Gallerists who coach sellers in passing off ‘hot’ art and antiques as respectable collectables. Museums which choose to overlook questionable provenance in order to buy a too-good-to-be-true artefact. Sneak thieves creeping through midnight churches, armed masked gangsters bursting into public museums, brazen individuals sauntering into galleries and calmly lifting art off the wall. Forgers who intentionally insert ‘mistakes’ that may lead to their capture, and thus the notoriety that they crave. Soldiers stripping the vanquished of their heritage to send to hidden salt mines or the homes of generals (and pocketing souvenirs themselves along the way). All-too-easily-defeated million-euro security systems, and the do-it-yourself hardware-store mechanisms that can sometimes be far more effective for keeping art where it is meant to be. Thefts for ransom or reward, with no intention to try to sell ill-gotten gains. Dedicated art police and dismissive agents who (incorrectly) think art is a waste of time. Insurance fraud, art law and bureaucratic tripwires. These are some of the themes examined in this new, practical book, all within the interdisciplinary field known as art crime.
The stories often defy belief, and are frequently cinematic. Machine gun-wielding burglars escaping with a Rembrandt via speed boat: it may sound like the start of a James Bond movie, but it was the premise of a real heist. A forger hiding ‘time bombs’ in his handiwork – intentionally inserted anachronisms that function as covert insults to the so-called experts who overlook them. Elaborate security measures that turn out to be Gordian knots, out-manoeuvred with simplicity. But for all the pizzazz of this topic, which everyone from professors to plumbers finds intriguing (whether your association is The Thomas Crown Affair or an obscure post-Napoleonic legal clause to prevent war looting), art crime is serious business.
The term ‘tomb raider’ brings to mind a scantily clad video-game heroine before most people associate it with black-clad fundamentalist terrorists. But the people who illegally excavate archaeological sites rarely brachiate their way, vine to vine, across subterranean chasms wearing daisy dukes. The world of antiquities looting has crossed into the realm of terrorism – the ancient pot you buy on eBay, or at a prestigious auction house, might be funding jihadists.
The union of art and terrorism is nothing new. In the 1970s, IRA operatives stole art on several occasions from Irish private collections, in order to sell or swap them for the release of political prisoners. In 1999, Mohamed Atta, one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, flew to Germany with photographs of looted Afghani antiquities, which he sought to sell in order, in his own words, ‘to buy a plane’ to crash into American buildings. Just a few weeks before this foreword was penned, Daesh (alternatively known as ISIS, ISIL or Islamic State) bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud and smashed statues at a museum in Mosul, destroying pre-Islamic monuments and artefacts, while news filtered out that they were earning ‘as much as tens of millions’ by selling antiquities looted from territory in occupied Syria alone, to foreign buyers. Even more recently, terrorists stormed a museum in Tunisia and killed everyone they found inside. Stolen art and looted antiquities fund terrorist groups. So why has it taken so long for the world to take this seriously, or even notice?
Of course, this is old news to those of us who study art crime. As early as 2005, US Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos and colleagues presented evidence, much of it still classified due to active operations, at the annual INTERPOL conference in Lyon on stolen works of art, that terrorist groups were funding their activities by selling looted antiquities abroad. At the same meeting, it was announced that art crime was perhaps the third-highest-grossing criminal trade worldwide, behind only the drugs and arms trades. This was also the year when Der Spiegel broke the news about Mohamed Atta trying to sell looted antiquities in a predecessor to the hijacking plan for 9/11.
But it is only now, ten years later, in 2015, when Daesh, with their savvy terror-marketing videos of executions of people, and destruction of statues and monuments, that the world has taken proper notice. Daesh’s activities are just the latest chapter in the story of art and terrorism, which often mixes the idea that certain art works have a corrosive influence and must be destroyed, with the recognition that an art work can be sold to collectors for high sums. Daesh accepts the value of antiquities but also destroys them, finding it unacceptable for non-traditional, non-Islamic art to exist within its territories of conquest. This lack of logic sounds spookily similar to the indecisive Nazi theories on ‘degenerate art’. The Nazis stole as much as they could, selling as much of that as they could (much of it to prominent American and British collectors, who passed cash to the Nazi war effort), and burned the rest in bonfires. The art they did not like was to be destroyed, unless they could profit from it. Even more macabre, this attitude to art ran parallel to Nazi views on concentration camp victims – those of ‘lesser races’ were not killed outright, but put to work and used as an economic commodity, as long as they could reasonably be sustained, before being killed or allowed to die off. It is an easy pairing to see Daesh and Nazis as peas in a pod: the former obsessed with a warped interpretation of a real religion, the latter having cobbled together their own pseudo-spiritual amalgam of White Supremacist beliefs.
The reason for the delay in links to art and terrorism being taken seriously has to do with statistics, or lack of them. There are tens of thousands of art thefts reported each year worldwide, and far more go unreported. In particular, instances of illegally excavated antiquities are nearly impossible to monitor, because the objects extracted from ancient tombs have never existed before for modern humans – they were last seen when they were buried, perhaps thousands of years ago. No one knows what was pulled out of the ground by tomb raiders; authorities might not even find the empty tombs or sites. So we really have no idea of the scale of the problem, only that it is indeed vast. With more anecdotal evidence than empirical, authorities have taken a ‘maybe – let’s see’ approach. But Daesh’s PR savviness has made the problem impossible to ignore, whacking anyone with a computer screen on the head with videos of grotesque devastation, to people and art works.
The extent of the damage done to Nimrud and Palmyra is abominable. But if it can be said that there is a thimbleful of lemonade to be made out of the Daesh bagful of lemons, it is that their focus on high visibility for their activities has made protecting cultural heritage, and keeping saleable antiquities out of terrorist hands, a priority. So, now that we have governmental attention, what can (or should) be done?
The first step is to stop buying antiquities from Daesh-occupied territories. Period. Unless an object has a documented history of having been legally excavated and exported decades ago, it should not be touched with a ten-foot pole. That may seem painfully obvious, but no terrorist would be able to turn pots and statues into income unless there was someone handing cash to them in exchange. Armies already map out culturally sensitive zones to try to avoid collateral damage while fighting. But such sites should likewise now be targeted for protection. Local guards should be posted at known archaeological sites and museums – studies have shown that trained, reasonably paid locals make for the best security in such situations. While debates continue as to whether such guards should be armed, in situations like the recent Tunisian museum attack it was the fact that the armed guards were absent (one had failed to show up for work, another was on break) that allowed the assailants to waltz into the museum. One wonders what would have happened if the guards had been in place. The main lessons are to protect cultural heritage sites as if you would any high-price, saleable commodity that you do not want to fall into terrorist hands. A museum can be worth as much as an oil field, provided there is someone willing to buy what has been stolen from it. Which brings us to the second point: stop buying anything that could have come from terrorist-occupied territories.
Whether the concern is the preservation of cultural heritage from obliteration, or keeping cash from its sale out of the hands of terrorists, art, antiquities and monuments must be protected. It is not just the art that is at stake.
Stories like these, and lessons from these true crime stories, are to be studied in order not to repeat past mistakes, and to arm ourselves for the future. Since the foundation of ARCA (Association for Research into Crimes against Art), the research group behind the book you hold today, art crime has gone from an under-studied, often misunderstood phenomenon to something more solidly grasped and widely acknowledged as far more serious than the once-prevalent image of Thomas Crown, Cary Grant and George Clooney, as on-screen mis-constructs of art thieves, suggested. Real criminals stealing, looting and destroying art look like thugs and terrorists, not dapper millionaires. It has long been known that art crime is among the highest-grossing criminal trades worldwide, and that, since the Second World War, it has largely been the realm of organised crime, from small local gangs to large international syndicates. But while the relatively small group of specialists the world over (most of whom have collaborated with ARCA in some capacity) are well aware of this, it is only in the past year or so, with the likes of Daesh throwing the links between art looting and destruction with organised crime and terrorism in our faces, that the world at large has sat up and taken proper notice. Art crime used to be dismissed as not ‘serious’, even by government and police officials. It is still underrepresented in law enforcement (few countries have any dedicated art police at all), but there can be no doubt as to its severity. If you are troubled by the drugs and arms trades, the destruction of cultural heritage, organised crime and terrorism, then art crime must be taken seriously.
There have been relatively few books on art crime. The shelves of the library at the seat of ARCA’s annual Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection hold some two hundred books, very few for a phenomenon that dates back to the ancient world. The majority of what is written consists of journalistic accounts – engaging and factual, but with little analysis or scholarly backbone. ARCA has sought to develop the academic side of this field of study. Now this book offers a practical point of reference on all things art crime. If you are interested in the subject, or work anywhere in the field – museums, galleries, auction houses, academia, archaeology, art law, as a collector – this book will be both useful and enlightening. Chapters are penned by acknowledged experts in the field, and written so as to be accessible and practical for readers of all backgrounds and professions. Should you wish to learn more, the bibliography can point you in useful directions, and you may also be interested in subscribing to ARCA’s Journal of Art Crime, a twice-yearly peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject, or even attending ARCA’s Postgraduate Program, held every summer in Italy. For more information, visit www.artcrimeresearch.org.
Meanwhile, enjoy this book, which we hope you will find invaluable as a reference to understanding, and protecting yourself against, art crime.
Dr Noah Charney is a Professor of Art History specialising in art crime and founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. He is a best-selling author and editor and recent books include The Art of Forgery (2015) and Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves (2016).