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Showing posts with label 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program. Show all posts

February 1, 2015

ARCA Founder Noah Charney returns to Amelia for seventh year to teach "Art Forgers and Thieves" for the 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection

Noah Charney in Ghent
ARCA founder Noah Charney returns to Amelia for the seventh year to teach "Art Forgers and Thieves" for the 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection.

What is the relevancy of your course?

Art theft and forgery fascinate professional and the general public alike, but both fields have received relatively little in the way of scholarly study prior to the foundation of ARCA. This course will examine historical case studies of art theft and forgery from which we can glean more global lessons about both phenomena. What are the preferred modi operandi for art thieves and how can knowing them help us better secure our art collections? What is the most common confidence trick used by art forgers, and how can we guard against it? We will examine these questions through the context of fascinating historical case studies.

Why do you keep coming back to teach in Amelia?

I love teaching and I love Amelia. It's an ideal small Italian town, one which provides the true immersion experience in Italian life. It is gorgeous, charming, and the locals adopt our students as their own. It's a great place to spend a summer.

What do you hope students will get out of the course?

My students should, first and foremost, enjoy themselves enough that they don't realize just how much they are learning until the end of the program. Then everything will shift into place and they will realize that they are among a tiny group of fellow experts and program graduates who know more about this subject than anyone else in the world. It's a very empowering feeling. But during my course, I try to teach through engaging anecdotes, to which I tie in theory, which makes the lessons far easier to comprehend and retain. If a course is interesting enough, students learn without feeling like they are "Working."

What would a typical day be like in your classroom?

I tend to talk a lot, as I have a lot of stories to tell. I'm something of a performance junkie, so I'm jumping around in front of my slides, but then we always engage in group discussion. I feel that if there's anything a student has not understood, it is because I have not taught it well enough, and I say that on the first day. So it's up to me to lay out case studies as examples of theories in practice, to make complicated matters clear.

In anticipation of your course, what book, article, or movie would you recommend to students?

In an act of shameless self-promotion, I recommend that my students read my non-fiction books on the subject: Stealing the Mystic Lamb; The Thefts of the Mona Lisa; Art & Crime, and even The Wine Forger's Handbook. Rare wine counts as edible art!

January 17, 2015

Retired insurance executive Dorit Straus returns to teach "Insurance Claims and the Art Trade" in Amelia this summer

Dorit Straus, retired insurance executive
Dorit Straus, retired Chubb Insurance executive specializing in fine art, will be returning to Amelia to teach "Insurance Claims and the Art Trade":
My academic training was at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the department of Archeology - at that time the head of the department was Yigael Yadin, whose father was known for the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He himself was famous for the excavations at the breathtaking desert palace of King Herod at Masada. During my studies, Yadin was involved in Hazor, another major excavation in Northern Israel. It was exciting to participate in such high profile digs. My career moved into the museum field and I worked at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. At one point, I decided to make a 360 degree shift and somehow came towards fine art insurance, which started a 30 year career with the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. It may seem unlikely to take that kind of a career path, but ultimately it was a completely rational progression whereby the skills that I acquired in the academic and the museum world matched the corporate needs of the insurance company. It was a very good partnership whereby I benefited from learning about the business world and applied those skills to fine art clients, whether they were private collectors, galleries or cultural institutions. 
In the insurance process the key to profitability means choosing the right customers, at the right premium and then providing them with means to protect and preserve their property - analyzing these variables can make the difference between making a profit or having a loss. Providing the risk management and risk prevention is an essential benefit to the art community. In my role as an insurance executive I made sure that there was an equal balance between these demands and that the art community would benefit from an innovative approach to risk prevention. During my tenure at Chubb, we developed specific products to benefit the art community such as the Museum and Cultural institution program and an art gallery program. We came up with software products to help museums and cultural institutions manage their collection as well as infra red testing to detect hot spots in the walls that may mean that there was an electrical problem which could lead eventually to a fire. Preventing losses meant that one had to analyze the risk to make sure of the integrity of the insured - quite often I came across potential insureds who had questionable reputation or they were out right criminals. Many times it was a question of fraudulent valuations, either inflating values or trying to pass on a fake as the genuine item - catching these types of bad risks can be thrilling!
Almost everyone has some sort of a involvement with insurance, but most people do not understand the insurance transaction and have all kinds of misunderstandings of the process. In my course, I will cover the fundamentals of art insurance, the relationship between the different players and how the process actually works! We will address the different needs of the private collectors, museums and commercial galleries and focus on actual cases of art fraud and how the insurance transaction will or will not respond. We will also look at ways in which bad risks can be improved and we will demonstrate that through case studies in which theoretical and practical approaches will be taken. Those students who plan to move into positions in the art industry will find the course to be very useful in their future career. With so much in the news about art theft, fraud and fakes, and residual WWII issues, the course will be both relevant and timely. 
On the final days students will be divided into 4 teams in which they will create scenarios including role plays to reflect what they have learned during the course. These scenarios will be judged on their originality, reality and creativity of presenting an insurance risk, a claim situation and determine if its a covered loss, and if not, why not. 
There are several films that I would recommend: “How to Steal a Million" with Peter O’Toole and Audrey Hepburn is a fun movie that touches on many points that are relevant ( but not necessarily realistic) to the insurance course, also "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Entrapment" and -- a very good documentary about art theft -- is “Stolen” by Rebecca Dreyfus.

Ms. Straus serves on the board of directors of AXA Art and Crozier Fine Art. She is also an insurance consultant for Art Recovery International.

Ms. Straus recently wrote in an email: "I started a project working with artists in the Hudson Valley in New York State called Art Hudson/Farm to Frame, bringing collectors and artists together, to support the arts and preserve farmlands. In 2014, we visited studios of Judy Pfaff; the private gallery of Steven Holt "T Space" with Carole Schneeman; and a visit to the new space of Jack Shainman "The School".  Each event included a sumptuous farm to table lunch by top local chefs - and the events also support the great works of Scenic Hudson a not for profit environmental Advocacy organization!
Exciting events are planned for spring and fall of 2015 - stay tuned!" 

March 1, 2014

Faculty and Course Schedule for the 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection

This is the Faculty and Course Schedule for the 2014 Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection in Amelia, Italy. The general application period has been extended through March 30, 2014.

Course I – June 2-4 and June 9-11 “Art Policing, Protection and Investigation”
Richard Ellis, Detective and founder of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad (retired), Art Management Group Director 

Course II - June 4-6 and June 11-13 “The International Art Market and Associated Risk”
Dr. Tom Flynn, London Art Lecturer, Docent and Art Historian

Course III - June 16-20 “Transnational Organized Crime and Art”
Dr. Edgar Tijhuis, Lawyer and Assistant Professor of Criminology at the VU University in Amsterdam

Course IV - June 23-27 “Art Forgers and Thieves”
Dr. Noah Charney, Founding Director of ARCA - Adjunct Professor of Art History, American University of Rome

Courses V - June 30-July 2 and July 7-July 9 “Art Crime in War”
Judge Arthur Tompkins, District Court Judge in New Zealand

Courses VI – July 2-4 and July 9-11 “Art and Heritage Law”
To be Announced

Courses VII - July 12 -16 “Risk Assessment and Museum Security”
Dick Drent, Corporate Security Manager, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Course VIII - July 23-25 “Insurance Claims and the Art Trade”
Dorit Straus, Vice President and Worldwide Specialty Fine Art Manager for Chubb & Son, a division of Federal Insurance Company (retired)

Course IX - July 28-30 and August 4-6 “Unravelling the Hidden Market of Illicit Antiquities: Lessons from Greece and Italy” 
Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, Forensic Archaeologist, Illicit antiquities researcher, University of Cambridge

Course X - July 30-August 1 and August 6-8 “Antiquities and Identity”
Dr. Valerie Higgins, Associate Professor and Chair of Archaeology and Classics at the American University of Rome

February 17, 2014

Dick Drent, Corporate Security Manager for the Van Gogh Museum, returns to Amelia to teach "Risk Assessment and Museum Security"

Dick Drent
Dick Drent, Corporate Security Manger for the Van Gogh Museum, will return July 12 - 16 to Amelia to teach "Risk Assessment and Museum Security" for ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crimes and Cultural Heritage Protection.

Before joining the staff at the Van Gogh MuseumMr. Drent worked in law enforcement in the Netherlands for 25 years, mostly in teams fighting organized crime and for few years as a liaison for the Dutch police for the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. During the last 13 years in law enforcement, he worked as a coordinator with the National Undercover and Sensitive Operations Unit. In January 2005, he started as the Director of Security with the VGM before being appointed eight years later as Corporate Security Manager of the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam where he is responsible for the development and realisation of security related issues (like policy, strategy, operations, risk assessment and management within the whole of the enterprise). In addition, Mr. Drent has a security consulting company, Omnirisk, which has provided services on the new Vincent Van Gogh Museum opening in Arles in April 2014; the renovation project of the Noordbrabants museum in Den Bosch (opened in 2013); and the renovation of the Dordrecht Museum in Dordrecht (2008-2010).

What makes your course relevant in the study of art crime?

The relevancy of my course is actually the solution for fighting crime against art in general. This is a firm statement of course but solving a crime against art is re-active and not protecting the art or cultural heritage. In a sentence: It is a tool to get the bad guys and recover, preferably undamaged, the stolen items. The power and strength of protecting art lies within the pro-active phase. How do you protect and secure your items, whether they are paintings, objects or other parts of cultural heritage? How do you prevent that something or anything will happen to it? These are the questions that will try to answer in my course.

What will be the focus in your course?

The focus on my course is that by the end of this course students will have gained an understanding on:
• The reasons why security should be an intrinsic part of a museum or other cultural heritage organization;
• The structure necessary to secure cultural heritage by ways of thorough risks analysis, combined with security measurement and proper training of staff; 

• A working knowledge of how to conduct a facility check via an audit within a museum or cultural heritage organization.; and
• An overview of working in a security role in a museum.
Do you have a recommended reading list that students can read before the course?

In addition to various course materials, students will be asked to read my chapter "Security for Temporary Exhibitions: Regular, Customized, or Bespoke" in Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World (Praeger, 2009) from the ARCA library. I recommend that students read Managing the Unexpected, resilient performance in an age of uncertainty by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (Jossey-Bass, 2007).

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.

February 11, 2014

A.J.G. "Edgar" Tijhuis Returns to Amelia to Teach "Transnational Organized Crime and Art'

Edgar Tijhuis, lawyer and assistant-professor of Criminology at the VU University in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, will return to Amelia for the sixth year to teach “Transnational Organized Crime and Art” (June 16-20) for ARCA’s Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies.

Tijhuis, the author of Transnational Crime and the Interface between Legal and Illegal Actors – The Case of the Illicit Art and Antiquities Trade (Nijmegen, Wolf Legal Publishers, 2006), published a chapter in Art & Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World (Praeger, 2009), “Who Is Stealing All Those Paintings?” He is also associated with the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam.

What makes your course relevant in the study of art crime?

The current literature on art crime gives us some idea of art crimes that are committed all over the world. However, it is far less clear who is involved and how these crimes are organized. In this course we will look at art crime from a criminological perspective and focus on these issues. What kind of people are actually involved in specific types of art crime: organized crime, insiders, petty thieves, quaint characters, terrorists or all of them? And how can we explain their involvement in these crimes? Criminological theories and models help to answer these questions. This approach makes the course very relevant as it tries to fill the gap that is left between research from lawyers, archaeologists and others. Finally, trying to figure out who is involved and why, helps to define criteria for the most fruitful policies to deal with the problem of art crime.

Do you have a recommended reading list that students can read before the course?

A good starter would be "The Medici Conspiracy" by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini. This landmark study touches upon many very important issues that we will deal with in this course.

Please give us a snapshot of a day in your classroom about what students might learn on a given day.  

Students will learn about a wide array of topics. Among other things, students will get a crash course of criminological theories spanning over 200 years and apply these theories to cases of art crime. We will dive into the world of transnational crime, from the trade in blood diamonds to arms trafficking and terrorism. And we will look at the process of "laundering" hot art and integrating it in the legitimate market.

What is your current area of focus as related to art crime?

At VU University I'm supervising a Phd study by Ruth Godthelp. She is analysing the nature of art crimes in the Netherlands. She is also a member of the heavy crimes (or serious and organised crime) unit of the Amsterdam Police Department (where she's combatting art crimes on a daily basis) and has built a unique database of over 4000 art crimes. Furthermore, I'm working with Jasper van der Kemp, who is specialising in profiling) We search for ways to profile art crimes, both big museum thefts as well as series of thefts from churches, libraries etc. Finally, I'm working on a book on histories of transnational crime, which will include an overview of over 2000 years of art crimes by Noah Charney.

February 9, 2014

Judge Arthur Tompkins returns to teach "Art in War" for ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection

In 2014 Judge Arthur Tompkins will be teaching his Art in War course for the 5th consecutive year. Judge Tompkins began his work with ARCA back in 2009 when he traveled to Amelia for the first of a two-part presentation at the International Art Crime Conference to discuss a possible pathway to creating an International Art Crime Tribunal. In 2010, as well as presenting the second part of his proposal to the conference Judge Tompkins first taught his Art in War course. This year his course will run from June 30-July 2 and July 7-July 9

Judge Tompkins has been a District Court Judge in New Zealand for 17 years. He gained his Bachelor’s degree in Law from Canterbury University, in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1983, and subsequently graduated Masters in Law, with First Class Honours, from Cambridge University, England, in 1984. Over the years he has taught the Law of Evidence, and presented at numerous conferences and workshops on a variety of topics, including expert evidence, the intersect between law and science in the Courtroom, and most extensively in relation to forensic DNA and forensic DNA Databanks, in New Zealand, China, England, Ireland, France and Mauritius. He is an Honorary Member of Interpol’s DNA Monitoring Expert Group. This year he was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of Pitcairn Island.

What makes your course relevant in the study of art crime?

Art has always suffered in times of war – right down through all the many centuries from the first recorded instance of plundering of art during wartime – the taking of the Stele of Hammurabi by the Elamites from Babylon to Susa in the 12th century BCE - to the disastrous shelling of the Crac des Chevaliers in the ongoing Syrian conflict. And the crimes against art committed during wartime span the full spectrum from the vast, organised and systematic plundering of art by Napoleon and the Nazis, to the opportunistic ‘souveniring’ of art by individual soldiers amid the chaos of the battlefield, and everything in between. How societies have sought to prevent to lessen such crimes, and to provide some degree of redress, in the past provides valuable insight and guidance as to what might be done in the future.

What will be the focus in your course?

The first half of the course covers a historical survey of art crimes during war. We start with Classical Antiquity, including the sack of Corinth by the Romans, then jump forward to the Fourth Crusade and the pillaging of Constantinople. From there we move forward a few centuries again, to the Thirty Years’ War, and from there to Napoleonic France.

On Day Two, we start with the First World War, move through the Second World War, and end with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, (and this sounds much more daunting than it actually is when we do it) we cover over 2000 years in two days …!

The half day that ends the first part of the course is devoted to Libraries – including the libraries at Alexandria, the Library of the Palatinate, the Bosnian National Library, and the US’s Library of Congress. I am hopeful that this year there will also be a guest presentation by one of ARCA’s alumni on another fascinating library’s history.

The second half of the course concentrates on the legal response to what has happened over the centuries. We look at a variety of public international and private legal responses, including the Laws of War, the various Conventions aimed at protecting art and cultural heritage, non-binding international agreements and the like, and then issues arising from private claims to recover looted or stolen art. We end the course with a look at other forms of possible redress, and some selected student presentations to the class.

Do you have a recommended reading list that students can read before the course?

I recommend that students read the classic work of scholarship in this area, Lynn Nicholas’ The Rape of Europa, and also either or both of Robert Edsel’s books on the Monuments’ Men. And this year in particular, I would also suggest they go see the George Clooney/Cate Blanchett movie, ‘The Monuments Men’. How Cate Blanchett portrays one of my personal heroes of the fight against art crime in war, Rose Valland, I will be fascinated to see!

I would also recommend, as a way of reading themselves into the historical ambience of a couple of parts of the course, Geraldine Brook’s People of the Book, and Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition, are both fictionalised accounts of events we cover in the course.

Finally, and these are three personal favourites relating to various aspects of the course, I would point folk to Baez’s A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Freeman’s The Horses of St Marks: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice, and O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

February 4, 2014

2014 Schedule for ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage in Amelia, Umbria

Here is the 2014 schedule for ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage to be held in Amelia, Umbria:

May 30 - Students arrive in Amelia
May 31 and June 1 - Program Orientation and City Familiarization

Course I – June 2-4 and June 9-11 “Art Policing, Protection and Investigation”
Richard Ellis, Detective and founder of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad (retired), Art Management Group Director

Course II - June 4-6 and June 11-13 “The International Art Market and Associated Risk”
Dr. Tom Flynn, London Art Lecturer, Docent and Art Historian

Course III - June 16-20 “Transnational Organized Crime and Art”
Dr. Edgar Tijhuis, Lawyer and Assistant Professor of Criminology at the VU University in Amsterdam

Course IV - June 23-27 “Art Forgers and Thieves”
Dr. Noah Charney, Founding Director of ARCA - Adjunct Professor of Art History, American University of Rome

June 27-29, Sixth annual ARCA Art Crime Conference weekend 

Course V - June 30-July 2 and July 7-July 9 “Art Crime in War”
Judge Arthur Tompkins, District Court Judge in New Zealand

Course VI – July 2-4 and July 9-11 “Art and Heritage Law”
To Be Announced

Course VII - July 12 -16 “Risk Assessment and Museum Security”
Dick Drent, Corporate Security Manager, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

July 17-22, Program Break for travel

Course VIII - July 23-25 “Insurance Claims and the Art Trade”
Dorit Straus, Vice President and Worldwide Specialty Fine Art Manager for Chubb & Son, a division of Federal Insurance Company (retired) 

Course IX - July 28-30 and August 4-6 “Unravelling the Hidden Market of Illicit Antiquities: Lessons from Greece and Italy”
Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, Forensic Archaeologist, Illicit antiquities researcher, University of Cambridge

Course X - July 30-August 1 and August 6-8 “Antiquities and Identity”
Dr. Valerie Higgins, Associate Professor and Chair of Archaeology and Classics at the American University of Rome

August 9-15, 2013 August Palio dei Colombi, Notte Bianca and Ferragosto festivities.

For application information and prospectus please write to education@artcrimeresearch.org.
March 1 is the deadline to apply to the program.