Nominees for ARCA's 2013 Eleanor and Anthony Vallombroso Award for Art Crime Scholarship

This year five people have been nominated for ARCA's 2013 Eleanor and Anthony Vallombroso Award for Art Crime Scholarship, which usually goes to a professor or author. Past winners:  Norman Palmer (2009), Larry Rothfield (2010), Neil Brodie (2011), and Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, jointly (2012).

The Five (5) Nominees for 2013 are:

Duncan Chappell, an Australian lawyer and criminologist now based at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney, has had a long-standing interest in art crime which dates from the period during which he was the Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology (1987-1994). Since that time he has been engaged in research and publishing on a range of art crime topics but with a particular focus on patterns of illegal trafficking of objects of cultural heritage in the South East Asian region. Much of this research and publishing has been undertaken in collaboration with a friend and colleague at the University of Melbourne, Professor Kenneth Polk.

Duncan Chappell’s publications include two coedited texts: Crime in the Art and Antiquities World. Illegal Trafficking in Cultural Property (2011) Springer: New York (With Stefano Manacorda) and Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime (In Press) Ashgate: London (With Saskia Hufnagel). He has also had published a number of journal articles and book chapters on various aspects of art crime including fraud and fakery in the Australian Indigenous art market; the impact of corruption in the illicit trade in cultural property; and the linkages between art crime and organized crime.

In addition to his research and writing on art crime Duncan Chappell has acted as an expert in regard to court proceedings involving art crime and also been a strong supporter of  measures to enhance public awareness of the evils of looting behaviour and to strengthen the engagement of law enforcement agencies in investigation and prosecuting those responsible. In his present capacity as Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence in Policing and Security, he has sought to foster a far more proactive approach to the prevention and detection of art crime both in Australia and its neighbouring countries within the South East Asian region.

Milton Esterow, author of The Art Stealers and editor of ArtNews, which has won 44 major awards for reporting, analysis, criticism, and design—the first and only art magazine to win these awards. Since Esterow bought ARTnews from Newsweek Magazine in 1972, he has guided its growth into the most widely circulated art magazine in the world. Since 1975, ARTnews has won most of the major journalism awards presented to magazines.  Its editors and reporters have been honored forty-four times for excellence in reporting, criticism, and design.

Under Mr. Esterow's direction, ARTnews became the first magazine to consistently apply rigorous standards of investigative reporting to the art world.  Mr. Esterow received a special award for lifetime achievement from the College Art Association, the national organization of educators, artists, art historians, curators, critics, and institutions in 2003. He was cited for “his exceptional contributions to art journalism and investigative art reporting” and for having “overseen the magazine’s financial success while enhancing its reputation and influence in the visual-arts community and beyond.”

Fabio Isman is a highly esteemed investigative journalist who has worked for Il Messaggero for 40 years .  He is a major contributor to the Giornale dell’Arte, The Art Newspaper, Art e Dossier, Bell’Italia. Through Skira, and has published I Predatori dell’Arte Perduta, il Saccheggio dell’Archeologia in Italia (Predators of Lost Art, the Archeological Plunder of Italy, 2009), and the study of the “Grande Razzia” (The Great Plunder) and illegal excavations since 1970 of a million archeological finds in Italy, many of which are found in noteworthy museums abroad.  His list of publications include 32 books and hundreds of articles.

In Italy and abroad, he has covered the “Six Day War” (1967) and the war in Lebanon (1982); the death of Mitterrand and the election of Chirac; the murder of Rabin; the voyages of Pertini, Cossiga and Scalfaro, the ascension of eight italian governments and two Popes; the trials of Piazza Fontana, the Lockheed scandal, the Ardeatine massacre and the “Mani Pulite” political corruption scandal of the 1990s in Italy.  Since 1980, he has been dedicated to writing about cultural heritage protection, with an emphasis on historic preservation not only in Italy, but worldwide.

Dr. Kenneth Polk, University of Melbourne, Australia, has written extensively in the topic of antiquities trafficking. While his previous work in criminology was in such areas as youth crime and crimes of violence, for the past 15 years Prof. Polk has concentrated on issues of art crime, including art theft, art fraud, and the problem of the illicit traffic in cultural heritage material.  He has recent or forthcoming publications in all of these areas.  Much of the work over the past ten years has dealt with the illicit traffic in antiquities, including articles (with Duncan Chappell) on the question of how this traffic fits into the large volume of work done on organized crime.  Because of emerging interest in recent months around the problem of art theft (in part provoked by the 100th anniversary of the well known events around the theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa), he has re-visited this topic in forthcoming works.  In Australia, Prof. Polk currently serves as a member of the National Cultural Heritage Committee (appointed by the Australian Government).

Lyndel V Prott is an Honorary Professor, University of Queensland and Honorary Member of The Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the former Head of International Standards Section, UNESCO and then Director of the Cultural Heritage Division where she was instrumental in strengthening existing international instruments and the realisation of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention. Her terrific scholarly output has brought attention to the plague of antiquities looting and she has been a wonderful advocate for concerted international action to combat the theft of heritage and destruction of our collective past.

Lyndel Prott AO (1991), Öst. EKWuK(i) (2000), Hon FAHA; LL.D. (honoris causa) B.A. LL.B. (University of Sydney), Licence Spéciale en Droit international (ULB Brussels),  Dr. Juris (Tübingen) and member of Gray’s Inn, London, is former Director of UNESCO’s Division of cultural Heritage and former Professor of Cultural Heritage Law at the University of Sydney. She has had a distinguished career in teaching, research and practice, including co-operation with COM and INTERPOL to improve co-ordination between civil and criminal law to deal with illicit traffic.

At UNESCO 1990-2002 she was responsible for the administration of UNESCO’s Conventions and standard-setting Recommendations on the protection of cultural heritage and also for the negotiations on the 1999 Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict 1954 and the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage 2001.  She contributed as Observer for UNESCO to the negotiations for the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects 1995. She has authored, co-authored or edited over 280 books, reports or articles, written in English, French or German and translated into 9 other languages.