The following was contributed by Renée D., a member of ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime studies Class of 2010. The ARCA staff has enlisted her to provide updates on the program's progress as well as to, hopefully, convey some of the intimate nuances and intricacies of life in Amelia to those of us outside its medieval walls. The program runs June 1 through August 13. 

Before the second week of the postgraduate program started, ARCA arranged our first field trip to the medieval city of Orvieto. Narrow and winding, the roads lead up the hills and through picturesque countryside to get to the top of a plateau where Orvieto is situated. Noah met us at the top of the plateau to finish off his week of teaching by giving us a full walk through of Orvieto’s medieval gothic church or duomo, as it is called in Italian. The duomo was truly breath-taking as we took in the same structure that even inspired Michelangelo. It was yet another unexpected reminder that we are in fact walking around in the shadows of the Renaissance masters who once roamed over Orvieto’s cobblestones. Noah challenged us at the church to put to use some of the skills we had learned over the past week and do a little hostile surveillance, which entailed identifying security measures and exits as if we were planning to take something from the church. This is a useful exercise to help prevent potential thefts before they occur from any institution. After, as a special treat, we went around to the back of the church to a separate attached chapel to see the skeleton remains of a Catholic female martyr, who had been speared to death. Over the course of the day, you could see in everyone’s face a sense of delight. Perhaps it was the view from the plateau over the expansive countryside, or the ceiling paintings within the church, or even the taste of gelato on a hot Saturday, but it was impossible not to feel it. 

Back in the classroom in week two, we have been learning about the art world from London-based art historian, Tom Flynn. Although many of the students have art history backgrounds, it is always refreshing to listen to a different point of view on the subject as Tom literally keeps switching between his two sets of glasses throughout his lectures. While Noah shared stories about the Ghent Altarpiece, Tom has already shared interesting anecdotes about collectors such as Albert Barnes and Edward Perry Warren. Flynn, the sculpture scholar, can be spotted among the students watching the World Cup matches in his breezy linen shirts, as well as discussing various topics in the art field at Bar Leonardi. Easy to talk to and extremely knowledgeable, Tom maintains his own art-related blog among his many projects: http://tom-flynn.blogspot.com/. 

The contemporary English gentleman, Flynn has challenged us this week to present to the class our own thirty minute manifesto for the art world. The topic could range from our personal issues with the art market to our expertise within the art world. Ultimately, it is daunting to tackle such an assignment because how does one really go about chipping away the issues of a world whose existence is kept shroud in mystery to even those who play a part within it? It is somewhat intimidating to stand in front of your peers to talk about your opinions on aspects of a world we all wish to join in some way, but we are all in Amelia to learn how to protect the currency of this world, which is art. To pinpoint an area that we find contention with in the end is to pinpoint where our own passions lie. This exercise really is to our benefit because as we move full speed ahead on the bumpy winding roads within the world of Art, we must overcome our romantic views and weak stomachs to be able to stand in front of anyone to explain the important cultural value of the art we all want to protect.

ARCA's Business Director, Mark Durney, was quoted in the Southeast Missourian's article "Value of public art in vandalism cases an unclear issue" (11 June 2010). The article describes a recent criminal court case that involved a work of art on public display that was vandalized. Access the article here.

The following was contributed by Renée D., a member of ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime studies Class of 2010. The ARCA staff has enlisted her to provide updates on the program's progress as well as to, hopefully, convey some of the intimate nuances and intricacies of life in Amelia to those of us outside its medieval walls. The program runs June 1 through August 13. 

The bells start ringing signaling that its noon and we are all in summer school. I briefly gaze out the side window from my seat and all you can see is the clay rooftops, the old buildings, and blue sky. Suddenly reality hits, we are not just in summer school, we are in Italy.

ARCA’s postgraduate program in International Art Crime Studies, class of 2010, is double the size of last year’s premiere group and rumor has it that interest for next summer’s program is already in record numbers. The program attracts people from all walks of life and all different backgrounds. This summer we are curators, conservators, lawyers, law students, appraisers, art historians, private investigators, gallerists, mapmakers, and archeologists. We are inquisitive. We are intelligent. We are the Art World.

As a group, we have already started to acclimate ourselves to this small beautiful Italian town called Amelia. Lunch ultimately sends us to Bar Leonardi, a local hot spot bar at the cross section of all the main roads in town. The staff of Leonardi tolerates our broken Italian as we sip our cappuccinos and snack on our sandwiches. The local older men sit under the overhang in the shade discussing various topics, but mostly they are studying the ARCA students with curiosity as if we ourselves are an exhibit at a museum.

For others, Punto Di Vino has become a home away from home. Luciano, the wine bar’s owner, and his family are so accommodating to our program as they offer us a glass of wine, a warm meal of risotto, and a piece of chocolate as we catch up with our families back home through Luciano’s free wireless connection.

The elusive Noah Charney, founder and president of ARCA, is finally extremely accessible to us this first week as he leads our lectures, which address topics ranging from forgeries to vandalism. He shares his personal love for Il Bronzino and the Ghent Altarpiece with us, and for the importance of churches needing better security systems. Noah sports a wallet chain and hair that until recently sported a ponytail. He also has been spotted smoking a Sherlock Holmes-esque pipe during lunch. Noah captures our attention with his vast knowledge and his way of engaging us by asking us questions that range from how we would define art to how we would handle security when a potential vandal enters our hypothetical museum.

This first week has allowed us to revisit issues that many of us have thought about extensively before but now perhaps can rethink in a different light. It is a great preview for the rest of the program. We are still in summer school, but while our shared passion to learn about this understudied yet relevant field keeps us going to class, we know that when class breaks for lunch, the Italian sun will be waiting for us.

Recently, ARCA's Colette Marvin, Director of Public and Institutional Relations, visited the scene of the crime while on business in Paris. Colette spent the past fall and winter organizing and curating a special exhibit on art crime at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. Currently, she is engaged in a documentary project focused on the career of the infamous forger, Elmyr de Hory.

El robo de obras de Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Braque y Léger la madrugada del día 20 en el Museo de Arte Moderno de París, "tiene todas las marcas del crimen organizado", es obra de "traficantes de armas y droga", según Noah Charney, uno de los más reputados expertos en robo de obras de arte.

"El crimen organizado, desde los años 60, ha sido el responsable de la mayoría de los delitos con obras de arte en todo el mundo" y, sobre todo, de robos de cuadros de Pablo Picasso, "el artista con gran diferencia más robado y falsificado en la Historia", dijo Charney.

En la pinacoteca parisina los ladrones se apropiaron de cinco lienzos. El robo de esos óleos, valorados "en cientos de millones de dólares", está en "segundo puesto", aunque "próximo", respecto del mayor robo de la Historia, de unos 500 millones de dólares, que "la mafia corsa perpetró en el museo de Isabella Stewart Gardner (Boston) en 1990", afirmó Charney, fundador de la asociación ARCA, que colabora con organizaciones internacionales para resolver casos delictivos con obras de arte.

"Las piezas robadas en París son del mismo tipo que las que eran sustraídas en la década de los 60 en la Riviera francesa por miembros de la mafia de Córcega (sur de Francia)", señaló este experto. "La mafia corsa, entre 1961 y 1962, tuvo fijación por los cuadros de Picasso y Cézanne, que marcaban récords de ventas en las subastas, lo que culminó en el macrorrobo de 118 Picassos en una sola noche en el Palacio Papal de Avignon (Francia)".

Sorprendente 'modus operandi'

Sin embargo, Noah Charney declaró que el caso del Museo del Arte Moderno le sorprende por el 'modus operandi': el robo fue "limpio" y "sigiloso" y, además, por la noche.

Ello sugiere, a su entender, "que estuvo bien organizado, coninformación desde dentro del museo sobre lagunas jurídicas y gestiones", y "que los ladrones, que no son trigo limpio, tienen un destinatario en mente" para su botín.

A pesar de los sistemas de alarma, los autores, añade Charney, "contaron con algo contundente para burlarlos". Y este es un problema actual de las pinacotecas, en las que, a pesar de que cada vez disponen de más medidas de seguridad, "el robo va en aumento", sobre todo en las horas de apertura al público, como ocurrió recientemente en el Museo Munch, de Oslo.

En opinión de Charney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1979), "la mayoría del arte conocido es robado para chantajear a la víctima o a la compañía de seguros, o como moneda de cambio en negociaciones entre bandas delictivas" por drogas y armas, e incluso en casos de terrorismo.

Del robo de París ha pasado una semana y los lienzos "ni han sido recuperados, ni se ha negociado ningún chantaje, por lo que su destino más probable es, como en el caso de tantas otras obras de arte famosas, que, al ser bienes fácilmente transportables, sirvan para negociaciones entre los grupos del crimen organizado", concluyó.
 

Thursday, 8 April 2010 - ARCA's Business and Admissions Director, Mark Durney, was featured in Canada's National Post. The article, "Forgeries: as seen on TV!" reflected on the recent convictions of a husband and wife from California who sold $20 million in forged goods via DirecTV and The Dish Network.

10 March 2010 - ARCA's Art Crime exhibit at the National Museum of Crime and Punishment was featured on FOX News 5 DC. Colette Marvin, who will be graduating from ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime Studies this summer, curated the exhibit. The exhibit runs from February 12 - April 26, 2010.

6 March 2010 - Anthony Amore, ARCA Trustee and Security Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was featured on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Watch Amore discuss the complexities of the Gardner heist. The theft's 20th anniversary is only weeks away. Find more of CBS's coverage here.

As Business and Admissions Director of ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime Studies, I have had a number of prospective students, current students, figures in the field, and others pose this question to me. Many have often queried, "Where are the opportunities in the fields related to art crime?" While not everyone can, or will, become a private art investigator, there are still opportunities within the fields related to art crime. This is the first post in a series on life after the MA in International Art Crime Studies. The first student profiled is Julia Brennan '09.

Julia has worked in the field of textile conservation for over twenty-five years (in practice). She established Textile Conservation Services in 1995 to serve private collectors, galleries, museums, and institutions. Early training included six years in a private atelier specializing in the conservation of 16th-20th century tapestries, Oriental carpets, Asian textiles and American samplers and quilts. Ms. Brennan helped establish the textile storage and conservation facility at the Philadelphia College of Textile’s Paley Design Center, and was the editor for a manual of conservation stitches. In 1989 she received a Getty Research Grant focusing on the analysis of dyes in historic Thai textiles, as well as treatments for oriental carpets. During her five years as Assistant Conservator for Exhibitions at the Textile Museum in Washington, she prepared over 30 exhibits, and was the guest curator of a contemporary textile show on Faith Ringgold.

She does regular contract work and maintenance of textile collections for The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, The Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, George Washington's Mount Vernon and Smithsonian Institution Museums. For more info about Julia's work see her site "Caring for Textiles". Recently, she contributed a chapter on teaching preventative and textile conservation in Asia and Africa in Frances Lennard and Patricia Ewer eds. Textile Conservation: Advances in Practice. Butterworth Heinemann. March 2010, pp 336.

Rebecca Dreyfus - Producer/Director "Stolen," a PBS Independent Lens Production

Brian Kelly - Chief of the Public Corruption & Special Prosecutions Unit, U.S. Attorney's Office, Boston

Geoffrey Kelly - Special Agent, Violent Crimes Task Force, FBI, Boston Division

Program Location:

"10 on the Park" at the Time Warner Center; 10th floor, 60 Columbus Circle, New York

The Dark Arts: Thieves, Forgers, and Tomb Raiders
ARCA has partnered with the National Museum of Crime & Punishment to focus on Crimes in the Arts. The exhibit will include information on theft, forgeries and looting. There will be a section devoted to the Gardner Museum Heist, which is an unsolved case of the largest property crime in US History.

This special one-day workshop will explore the history of art theft, and the lessons that it can offer to contemporary investigators and security personnel. Over the past forty years, art crime has consistently been the third highest-grossing criminal trade worldwide. Most art crime since the 1960s has involved organized crime, funding other operations, including the drug and arms trades, and even terrorism.

Art crime is little studied, from an academic and an investigative perspective. The combination of scholarly historical analysis with experience in the field can provide the best means to understand and curb this serious threat to not only our cultural heritage, but to impede organized crime overall.

The first half of the program will take you on a tour through the history of art crime with a focus on fine art theft, investigation, and museum security. The second half of the workshop will detail practical methods of using the lessons learned from history's master thieves, and from the successes and failures of investigators and security programs, to suggest better ways to investigate and protect art in the future.

Seminar starts 900am and will be located in Dodds Auditorium on the University of New Haven campus. This seminar is open to law enforcement officers, educators, and the public. Tuition is $100.00 and light refreshments will be served.

The seminar will be run by ARCA Founding Director Noah Charney.

To register please go to www.henryleeinstitute.com .

In a recent edition of the National — one of the leading English language newspapers in the Arab world — journalist Andy Pemberton investigates why thieves steal artwork that is nearly impossible to sell. To do so, he interviewed ARCA's Managing Director Terressa Davis and the Art Loss Register's William Webber, who both dispute the popular misconception that thieves steal art to order. Instead, stolen art is most commonly held for ransom or used as collateral when trading with other criminals.

You can read the full text of the article, entitled "Painting Into a Corner," here.

To keep our supporters better informed, ARCA has launched a new online bulletin. Citations: Updates from the Association for Research into Crimes against Art has already been e-mailed to our mailing list subscribers. From now on, this newsletter will be sent out on the first Tuesday of every month. It includes information on our work, a calendar of upcoming events, and links to important news stories. For future issues, we welcome your input on what other features you would like to see included.

If you are not already on our mailing list, you can join it at our website. You can also view our past newsletter archive online. Thanks for your interest and support!

Please let me introduce myself. In September 2009, I was named Managing Director of ARCA. As such, I'll be running the organization's daily operations, as well as helping to conceptualize, develop, and implement new projects. I hope to continue the great work founder Noah Charney and so many others have begun, but to do so, I will need your help.

Supporters like you have already allowed us to achieve a great deal in a short amount of time. In just the past year, ARCA launched the world's only Postgraduate program in Art Crime Studies, introduced the Journal of Art Crime, published the book Art and Crime, and consulted governments, law enforcement agencies, museums, places of worship, and other public institutions on art protection and recovery cases. In the next year, we will continue these endeavors and undertake numerous others, about which you'll be able to read in future posts on the ARCAblog.

There are many ways that you can become involved in this important work. Show your support by becoming a member, making a tax-deductible donation, subscribing to the Journal of Art Crime, purchasing Art and Crime, or studying in our Postgraduate program. Just as importantly, we need people to donate their time by volunteering or interning. And we are always looking for contributors to our journal, blog, and podcasts.

Thank you for your interest and support. If you have any questions or comments about our organization, I encourage you to email me. And you'll be hearing again from me soon on the ARCAblog.

I look forward to working with you!

Terressa Davis

director at artcrime.info

The Application (Due 15 Dec. 2009) and Prospectus for the 2010 Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime Studies are now available.

Once again, ARCA presents the first organized postgraduate program in International Art Crime Studies to be held June 1 - August 13. This program will provide in-depth instruction in a wide variety of theoretical and practical elements of art crime: its history, its nature, its impact, and what can be done to curb it. Courses are taught by international experts, in the beautiful setting of Umbria, Italy. Topics include art history and the art trade, museums and conservation, art security and policing, criminology and criminal investigation, law and policy, and the study of art theft, antiquities looting, war looting, forgery and deception, vandalism, and cultural heritage protection throughout history and around the world. It is the idea program for art police and security professionals, art lawyers, insurers, and curators, members of the art trade and post-graduate students of criminology, law, security studies, sociology, art history, archaeology, and history.

On 10 August 2009, ARCA Director Noah Charney was featured on CBC Radio's Q with Jian Ghomeshi. In the interview guest hosted by Jane Farrow, Charney discusses ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime studies and he describes the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to art crime. Additionally, he answers questions related to what opportunities graduates can expect to pursue upon their completion of the program. For anyone interested in learning more about the MA Program this is a great place to start. To access the Q with Jian Ghomeshi podcast click the title of this post or click here.

Further inquiries can be sent to Mark Durney, Business and Admissions Director of the 2010 MA Program, at ma@artcrime.info .

ARCA is pleased to draw your attention to an excellent feature article in The New York Times (Wednesday, 22 July 2009) on ARCA's Postgraduate Program in the Study of Art Crime and Cultural Property Protection.

We at ARCA would like to clarify a few points raised by the article.

Among the speakers at the ARCA Conference this July 11 was a judge from New Zealand named Arthur Tompkins (not Ngarino Ellis, as listed in the article).

We wish to emphasize that ARCA is a non-profit, and the tuition for the Program goes exclusively to covering expenses. The tuition is on the low end for a similar European master-level programs, and the short, intensive nature of the program means that the total expenditure for all students is a fraction of the cost incurred by 9 or 12-month long postgraduate programs, when one calculates the living expenses for the year and the income lost by professionals who would need to take a year off of work. ARCA's ultimate goal is to run the Program, like its other activities, free of charge--but this target can only be reached if ARCA receives financial support through philanthropy and grants in the future. Further the Director of ARCA receives no monetary compensation for his work as Director.

Finally, the journalist inadvertently raised an excellent point about the lack of solid, comprehensive empirical data and statistics about art crime worldwide, when she mentioned that Interpol could not corroborate the statistics about art crime mentioned by various scholars at the ARCA Conference and discussed in ARCA's book, Art & Crime.

One of the greatest issues in art crime today is the lack of sufficient empirical data to back up experiential and anecdotal information provided by professionals in the field of art protection, the art trade, and policing. This is a point that we stress repeatedly in our book, Art & Crime, and in interviews with and lectures by ARCA staff. Based on discussions with prominent members of international police squads (including the Carabinieri, FBI, the Dutch Politie, the Slovene Policia, the Spanish Policia, Scotland Yard, and many more), art criminals, members of the art trade, museum security directors, archaeologists, art lawyers, and more, scholars such as those associated with ARCA have developed an understanding of the extent and impact of art crime that preceeds the availability of sufficiently extensive data to prove the widely-agreed upon speculation. Prominent informed sources have regularly listed illict art and antiquities as the third highest-grossing criminal trade (as in tradeable commodity) worldwide over the past forty years, behind only drugs and arms. This is a fair indication of the severity of art crime, and the involvement in art crime of organized crime groups, and the use of illicit art and antiquities to fund terrorist activities, are widely known. However the statistics have never been complete enough to draw the serious attention of most of the world's governments.

One problem has been the lack of data kept by police around the world. Most police are told to file stolen art along with general stolen property. This means that many art crimes go unreported by the police, as the theft of a Rembrandt is not filed in a manner distinct from the theft of a Buick or a DVD player. As a result, art crimes reported to the police are often lost, misfiled, and never reported to larger national police agencies, and therefore never reported to Interpol. But this issue is made more difficult by the fact that many art crimes go unreported by the victims. Museums and galleries may be loath to admit their own security failures, while private collectors may not have declared ownership of some objects in their collection, in order to avoid luxury tax. The result is that only a fraction of art crimes are reported and, as mentioned, those that are reported are likely as not to be filed in a way that makes it difficult to sort out art crime from general property theft. The looting of antiquities is another difficult component. Antiquities tend to be looted from remote sites, jungle tombs or coastal shipwrecks, that may go undiscovered for months or years, if someone comes across them at all. Even if an illegal excavation site is discovered, there will be no record of what was at the site to begin with, if the site was never before excavated. Therefore police may learn that a tomb has been opened, but have no idea what to look for, because the contents are known only to the thieves.

Police are too often unaware of the severity and nature of art crime for the very reason that good analyses of art crime are rare, due to the poor data available, which is itself caused by inadequate filing systems. The problem then becomes cyclical: with so little data available, professionals continue dismissing art crime as a trifling, and occasional misdemeanour, making good news stories and thrillers, involving the collectibles of the wealthy, whose affluence protects them from real misfortune. One of the goals of ARCA is to take a step outside of that cycle, by informing police and the art world about art crime, explaining how it functions, and why it is necessary to take it seriously.

This briefly illustrates the uphill hike that the united front of academics and art, police, and security professionals face in order to establish and develop this new field of the interdisciplinary and practical study of art crime. For more information and extensive discussions of this, please see Art & Crime (Praeger 2009).

In the most recent US News & World Report Ulrich Boser has written an article on the FBI Crime Team. While researching for this piece Boser referred to ARCA's Art Crime Facts page, and asked me why so many art crimes go unreported. In my response I discussed how objects from unknown archaeological sites have not yet been registered, studied, or cataloged prior to the theft and thus are left unnoticed. Museums may be reluctant to report art thefts because it highlights shortcomings in their security. An institution's and its leadership's respect and reputation are at stake as well.

Additionally, in my discussion 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.

While scrutinizing a number of institutions' balance sheets I found some other things of note regarding special exhibitions and an institution's spending. The Wadsworth Atheneum whose net assets total just a little over a tenth of that of the Art Institute of Chicago nevertheless tallies more in special exhibition expenses than the Art Institute ($1,066,435 versus 1,061,113 respectively). Evidently, the Wadsworth views special exhibitions as great opportunities for growth.