Abstract
In 1987, grave robbers in Peru stole the largest gold object ever found from an ancient royal tomb in the archeological site of Sipàn (Atwood 2004). Weighing in at just under 3 pounds, the piece was a backflap, ripped off the skeletal remains from the tomb of an important warrior–priest. Ten years later, the backflap was recovered in the parking lot of a hotel in Philadelphia as part of sting operation conducted on the part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (FBI 2009). The undercover agents had offered $1.6 million for it (Brodie et al. 2000: 15). In 1998, the backflap was finally returned to Peru and is now on display in the Museo de la Nación in Lima (Rose 1998).
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Notes
- 1.
With the advent of farming, for example, empires and cities largely replaced hunter–gatherer, pastoral, and nomadic ways of life (Stille 2002: xiv).
- 2.
Moreover, the tangible remains of the past as they relate to collective cultural heritage are also essential elements in the perpetuation of a thriving tourist economy. Greece, for example, is a relatively poor country that relies heavily on tourism as a source of national income.
- 3.
- 4.
At one point, for example, there was speculation that the heist had been perpetrated by individuals with ties to local organized crime groups and even the Irish Republican Army (Boston Globe 2004). See the full article online at http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/03/11/new_theory_airs_on_gardner_museum_theft/.
- 5.
Many libraries have fallen vict im to theft of rare books and manuscripts. See, for example. Sandra Laville’s recent article in The Guardian on William Jacques, a thief who stole £1 million worth of rare and ancient texts from the British Library. (See at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/02/antiquarian-book-theft-library-crime.)
- 6.
A more expansive definition of art vandalism could also include unintentional damage caused by thieves in the course of a theft; damage to an artwork caused by a neglectful caretaker; restorative efforts that instead mutilate an artwork; and damage to artworks caused during war or civil unrest (Conklin 1994: 227–228).
- 7.
For example, a lawsuit involving the seizure of Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally, was initially commenced by the U.S. Government in 1999, claiming that the current holding institution knew that the painting had been stolen in 1938 from a Jewish owner’s private collection (Hoffman 2006). To this day, the painting is still tied up in litigation (Artinfo 2008).
- 8.
While the art fraud discussed here is, for the sake of space, limited to a cursory discussion of fakes and forgeries, a broader examination of art fraud should include fraudulent activities committed on the part of dealers, collectors, auction houses, and museums. Such examples of art fraud include but are not limited to: insurance fraud, tax fraud, and investment fraud committed on the part of collectors; fraud committed on the part of dealers against artists, other dealers, collectors, auctions houses, museums; fraud committed on the part of auction houses (e.g., insider trading, the sale of stolen or counterfeit art); fraud committed on the part of museums (e.g., purchasing stolen or looted art for a collection; customs violations). For an excellent, in-depth discussion of such fraudulent activities, we refer the reader to John Conklin’s Art Crime (Praeger Press 1994).
- 9.
- 10.
Provenance refers to the previous ownership history of an object. The term is most frequently used in the art community to refer, in other words, to what has happened to an antiquity since it came out of the ground.
- 11.
Since property varies from one legal framework to the next, so too do legal conceptualizations of ownership. Following the Anglo–American nemo dat rule, for example, a thief can neither convey good title nor can someone claim good title through a thief even if the property is transferred to a good faith purchaser (Gerstenblith 2004). Unlike common law countries such as the USA, however, good title to a stolen object can be conveyed in the bulk of European continental civil law countries if the object was purchased in good faith. This means that even if an antiquity was looted and illegally exported from its country of origin, if it was subsequently purchased in good faith in a civil country, then the good faith purchase is favored and the object is no longer legally construed as stolen (Brodie 2002). Civil countries, then – most famously, Switzerland – become transit ports in which antiquities change hands and title is obtained. With a good title secured, an antiquity can now obtain legal export documentation, be legally imported elsewhere, and thus begin to circulate freely and legally on the antiquities market (Alder and Polk 2002, 2005).
- 12.
Legislative attempts to curb antiquities trafficking have in general identified the issue as one of theft or illicit export; that is, the enactment of national laws that vest ownership over antiquities to the State, in which case the removal of such objects constitutes theft; or, laws that attempt to prohibit exportation of such objects from national borders (Alder and Polk 2002). The salient difference between these two legislative efforts concerns its enforceability – market nations who top the list of antiquities importers have been reluctant to enforce other nations’ export laws, and source nations are more successful in pursuing legal recourse when such items are legally construed as stolen (ibidem).
- 13.
Another figure often attributed to INTERPOL by scholars and journalists alike is that art crime is the third highest-grossing criminal industry, just behind drugs and arms. INTERPOL, on the other hand, has carefully and explicitly stated for years on its Web site that “We do not possess any figures which would enable us to claim that trafficking in cultural property is the third or fourth most common form of trafficking, although this is frequently mentioned at international conferences and in the media” (INTERPOL 2009). We suspect that this figure gets recycled over and over simply because it is sensational, not because it is necessarily based in fact.
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Passas, N., Proulx, B.B. (2011). Overview of Crimes and Antiquities. In: Manacorda, S., Chappell, D. (eds) Crime in the Art and Antiquities World. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7946-9_3
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