogue which collection this object came from only last year, nor that the object was damaged during storage. All this exposes their practices even more.
Dr. Tsirogiannis wrote in an email to ARCA:
To echo Lord Renfrew in 2010, when four other antiquities I identified were withdrawn by Bonhams (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/apr/27/bonhams-stolen-roman-sculptures-auction), "London risks regaining its unenviable position as the home of the 'dirty' antiquities market".
Here's a link to the article in BBC News "'Looted' artifacts removed from auction" (2 April 2014).

Here's a link to Dr. Tsirogiannis' post "Auction houses should do more to rooted out looted antiquities" on the website for Apollo Magazine.

February 15, 2014

Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis will teach "Unravelling the Hidden Market of Illicit Antiquities: Lessons from Greece and Italy" for the 2014 ARCA Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection

Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis will return to Amelia this year to teach "Unravelling the Hidden Market of Illicit Antiquities: Lessons from Greece and Italy" from July 28-30 and August 4-6 in ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection.

Dr. Tsirogiannis attended ARCA's International Art Crime Conference last year to accept the award for "Art Protection and Security" in recognition of his work of matching objects at auction with police-confiscated archives, leading to repatriations for Italy and Greece.

Christos, a Greek forensic archaeologist, studied archaeology and history of art in the University of Athens, then worked for the Greek Ministries of Culture and Justice from 1994 to 2008, excavating throughout Greece and recording antiquities in private hands. He voluntarily cooperated with the Greek police Art Squad on a daily basis (August 2004 - December 2008) and was a member of the Greek Task Force Team that repatriated looted, smuggled and stolen antiquities from the Getty Museum, the Shelby White/Leon Levy collection, the Jean-David Cahn AG galleries, and others.

Since 2007, Tsirogiannis has been identifying antiquities depicted in the confiscated Medici, Becchina and Symes-Michaelides archives with those in museums (e.g. the Michael Carlos Museum in Atlanta, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), galleries (e.g. Cahn AG), auction houses (Christie's, Sotheby's and Bonhams), and private collections (e.g. those of Shelby White/Leon Levy, Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, George Ortiz). Notifying public prosecutor Dr. Paolo Giorgio Ferri and the Greek authorities has led to repatriations (e.g. from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome). He received his Ph.D. last October at the University of Cambridge, on the international illicit antiquities network viewed through the Robin Symes-Christos Michaelides archive.

What will be the focus in your course?
The trafficking of antiquities internationally, focusing on the last 50 years, and especially the developments in the illicit trade since 2005, using case studies throughout. We will start with a historical introduction, then survey the leading dealers of the international market. The central session of the course will consider the roles of auction houses, museums and galleries. Focusing on Greece, Italy, the UK and the USA, we will discuss the level of proof needed for a successful claim and repatriation, before we examine various strategies proposed for regulating the market in the future. Lectures will be combined with interactive discussion sessions.
Do you have a recommended reading list that students can read before the course?
CHIPPINDALE, CHRISTOPHER & DAVID W. J. GILL. 2000. Material consequences of contemporary classical collecting, American Journal of Archaeology 104:463-511. 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/507226
MEYER, KARL E. 1977. The Plundered Past. Atheneum (NY): Hamish Hamilton. 
O’KEEFE, PATRICK J. 1997. Trade in Antiquities: Reducing Destruction and Theft. London: Archetype Publications and UNESCO.
RENFREW, A. COLIN. 2006. Loot, legitimacy and ownership. London: Duckworth.
*WATSON, PETER & CECILIA TODESCHINI. 2007. The Medici conspiracy. New York (NY): Public Affairs.
Here's a link to a 2012 BBC interview with Christos Tsirogiannis.

The deadline to apply to the ARCA program in Umbria is March 1. You may send inquiries to education@artcrimeresearch.org.

August 16, 2013

Janet Ulph's and Ian Smith's "The Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities" reviewed by Marc Balcells (The Journal of Art Crime, Spring 2013)

Marc Balcells reviews The Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities (Hart Publishing 2012) by Janet Ulph and Ian Smith in the Spring 2013 issue of The Journal of Art Crime.
Janet Ulph and Ian Smith write, mainly from a legal point of view, about the illicit trade in art and antiquities, the criminal and civil liability derived from these kind of cases, and the efforts regarding international recovery. The goal of the text is to focus upon the extent to which laws can protect vulnerable countries, while considering what further steps could be taken in the future. Therefore, the book deals with this particular topic from a double perspective: an international point of view, on the one hand; on the other, drawing from the experience of the authors (Mrs. Ulph is a solicitor and a professor in Commercial Law at the University of Leicester, and Mr. Smith is a barrister in London), it uses many cases from English law.
The book covers, in a logical and ordered structure, the different topics mentioned above. The first chapter deals generally with the trade in art and antiquities: concepts and broad topics are defined, such as the legal right to claim, good faith purchasers, or the global market in art and antiquities. The situation in Iraq is used as a study case, to illustrate the patters of this form of illicit trade. 
The second chapter talks about international initiatives, to focus on the major international conventions and other legal instruments which, objectively, have an impact upon the illicit trade in art and antiquities. The scope of this chapter is truly amazing, going beyond the UNESCO and UNIDROIT conventions, and analyzing such legal dispositions as the Vienna or Palermo conventions, among others.

The complete book review is included in the ninth issue of The Journal of Art Crime, edited by ARCA Founder Noah Charney (available electronically and in print via subscription and Amazon.com). Associate Editor Marc Balcells (ARCA '11) is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Department of Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice -- The City University of New York.

October 11, 2012

The Journal of Art Crime, Fall 2012: "Getting Governments to Cooperate Against Looting: Insights from the American and British Experience" by Asif Efrat

In the Fall 2012 electronic issue of The Journal of Art Crime, Asif Efrat writes on "Getting Governments to Cooperate against Looting: Insights from the American and British Experience":
Why would countries that had long resisted the efforts against archaeological plunder reverse course and join these efforts?  The article solves this puzzle by examining the American and British decisions to join the 1970 UNESCO Convention.  Initially skeptical of UNESCO's endeavors, the United States and Britain changed their policies and came to support the international efforts in the early 1970s and early 2000s, respectively.  I argue that the two countries' policy shifts had similar causes.  First, archaeologists advocacy made policymakers aware of the damage caused by the illicit antiquities trade and the art world's complicity.  Second, public scandals exposed unethical behavior in the American and British art markets and demonstrated the need for regulation.  Third, the U. S. and British governments established domestic consensus in favor of regulation through advisory panels that included the major stakeholders: archaeologists, dealers, and museums.  Yet because of divergent bureaucratic attitudes, the U. S. government has ultimately been more vigorous in its efforts against the illicit antiquities trade than has the British government.
Dr. Efrat is Assistant Professor of Governmnet at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel.  He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University and has taught at Cornell Law School.  His book Governing Guns, Preventing Plunder: International Cooperation against Illicit Trade has been published by Oxford University Press.

Here's a link to the ARCA website and more information about subscribing to The Journal of Art Crime.

February 18, 2012

Museum of the History of the Olympic Games: England's Channel 4 News 'Armed robbers loot ancient Greek museum'

Follow this link "Armed robbers loot ancient Greek museum" to view a video about the theft of the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games on February 17, 2012. ARCA Instructor Dick Ellis is quoted in the accompanying article (excerpts here):
As a pair of armed robbers bound and gag a security guard to steal dozens of ancient artifacts from the Olympia museum in Greece, Channel 4 News goes hot on the trail of the illicit antiquities trade. "It has become an organised crime business," said Richard Ellis. A former Scotland Yard detective who set up the Metropolitan Police's Art and Antiques Squad, the specialist art and antiquities crime investigator has worked on the recovery of some of the world's most famous paintings, including Edvard Munch's The Scream. 
The latest known theft to have taken place only happened this morning, when two armed robbers broke into an Olympia Museum and made off with between 60 to 70 bronze and clay pottery objects. They tied up and gagged the female security guard before using hammers to smash display cases and grab the loot. That followed the theft last month of a Picasso and a Mondrian from the capital's National Gallery. Today's incident prompted the culture minister, Pavlos Geroulanos, to tender his resignation, amid outcry that the nation's priceless treasures were no longer safe in state hands. Now, Mr Ellis told Channel 4 News, "the incentive is there to make money in Greece". And they may well begin a life which sees them travel from the poorer hands of the lowly thieves who broke into the museum to reach the lucrative shores of London or New York, and in some cases, find themselves auctioned off for tens of millions of dollars. "I am sure the current economic situation is Greece is triggering people to become more active," Mr Ellis said. "I would expect these objects are going to get moved. It's a transitional country for other stolen goods, and they can go west or east." 
According to Mr Ellis, many are looted or excavated by poorer local people looking to make some fast yet small amounts of cash, before being sold on to intermediaries. The real mark up, he says, comes in the stage after that, after they have been passed on to dealers. From here they can end up in auction houses or with private collectors, having changed hands for millions of dollars. In some cases, Mr Ellis said, collectors are aware they are trading in illegal goods, despite a rise in 'due dilligence' to establish the provenance of items.
The article also includes a perspective from Christos Tsirogiannis, [a contributor (along with David Gill) to ARCA's Journal of Art Crime] a researcher in illicit antiquities and repatriation cases at Cambridge University, and a former archeologist with the Greek police squad.
"All the countries that are in decline, with financial problems, and yet hosted ancient civilisations, such as Greece, Italy and Egypt - they are going to see big problems. In Greece, this is connected with the financial situation. We will have more of such things coming up in the next few months. The people who stole this are uneducated people with no money, who are not aware it will be difficult to give these objects to the market as they are recorded, and there are pictures of them. They do it for money, but they are not aware it will be really difficult to get rid of them." It may be the case that some of them end up in refrigeration trucks transporting food in order to be smuggled across borders, through Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, before reaching Europe where they are likely to fetch up a higher price. Another popular route for other goods illegally seized or excavated from Asia, Mr Tsirogiannis said, is aboard ships to Italy. From there they may make their way to Switzerland, and from there, he said, they may be laundered in auctions in London and New York before being sold to private museums and collectors.