Abstract
Reviewed by: Julian R. Murphy, Judge's Associate, High Court of Australia, Australia
What better time to be reading and thinking about art crime than in the wake of one of the most highly publicised and hard fought art fraud trials conducted in Australia’s history: the case of the counterfeit Brett Whiteley paintings. Prosecuted in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the jury spectacularly returned guilty verdicts after the judge had given a rare Prasad direction, essentially an invitation to the jury to acquit. The media circus around, and the public interest in, that case show our peculiar fascination with this subject, a fascination which has propelled books like The Art Thief (Charney, 2007) and The Art of the Con (Amore, 2015) into bestseller lists around the world. Such books make for gripping reading, but for readers looking for a more comprehensive introduction to this issue there is John Kerr’s The Securitization and Policing of Art Theft: The Case of London and Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel’s edited collection, Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime: Australasian, European and North American Perspectives. These two works are major contributions to the recent efflorescence of study in an arena that, only 15 years ago, was chronically under-researched.
John Kerr’s monograph is the more specific of the two publications. Kerr’s book is, as its title suggests, a sustained look at the actors and processes currently operating in London for the prevention and detection of art theft (as opposed to other art crimes like trafficking, forgery, ransom, looting and vandalism). The book is firmly grounded in quantitative and qualitative research; Kerr conducted 33 interviews with art detectives, insurers, loss adjusters, police officers, artists and even a convicted forger. He also made site visits to 50 galleries, museums and other institutions – private and public – in London and greater Europe. The result is, as one would expect, an informed, evidentially grounded and exhaustively referenced survey of the field.
The tripartite task Kerr sets himself at the book’s outset is not a modest one – to survey the security and policing geography of London’s art world, to assess the efficacy of current security measures and to propose innovations. Yet, the book fulfils its brief, although one might lament the limited attention paid to the last topic – innovation and future directions. Over the course of the book, Kerr works systematically through what he identifies as the four institutions combining to create the modicum of security that art objects enjoy in London: ‘private security, the insurance industry, the public sector and self-policing by the art world’ (p. 1). It is the interrelations between these institutions that Kerr is most interested in, particularly those between the private and public players. This is, really, the burden of the book – that the security of art works is co-produced by the various players and institutions, private and public, complementing each other (p. 69). Kerr employs the language of ‘nodal governance’ to describe the way these vastly different sites work together.
Kerr’s work can make for difficult reading for someone not working in the field; it is densely academic and exegetical. But the book’s specificity is also its strength; it is the first in-depth study of the securitization and policing of art theft in the London area. Art theft is a hugely important area of study – the economic value of art theft annually is estimated to be between one and five billion US dollars (p. 8) – and this book goes some way to explaining how we might better guard against it. The book is an important contribution to the field for the rich array of data and observations it provides for future studies to build upon.
Less specific, but no less valuable for that fact, is Chappell and Hufnagel’s edited collection of essays. Chappell is a pioneer in this field (and he is mentioned in these terms in the literature review segment of Kerr’s monograph), having researched and published on the subject of art crime for close to two decades. Hufnagel too has authored important work in the area and between them they have brought together an impressive cadre of writers including Neil Brodie, co-editor of three seminal books on the antiquities trade; Noah Charney, editor of The Journal of Art Crime; and Lyndel V. Prott, former Director of UNESCO’s Division of Cultural Heritage.
The book, which has its genesis in a workshop organised by the editors in 2012, offers a smorgasbord of international perspectives on art crime, particularly theft, forgery and illegal trafficking in antiquities. To that end, it collects between its covers authors from Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the USA, the UK and Australia. Where Kerr’s book telescopes in on a particular geographic location, this collection takes a global view of the movement of art within and across borders, and the trends in, and dissimilarities between, art crime in different jurisdictions.
The first third of the book is devoted to case studies of theft and fraud involving art and antiquities. The chapter by Chappell and Kenneth Polk, entitled ‘The Peculiar Problem of Art Theft’, is perhaps the best place to start for the general reader, and resonates with Kerr’s work discussed above. The authors outline the bizarre conundrum whereby the successful art thief finds him or herself in possession of a highly valuable object that is almost impossible to sell. However, the prospect of finding oneself in such a predicament does not appear to deter people, as is clear from Vicki Oliveri’s chapter where she examines two of the most intriguing, and unsolved, art thefts in recent history – one from a Boston museum and the other from our own Art Gallery of New South Wales. Oliveri’s chapter makes for a gripping read, in the style of other accounts of great art crime like Sandy Nairne’s book on the Turner thefts (Nairne, 2011). Also contained in this part of the book is a chapter by Neil Brodie which examines the looting of antiquities, a problem that is particularly acute in the Middle East and is only likely to become more so as the political situation there remains unstable and reports spread of looting and vandalism occurring in ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria (Caulderwood, 2014; Edwell, 2015).
The second third of the book directs attention to the criminal legal process and procedure surrounding the prosecution of art crimes. The discussion here will be of special interest to lawyers and other persons seeking to understand the way courts deal with these matters. One thorny issue which raises its head in forgery cases is the difficulty of proving or disproving the authenticity of an artwork said to be by an artist who may have been dead for centuries. Without the artist to say that she did, or did not, paint a particular work, the issue almost inevitably falls to be determined by circumstantial evidence – in the recent case of the Brett Whiteley forgeries, mentioned above, it was the late Whiteley’s ex-wife who gave evidence that the paintings did not appear to have come from his hand. Another site at which art crime cases are often contested is on the issue of the rightful ownership of works of art. Craig Forrest’s chapter provides an insight into how cases of disputed ownership are conducted and resolved.
Finally, the book turns to survey international attempts to improve law enforcement in this particularly complex domain. Contributors reveal how the European Union, the USA, Canada and China take different approaches to the prevention and detection of art crime. One theme emerging from the chapters in this section is that in recent times, governments and international bodies are slowly moving towards a more systematic and organised approach to policing art crime, evidenced by the creation of the FBI’s Art Squad and similar specialised units in other countries. Yet, it is also clear that much more needs to be done, and more international cooperation needs to occur, to stamp out a species of crime that is truly international in its scope.
Art crime is so interesting because it is a site at which two very different worlds intersect – the creative and the legal. All of this is explained, explored and critiqued from an impressive array of perspectives in these two recent publications in the burgeoning field of academia that shadows this fraught area of competing human endeavours.