by Summer Kelley-Bell, ARCA 2013

WARNING: this essay is a work of satire.  It will be best understood if read in the voice of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, from Downton Abbey.

As an ARCA alumna, I have come to warn you about all of the things that you will hate about this small program on art crime. In that vein, I here offer you a list of the woes of living in a small Umbrian town the likes of which will keep you up at night as you scroll through old Facebook photos.  A letter of warning, if you will, to all prospective ARCA-ites. Should you choose to ignore my advice, I cannot be responsible for the consequences.

Your first few days in Amelia will leave you with an intense urge to explore and make friends.  The town is ancient, surrounded on most sides by a Neolithic wall with even more history buried beneath it.  There are secret passages and hidden rooms and you’re going to want to grab a new-found buddy and sneak through every one of them.  DON’T.  The more you explore, the more you will love the town, and it will make it that much harder to leave.  Yes, there is a secret Roman cellar underneath one of the restaurants.  Yes, the town’s people do scatter the roads with rose petals in the shape of angels every June.  Yes, there quite possibly is a hidden room in your classmate's flat.  All of these things are beside the point.  Walk steady on the path and avoid all temptations to adventure.

As for friends, stick with people that live near to you back in the real world.  I know Papa di Stefano is fantastic, and yes, he will befriend you in a way that transcends language, but do you really want to miss him when you’ve gone?  And your fellow students?  Well, most of them are going to live nowhere near you.  Do you really need to have contacts in Lisbon and Melbourne and New York and Amsterdam?  No, you don’t.  It’s so damp in the Netherlands and we all know London is just atrocious.  I mean really, all those people. Take my advice, ignore anyone that lives far away from you.  You are here to learn and leave, not make connections that will last you the rest of forever.

You will also want to avoid the town’s locals.  Amelia is tiny, so getting to know most of its shopkeepers and inhabitants will not be very hard, but you must resist the urge to do so.  It’s true that Massimo will know your coffee order before you get fully through his door, and the Count will open his home with a smile to show you around his gorgeous palazzo, but these things are not proper.  Do not mistake their overflowing kindness and warmth for anything other than good breeding.  And when you find yourself sobbing at the thought of saying goodbye to Monica, you can just blame your tears on the pollen like the rest of us.

Your instructors are going to be just as big of a challenge.  The professor’s are really too friendly.  I know that Noah Charney says that he’s available for lunch and Dick Ellis will happily have a beer with you, but is getting to know your professor socially really appropriate?  I mean, we’ve all attended seminars where you barely see the speaker outside of stolen moments during coffee breaks, and that’s the best way for things to go, isn’t it?  Sterile classroom experience with little to no professorial interactions is the way academic things should run.  I know I never saw any of my professor’s outside of class.  And I certainly don’t keep up with Judge Tompkin’s travels through his hilarious emails; that would just be inappropriate.

And then there’s the conference.  It lasts an entire weekend.  Why would I want to attend a weekend long event where powerhouses in the field open up their brains for poor plebeians?  I mean honestly, meeting Christos Tsirogiannis at the conference will be a high point in your year, and it will be too difficult to control your nerdy spasms when Toby Bull sits down next to you at dinner.  And then, when you find out that Christos joined ARCA's teaching team in 2014 and you’ll find yourself scrambling to come up with a way to take the program a second time just so you can pick his brain. Think about how much work that will be.  They aim to make this an easy experience where you rarely have to use powers of higher thinking.  This should be like the grand tour, a comfortable time away from home so that you can tell others that you simply summered in Italy. 

And the program would be so much better served in Rome.  I mean, just think on it.  You would never have to learn Italian because you’d be in a city full of tourists.  You’d get to pay twice as much for an apartment a third of the size of the one you rent in Amelia, and you wouldn’t have to live near any of your class mates.  A city the size of Rome is big enough that a half hour metro ride to each other’s places would be pretty much de rigueur.  This means you wouldn’t have to deal with any of those impromptu dinner/study sessions at the pool house.  And there certainly wouldn’t be random class-wide wine tastings at the Palazzo Venturelli. That’s just too much socializing anyway.  It’s unseemly.

And finally, let’s talk about the classes.  Do we really care about art crime? Sure, Dick Drent is pretty much the coolest human you’ll ever meet, and Dorit Straus somehow manages to make art insurance interesting, but really, do we care?  Isn’t that better left to one’s financial advisor?  And the secret porchetta truck that the interns will show you as you study the intricacies of art law, could surely be found on one’s own.  Couldn’t it?  I think we would all be much better served by just watching the terrible Monuments Men movie, fawning over George Clooney and Matt Damon, and thinking about the things we could be doing all from the safety and comfort of our own homes.  I do so hate leaving home.  The ARCA program involves work, and ten courses with ten different professors, and classmates that will quickly become family. It’s all so exhausting.  I mean really, tell me, does this sound like the program for you?

ARCA Editorial Note:  If you would like more information on ARCA's 2014 program please see our faculty and 2014 course listing here or write to education (at) artcrimeresearch.org for a copy of this year's prospectus and application materials. 

Photo of ARCA Class 2013

by Sophia Kisielewska, ARCA Intern

Art Historian Dr. Tom Flynn led the first course of ARCA's Postgraduate Certificate Program in International Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies.

Dr. Flynn, a London art lecturer and docent, began "The International Art Market and Associated Risk" on Monday by asking the students to consider the question ‘what is the relationship between economic and aesthetic value’.  During the week he went through the history of the art market and explored how ideas of value were initially generated and understood within it.  The class looked at how the fashion for Cabinets of Curiosity stimulated an interest in enlightened thought and then later in the 18^th century how the first auction houses in London, Christies and Sotheby’s, stimulated an interest in creating collections of art.  We learned how the desire to form collections of all things Classical and Italian was initiated by the travels made by the young aristocracy that had travelled to Greece and Italy on their ‘Grand Tours’.

With his vast experience in the art market Dr. Flynn guided the class through its complex structure, explaining the contemporary significance and ever-evolving roles of every faction: the auction houses, the art dealers, art collectors, museums and the art media.  He created a very easy atmosphere for debate and discussion and right from the off everyone was keen to contribute knowledge gained from their different experiences of the market. The vibrant mix of nationalities and expertise in the class made for a fascinating arena of discussion and those with specialist areas of knowledge brought valuable insights to share with the class, such as Anna Knutsson who, having worked as a researcher and cataloguer at The Smith Library and former Sales-room assistant at Christies, has had a lot of experience in the market of books and manuscripts.

Students also shared their own cultural/national perspectives.  Mink Boyce, a gallerist and art consultant from Auckland, shared her experiences of working in the New Zealand art market.  She spoke of the complicated ethical issues surrounding the trading of traditional Maori art, and the need for greater cultural sensitivity in the art market when dealing with such works.  This discussion arose from a mention of the recent controversial sale in Paris that auctioned off Native American Hopi and Zuni tribal masks. 

Every day after class, the debates have been transferred with enthusiasm to either Punto di Vino – a sophisticated wine bar just around the corner that welcomes the ARCA students like family -- or Bar Leonardi – a bar placed just outside the gate which offers an authentic Italian bar experience.

On Tuesday morning, Monica Di Stefano (ARCA’s resident Amerino) directed those who had signed up for Italian lessons in their first ciao’s and mi chiamo’s.  Armed with their exercise books, the students moved very speedily through the basics and by Thursday morning could be seen rushing into Caffe Grande before class to confidently test out their new skills on Massimo, everyone’s favorite barista.

On Saturday, at 7.45 a.m., more than 20 students made their way by bus to the beautiful Umbrian town of Orvieto. Monica Di Stefano, the trip’s tour guide, spoke of the city’s history from its inception as a major Etruscan settlement to its interesting relationship to the papacy in the Renaissance period and to being the one-time home of Thomas Aquinas.  The highlight for all the students seems to have been  Luca Signorelli’s astonishing San BrizioChapel in the Duomo, whose powerfully exaggerated nudes are famously thought to have been inspiration for Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ fresco in the Sistine chapel.  When asked about the trip, ARCA student Georgina Roberts said, ‘A quaint town with astronomical amounts of culture… and great ice cream’.

That evening many ARCA students joined the locals of Amelia in a pizza evening hosted by the ‘Collis’ contrada.  Amelia, like many medieval towns of Italy, such as Siena, is divided into condrade, and these zones of the city compete in various medieval events throughout the year.  The evening was finished off with music and a raffle, where ARCA student Sloane Taliaferro won third prize: a snazzy beach-bag and tights.

By Sunday everyone seemed a bit exhausted. Most people were seen taking it easy in the sun - when it wasn’t raining - but a few were hurriedly finishing their assignments for Dr. Flynn or desperately flicking through Noah Charney’s book Stealing the Mystic Lamb in preparation for Monday’s class.

Sophia Kisielewska recently finished her MA History of Art degree from the University of Edinburgh , which included a year of study at the Universita' di Roma Tre.