"Art & Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World" is the first book edited by ARCA. It contains a wide variety of essays by world-renowned scholars, police, security directors, lawyers, art historians, criminologists, and more, detailing the realities of art crime, and showing the unite front, working together to curb it. "Art & Crime" is published by Praeger, and is available through Amazon. All profits go to support ARCA's non-profit activities.

Amy Lee of the Yale Daily News has contributed a piece covering ARCA founder Noah Charney's recent lecture at the Yale University Art Gallery:

Law students take note: the registration deadline is fast approaching for the Inaugural National Cultural Heritage Law Moot Court Competition, sponsored by the Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. The competition will take place at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in downtown Chicago from March 5-6, 2010. The judges for the final round will include members of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Registration will be capped at the first sixteen (16) teams and is due by November 16, 2009.

For more information on the competition, please click here.

ARCA is pleased to announce the following events taking place in the US during the first two weeks of November.

Nov 5

11am

Marriot Hotel and Conference Center

Philadelphia, PA

ARCA trustees Erik Nemeth and Noah Charney present at the American Society of Criminology conference (open only to conference registrants)

Nov 7

4pm

Walters Art Museum

Baltimore, MD

Spotlight: Gary Vikan and Noah Charney

A conversation with the Walters Museum director and ARCA director Noah Charney

Nov 10

8am-4:30pm

Wexler Center for the Arts

Ohio State University

Columbus, OH

Library and Archive Security

Travis McDade and Noah Charney present a workshop on archive theft and security strategies, in collaboration with IFCPP (open to the public)

Nov 11

9am-4pm

Henry Lee School of Forensic Science

University of New Haven

New Haven, CT

Noah Charney gives an all-day workshop on how a knowledge of the history of art theft can be used to protect and recover art in the future

Nov 12

530pm

Yale Art Gallery

New Haven, CT

"The Most Stolen Painting in History"

Noah Charney speaks about his next non-fiction book, entitled Stealing the Mystic Lamb, a monograph on the art history and criminal history of Jan van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece, the most frequently stolen masterpiece of all time.

The talk will be followed by a book release party for ARCA's essay collection, ART & CRIME: EXPLORING THE DARK SIDE OF THE ART WORLD. The party will be held after the talk, across the street from the gallery at Atticus Bookstore Cafe. All are welcome.

Time: 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

ARCA Lecture

"The Most Stolen Artwork in History: Crimes and Mysteries of the Ghent Altarpiece"

Yale Art Gallery

Thursday, November 12, 5:30 PM

Noah Charney, art historian and founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), a nonprofit think tank on the protection of cultural property, presents a lecture on the subject of his next book, Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, the world’s most frequently stolen artwork, involved in thirteen different crimes since its creation in 1432. The lecture takes place at the Yale University Art Gallery’s Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall and is followed by a book signing and reception at Atticus Bookstore/Café, where Mr. Charney will be signing copies of "Art and Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World," a collection of essays on the world of art crime and its consequences.

We are pleased to direct your attention to a new article on art crime by Elizabeth Elliot, published in "The New Criminologist."

http://www.newcriminologist.com/article.asp?nid=2175

One of ARCA's primary goals is to encourage the academic study of art crime and create a criminological methodology for the analysis of art crime. Interested academics from any relevant field are welcome to contact us and submit papers for publication in our peer-reviewed academic journal, The Journal of Art Crime. The more scholars and professionals working together to curb art crime, the better off we, and our world's cultural heritage, will be.

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 .

The Smithsonian has announced that next year's National Conference on Cultural Property Protection will take place from February 21-24 in Washington, DC . This event "offers insight and proven solutions for new and seasoned professionals in the field of cultural property protection." Session proposals are currently begin accepted and registration will begin soon. For more information, visit the conference website.

Anthony Amore — chief of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, head of Amore Associates, and a trustee of ARCA — has uncovered a new twist in the increasingly bizarre art thefts in California. Amore's discovery, which contradicts statements in the press by the alleged victims of the heist, was featured in the October 11 edition of the Boston Herald. You can read the full story here.