Mum’s the word: Should we alert art thieves to the value of their haul?

Another day, another theft from a museum...and another tranche of media articles alerting the thieves to the market value of what they’ve just stolen. Clearly we cannot stop journalists researching the likely open market value of stolen works of art, particularly when art price databases are so widely available and high prices make juicy headlines, but what’s the industry intelligence on this? Should law enforcement authorities, art theft investigators and specialist art crime research agencies reveal values or not? 

This question occurred to me while reading ARCA CEO Lynda Albertson's excellent and informative piece on this week's theft of important Castellani jewellery (left) from Rome's Villa Giulia Museum. 

If you believe, as many erroneously do, that stolen works of art have no economic value whatsoever (because they cannot be sold on the open market), then it logically follows that there is no harm in revealing recent auction prices for comparable works. In doing so you're just telling the criminals how stupid they are. However, if you believe, as I do, that thieves often derive real economic value from art theft (albeit only a fraction of legitimate market value) — through insurance ransoms, using the objects as collateral against other criminal commodities, or benefiting from “rewards for information leading to recovery”, etc. — then surely there is genuine harm in revealing recent market prices. Won’t this only encourage further thefts?

There is, of course, a difference between the theft of works by ‘blue chip’ artists, the notional values of which are more widely known, and the theft of more academic material or unique works that have no direct or obvious market equivalent. We are therefore doing ourselves — and indeed the aggrieved museums or private collections — no favours by alerting thieves to the market value of comparably rare objects or comparable objects from specialist niche categories. The objects might have been nicked on commission (whisper it) on behalf of a collector with an aesthetic passion for such things and who in any event would never sell (in which case their market value is largely irrelevant). But they might also have been stolen opportunistically, in which case why inform the thieves as to the likely black market value of their haul?

The recent theft from the Rotterdam Kunsthal immediately triggered a hail of media reports estimating the likely market value of the hoard. Almost all of these were so wide of the mark as to be laughable to anyone with specialist knowledge of the art market. But they made good headlines. More critically, they may well have served to encourage other criminals to have a go. 

I don’t know the answer to this, but my instinct tells me that those who understand art's economic value (and particularly the relationship between legitimate and black market values) would generally refrain from educating the criminal fraternity on the financial upside of art theft. 

I’d be interested to hear what specialists in the ‘art crime industry’ think. Should we broadcast prices? Or keep ‘schtum’?

Bacon slicer brings screaming pope to auction

A slice of Bacon: £25,000-30,000

It's fitting, perhaps, that a version of one of Francis Bacon's screaming popes should be coming under the hammer in the very month that the real Pope — Herr Ratzinger, late of Rome — is leaving office under a cloud of controversy, with some contingents screaming for him to surrender more than his papal ring and crimson pumps.

But the pope that will be offered at auction at a Surrey fine art saleroom on March 20 has had good reason to scream — because someone took a knife to him and sliced him to pieces.

This is just the latest instalment in a dismal series of events connected to the painter Francis Bacon, who is no longer around to object to the way his discarded artworks have been resurrected and commercially exploited. He may, of course, have just poured more champagne and laughed about it all the way to the Colony Club.

Back in April 2007, the Surrey auctioneers Ewbank (as they were then known) offered the 'Robertson Collection' of Francis Bacon studio throw-outs. To call it a collection is a serious misnomer, however, for the works were never 'collected' in any conventional sense. The story goes like this:

An electrician, who happened to be working at Francis Bacon's South Kensington home in 1978, 'rescued' diaries, cheque stubs and cancelled canvases by Bacon from a rubbish skip outside the building into which, he claims, Bacon was about to throw them. According to the account offered by The Daily Mail in 2007, the electrician, Mac Robertson, then 75, "persuaded the artist to let him keep some of the junk." Robertson went on to say, "I was in the right place at the right time. I had no idea that the bits and bobs Bacon was about to throw away might one day be worth a fortune."

Looking at the many surviving photographs of Bacon's studio, with its great Pyrenean slopes of sedimented detritus, it's hard to imagine the artist discarding anything, let alone the numerous contact sheets of Muybridge-like black and white photographs (above) which were a major source of inspiration. But these were also apparently destined for the skip until Robertson 'rescued' them. The haul — which included canvases that Bacon had quite literally de-faced with a Stanley knife in order to cancel them beyond redemption — went on to make £1.13 million when offered at the Ewbank Auction in April 2007. (You can see the video I shot of one of the destroyed portraits selling for £400,000 on You Tube here and my blog posts of 2007 here.)

Now another tranche of sliced-up Bacon is coming under the hammer, again at Ewbank Clarke Gammon Weller (as they are now known) in Woking, Surrey.

This time the material comes from the collection of the late Lewis Todd (1925-2006) (left), a  commercial artist who died in 2006. A Sunday painter of microscopic talent, Todd was in need of some cheap canvas on which to paint his amateur still lifes and landscapes. An acquaintance, Mr John Kesterton of the Heffer Gallery (now defunct), gave him a large canvas on which Francis Bacon had executed a study for one of his series of popes inspired by Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. How Kesterton came to own the Bacon canvas is unclear but it seems the Heffer Gallery also supplied Bacon with artist's materials so perhaps the gallery took the canvas in exchange.

Kesterton told Todd that if he wanted to use the unpainted side of the Bacon canvas he had to slice it up first. (At that time Bacon was not the 'blue-chip' artist he has subsequently become.) Todd happily obliged before executing his own paintings on the other side — works of consummate banality which he then sold to buyers at a craft market in Cambridge.

Auctioneer Chris Ewbank, who will disperse the slashed canvases at his Burnt Common saleroom in Surrey on March 20, has said of the consignment, "It is fantastic to think that these pictures were once part of a much larger painting of historical importance." Fantastic isn't quite the word I'd have chosen, but perhaps Mr Ewbank is thinking of the buyer's premium he will reap. The collection is estimated to realise around £100,000, but if the sale generates anything like the feeding frenzy that greeted the Robertson consignment the outcome could be in seven figures.

Given the prices these things realise it is not surprising that so many mutilated Bacon works have come under the hammer since the artist's death, most of them consigned by people claiming to have been the artist's friend. Perhaps they were. After all, Bacon was an affable fellow. He it was who coined the phrase, "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!"

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Viewing for the sale at the Burnt Common auction rooms is on Saturday March 16 from 10am to 2pm; Monday March 18 from 10am to 5pm, Tuesday March 19, from 10am to 8pm and on the morning of the sale from 9.30-10. For further information, please contact Chris Ewbank FRICS ASFAV on 01483 223 101 or antiques@ewbankauctions.co.uk

Lines on the Goulandris family art feud (or 'Aspasia and the Pot of Basil')

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When artworks to our heirs we leave
Marc’s Monet, worth ten million plus
Outstrips Matilda’s small Balthus
The nubile nymph she thought would pay
For her leisurely Harvard MBA
Is just a trifle, she is told
And not a Danaë shower of gold

Bertrand will cheer when he discovers
His Braque is better than his brother’s
Marie might faint when told the sketch
She dreamt would half a million fetch
Is not a blue-chip work by Miró
But a Beltracchi daub worth next to zero

“Et in Arcadia Ego”...True!
(That Virgil knew a thing or two)
Works of art expose our greed
The vanities on which we feed
If they could speak to us today
They’d sneer at all our wills and say:
“Cease this internecine feud!
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, dude!”

Inspired by the disputed art collection of the late Greek shipping magnate Basil Goulandris

European Commission Vice President seeks legislation to strengthen demands for restitution of “national treasures.”

The "Getty" bronze

News just in from the New Europe news agency suggests that European Commission Vice President Antonio Tajani is planning new legislation to help EU member states recover pieces of their cultural heritage unlawfully removed after 1993. (A quick reminder, as if any were needed — this will NOT affect the Parthenon Marbles, the bust of Nefertiti, the Benin brasses, the Rosetta Stone, the Maqdala manuscripts, and a host of other contested objects still beyond the reach of their countries of origin.)

EC Vice-President Tajani, responsible for Industry and Entrepreneurship, said: "Safeguarding the cultural heritage of all Member States is of major importance to the European Union. Our proposal is therefore necessary to further strengthen the effectiveness of the fight against illegal trafficking in cultural goods. The harmful effect on our national treasures represents a serious threat to the preservation of the origins and history of our civilization."

It’s perhaps not surprising that this initiative comes from an Italian politician, given Italy’s muscular efforts to police what it sees as its cultural property in recent years. Italy has shown greater determination than most countries in forcing North American museums to restitute looted objects and to reform their acquisition policies. But as the case of the "Getty" bronze (above left) demonstrates, ownership claims to "national" treasures are never cut and dried (grazie Felch and Frammolino).

There is a stark mismatch here between the utterances of the EU’s cultural policy unit and those issuing from the so-called ‘Universal’ or ‘Encyclopaedic’ museums in many of the EU’s more powerful member states. Many directors of these museums are members of the notorious ‘Bizot Group’ — an exotic truncation of the rather more cumbersome 'International Group of Organizers of Large-scale Exhibitions'. This élite institution, which takes its name from its founder, the French Countess Irène Bizot, a former head of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, was the source of the now notorious Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums.

James Cuno, the most vocal proponent of Bizot Group ideology, and President of the Getty Foundation — one of the institutions previously caught with its fingers in the cultural heritage till — is a staunch defender of the ‘Encyclopaedic’ museum model. He has frequently condemned what he sees as a veiled nationalist agenda behind today’s restitution claims. In harmony with British Museum director Neil MacGregor, Dr Cuno has consistently argued that there is no such thing as “national” cultural heritage, that no nation has a legitimate and exclusive claim to treasures found on its soil, since all culture is hybrid and therefore all material culture is the property of all humanity.

He has never explained why European and North American museums are the rightful custodians of the lion's share of the world's cultural property. As far as I can gather, nor has he refused to alter his position on the right, nay duty, of museums to continue acquiring cultural objects.

The “universalist” view of museum culture expounded by Cuno, MacGregor, Monetebello, et al— a legacy of Enlightenment thought — clearly doesn’t chime with Mr Tajani’s position, which argues that: “The harmful effect on our national treasures represents a serious threat to the preservation of the origins and history of our civilization" (my emphasis).

The directors of European and North American encyclopaedic museums insist that they are safeguarding “the origins and history of civilization” by retaining the world’s treasures within their walls. But that position is clearly no longer tenable in the eyes of Greece, Nigeria, Turkey, India, and other developing nations, many of which now seek to recover their “national” cultural property from these big institutions.

It used to be said that the British Museum was reluctant to return the Parthenon Marbles for fear that the notional “floodgates” would open, leading to the wholesale denuding of encyclopaedic museums everywhere. However, Marbles aside, the water level behind those gates has been rising steadily for years and the force of the water is increasing week on week, month on month, year on year. 

We will have to wait and see what impact this new EU legislation might have, if and when it is implemented. It cites 1993 as the cut-off year after which treasures cannot be acquired (a 23-year extension of the date cited in the UNESCO Convention), stating: “The proposed changes would apply to cultural goods classified as ‘national treasures’ unlawfully removed after 1993 that are now located on the territory of another Member State.”

Perhaps Dr Cuno would like to comment on how this scans with the syndrome he has so memorably defined as “nationalist cultural property retentionism”?

Courbet's Origin of the World: a field day for psychoanalysts

Gustave Courbet
L'Origine du Monde, 1866

Having crudely Photoshopped one of the few media images yet published of the recently discovered top portion of Courbet's controversial painting 'L'Origine du Monde' (The Origin of the World) to at least bring it into closer proximity with the extant lower half, my original skepticism towards the 'discovery' has been somewhat dispelled, although not entirely. This is, I readily acknowledge, an almost unforgiveable aesthetic crime, but hey, my curiosity got the better of me. I'm no expert in computer graphics, so cut me some slack for a moment — this is connoisseurship, not prurience.

We will have to wait until French experts have done a more professional job of digitally reuniting the two parts to be more sure. I can't see them attempting to actually 'restore' it. Perhaps it will end up being displayed like Manet's almost exactly contemporaneous Execution of Maximilian (1867-8) in the London National Gallery, which has also suffered radical dismemberment since it was painted (the art market is to blame for that).

If the Courbet head just discovered is indeed the excised part of the painting it will be an extraordinary art historical find, although not, perhaps, in the same league as the disinterment of Richard III's skeleton beneath a Leicester Car Park.

Jean-Jacques Fernier of the Courbet Institute unites the fragments

I learned this morning from Guardian critic Jonathan Jones's blog that Courbet's Origin of the World was once owned by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan's famously obscure writings were the cynosure of all undergraduate critical theorists while I was studying art history at Sussex University in the mid-1980s. That was a time when the so-called New Art History was asserting itself, a defining strand being the fusion of methodologies from other disciplines, most notably anthropology, critical theory, Marxism, gender theory, French psychoanalysis, and so on, into one gloriously calorific casserole of critical approaches. It made for some lively and knockabout post-graduate seminars.

Courbet's 'Origin' was often wheeled out on such occasions. It will be interesting to see how art historians deconstruct the marriage of the two separated portions. The possibilities for psychoanalytic interpretation are surely endless. Oh to hear what Lacan might have said. On other other hand, maybe not.

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Image above right: Photograph: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse! — Richard III found in Leicester car park

The discovery of the skeletal remains of Richard III in a Leicester car park is obviously a great day for archaeology. It's also a good opportunity to revisit Peter Sellers' great spoof of Laurence Olivier's Richard III reciting The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night.

'World Record' Chinese vase re-sold at less than half original price

Just about everyone knew it was too good to be true. Even within the other-worldly realm of Asian art, £53 million for a Qing dynasty vase (left) was an eyebrow-raising event.

When the hammer fell in Ruislip back in 2010 (the auctioneer brought his gavel down so hard and so exuberantly that it smashed in two) you could hear the exhalations of disbelief from Hammersmith to the Himalayas. It quickly emerged that the buyer was unable, or unwilling, to pay for it, which had appraisers everywhere turning to the chapter in the auctioneers' handbook marked 'Risk'.

Now Bloomberg's seasoned art market reporter Scott Reyburn has confirmed that it was all indeed a dream, an illusion, Chinese mist, smoke and mirrors. The Qing Dynasty porcelain vase 'sold' by Bainbridges Auction Rooms in Ruislip way back in 2010 was never paid for and has now been re-sold by private treaty to a different buyer in a transaction brokered by London auctioneers Bonhams. 

This time it has been sold for a sum reported to be between £20 million and £25 million (one wonders why, if they're happy to be that specific about the price, they don't just confirm the exact sum).

The failure of the original bidder to settle his obligation sent a ripple of concern around European salerooms, with a number of auction houses thereafter demanding pre-auction deposits from Asian bidders at sales of important Chinese works of art. The news that the so-called 'Ruislip Vase' was not the epochal moment it was cracked up to be (the vase remains on Bainbridge's website, trumpeted at £53 million) will merely reinforce the ongoing need for caution in disposing of the Chinese imperial wares so craved by Asian collectors. 

China has a long way to go before its art market is fit for purpose. The Ruislip Vase outcome is a reminder that the European art market is still vulnerable to its many inconsistencies. 

If 'luxe' could kill: Artists don't want to be artists...they want to make handbags

Yayoi-Vuitton at Selfridges

I thought I'd wrapped it up for Christmas and then along comes an excellent piece by Charlotte Burns, The Art Newspaper's ace art market reporter, on the Faustian pact between high-end contemporary artists and luxury brand strategies.

The 'luxury brand' concept — whereby we tend to view the work of people like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Damien Hirst in the same way that we view a Hermès handbag, Louis Vuitton luggage or a Rolex watch — is still relatively recent in the art world. As is the name-checking of economists in articles about the art market (it used to be art critics who were liberally quoted in market analyses).

Burns argues that the shine of luxury brands might finally be fading and she lists sliding share prices for Mulberry and Burberry in evidence, quoting Burberry’s finance director, Stacey Cartwright, on the decline of so-called “aspirational” middle class shoppers as one reason for the gloomy price warnings.

This reminded me of the famous "£100 rule" coined by Sotheby's marketing guru Stanley Clarke in the 1950s. After crunching the numbers, he told Sotheby's boss Peter Wilson that the firm's core business was not in multi-million dollar Cézannes and Monets, as many people assumed, but in objects worth £100 and less. Diana 'Dede' Brooks, Sotheby's CEO in the 1990s updated that mantra during her company's ill-advised marriage to Amazon.com. Plus ça change. As Charlotte Burns correctly points out, "While the top end of the market is not much affected by the woes of the middle class, a healthy mid-section is vital for long-term health." That's another reminder that although Koons, Hirst and Murakami remain the cynosure of media eyes, they represent just one of the many mansions within the art market house.

Yayoi Kusama's window at Selfridges' London store

In any event, I'm not at all sure that the products these three jokers release onto the world can properly be described as luxury brands. The branding aspect of their work has never been properly explained, Don Thompson's popularising efforts notwithstanding. Their work may be hugely expensive and thus available only to Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, but that in itself does not make them 'brands'.

Yayoi Kusama's cross-pollination with Louis Vuitton is a far more compelling instance of an artist seeking to partake of the luxury brand cachet. Most members of the general public who passed Selfridges' window during Kusama's recent Louis Vuitton installation in London (above right) would not have recognised her (the window contained multiple Kusama mannequins) or known she was a contemporary artist. But perhaps the issue is that even if they had, they would not have been surprised.

Maybe that's the real reason she, and Hirst, and Koons are leaving über-dealer Larry Gagosian. They don't want to be artists; they want to be handbag designers.

Less is more: The great Leonard Bernstein conducting

My final post for 2012 (and no, not because the Mayan-predicted Armageddon is coming) is a short video of the magnificent Leonard Bernstein proving that you don't need to wave a baton to get a great performance from your musicians. An approving pout will do...

The economic case for government funding of art and culture is heating up. Time for some lemonade...

Here's a short video by my friend David Castello-Lopes and his collaborator Léonard Cohen, which makes the case for public funding of culture in a witty and elegant way. It's set in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, but I'm hoping I can persuade David and Léonard to do one for the UK too, although the message is universal.

The issue of how to value culture in economic terms was hotly debated by participants at the recent Forum d'Avignon. Isn't it time we convened our own version of Forum d'Avignon here in the UK to make a forceful case for the fact that the arts and culture generally are not just superfluous add-ons that people do in their evenings and free time, but a critical part of the engine of economic growth.

Maybe we should be rallying support from Guardian Culture Professionals and others to create a two- or three-day forum to drive this message home.

  The Parable Of The Tuileries. Public funding in culture and arts: A handful of positive economic aspects. from Léonard Cohen on Vimeo.

EXCLUSIVE: US sculptor files copyright complaint against billionaire property developer Igor Olenicoff

Olenicoff's copy of Wakefield's work

Following my report in The Art Newspaper in July 2011, and which I also reported on Artknows here, I can now report that Russian-born billionaire property developer and convicted tax felon Igor Olenicoff and the company he founded, Olen Properties Corp., are being sued by contemporary artist Don Wakefield for alleged copyright infringement.

In 2011 it emerged that Wakefield had found at least seven unauthorised copies of a unique, large-scale granite sculpture he had created in 1992 on properties owned by Olen Properties in Brea, Irvine and Newport Beach, California. 

In his copyright complaint filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Wakefield alleges that Olenicoff wrongly presented the work to the Public Art Department in the City of Brea, California, and to the public in general, as the work of a Chinese artist.

Following my publication in The Art Newspaper of Wakefield’s claims, another American artist, John Raimondi, came forward with similar allegations against Olenicoff. Raimondi has filed a separate copyright complaint against the property developer and his company.

Igor Olenicoff: Forbes lists his wealth at $2.4 billion

In 2007, Igor Olenicoff admitted lying on his tax returns about his ownership of a number of foreign bank accounts. He was convicted of tax fraud and had to pay the US Government over $52M in fines. He is still listed as a billionaire on Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. Bradley Birkenfeld, an employee of UBS at that time and the whistle-blower in Olenicoff’s 2007 tax-avoidance case, was recently awarded $104m from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for drawing attention to the illegal Swiss accounts held by Olenicoff and others.

UBS are the corporate sponsors of Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair that is currently preoccupying most of the major art news outlets.

Don Wakefield says he has proof that Olenicoff was ordering copies of his work to be made in China and that he then submitted some of the sculptures to the Public Art Program in the City of Brea, California, bypassing the artists altogether, thereby saving himself significant expense.

Detroit-born Wakefield, who now lives in Southern California, found the first piece in 2008 but thought it was the original. He only realized his sculpture had been copied when he discovered three additional unauthorized copies in 2010 and three more in 2011. Later it emerged that several unauthorized copies of two different sculptures by east coast American artist John Raimondi were also found as a result of Wakefield’s investigation.

Wakefield believes that in terms of the size of the works — some being 25ft tall — the case represents one the largest copyright infringements in American legal history.

Both Wakefield and Raimondi are represented by attorneys Gene Brockland of law firm Herzog Crebs of St. Louis, Missouri and Mike Kuznetsky of Kuznetsky Law Group, Los Angeles. Both cases are pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

"Insufficient commitment" from the UK trade forces cancellation of leading antiques fair

LAPADA President Earl Howe and Judith Miller in happier times

The January 2013 edition of the National Fine Art and Antiques Fair, scheduled to take place at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham from 16-20 January, has been cancelled due to what the organisers, Clarion Events, describe as "insufficient commitment from the trade".

This is a major blow to Clarion and doubtless also something of an embarrassment to the London and Provincial Antique Dealers' Association (LAPADA) and the British Antique Dealers' Association (BADA), the two UK trade associations whose members make up the majority of the dealers who usually exhibit at the fair.

Meanwhile, over in Miami, the annual Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair continues to attract the super-rich collectors, or what another collector/speculator, Adam Lindemann, has described as "scenesters, people who don’t even pretend they are remotely interested in art.”

According to The Art Newspaper, Mr Lindemann recently penned a stinging attack on contemporary art fairs, adding his voice to others at the top of the market who have been pouring scorn on the oligarchs and other philistine trophy-hunters attracted by the rising prices for high-end art.

Jeff Koons, Hanging Heart, 2006

But it's not as if Mr Lindemann hasn't himself pumped this market. In 2006, he bought Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart (right) from Larry Gagosian for $4 million only to 'flip' it at Sotheby's months later for $23 million, on which occasion Gagosian bought it back (see my report of that sale here).

Over the past twenty-five years the pattern hasn't changed. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Forbes recently reported that the fortunes of the three wealthiest people in America — Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Larry Ellison were up $7 billion, $7 billion and $8 billion, respectively, despite the three men's charitable donations. The art market mirrors that trend with the top of the market remaining strong and the middle squeezed.

So, back in the UK, if you were planning on a New Year trip to Birmingham for a little antiques shopping, you should adjust your calendar. Was the cancellation of the National Fine Art & Antiques Fair in part an issue of location, underscoring the 'north-south' divide? Are London-based LAPADA and BADA members reluctant to travel north? One can't see BADA members showing "insufficient commitment" to their own London-based fair on 13-19 March 2013. 

Anish Kapoor & Co. — Gangnam Style!

Amnesty activists and leading members of the cultural world gathered at Anish Kapoor’s London studio to make a special Gangnam Style film in support of the artist, Ai Weiwei.

Anish Kapoor said: “Our film aims to make a serious point about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It is our hope that this gesture of support for Ai Weiwei and all prisoners of conscience will be wide-ranging and will help to emphasise how important these freedoms are to us all.”

Bravo, Anish!

Your weekend watching: James Cuno on Cultural Property

Thanks to Kwame Opoku for alerting me to this video (below) of a recent discussion between James Cuno and Maxwell Anderson on Museums and Cultural Property.

It begins with an extraordinarily politicized preamble from Getty CEO James Cuno who accuses countries seeking the return of their cultural objects of politicized nationalist agendas. His own agenda — to refuse to return objects acquired by Western imperial nations during the imperial era that are now in American museums — professes to be apolitical but is revealed here as rabidly political in its suspicion of those countries seeking an equitable share of cultural heritage (particularly of those objects taken from their lands).

Cuno is right, the Euphronius krater, recently returned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York to Italy (from where it was illicitly removed during the 1970s) is indeed Greek rather than Italian in origin. But that does not mean that an American museum has a greater right to own it and display it (and benefit from the cultural tourism it helps generate as a consequence) than an Italian Museum.

This is the basic problem with Cuno's argument. He is right that culture is essentially "mongrel" and hybrid, but he is yet to offer credible reasons why America has a more legitimate right to keep and curate the world's cultural heritage than any other nation. In the absence of those reasons, his championship of encyclopaedic museums as the legitimate Enlightenment-born stewards of the world's cultural heritage will continue to look like nothing less than nationalism of a different sort.

The Art Market: Hacks and critics abandon ship

Wow! Huh? US art critic Dave Hickey (left) and Canadian art market hack Sarah Thornton have both decided to give up on the art world. Does it matter? Does their decision to ride off into the sunset tell us anything about the current state of the art market that we didn't already know?  

Hickey has thrown the towel in on the grounds that the art market has become "calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing," while Thornton, whose art market primer, Seven Days in the Art World, remains a best-seller, has listed on her blog her ten reasons why she is quitting. One of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is related to the activities of oligarchs.

"Oligarchs and dictators are not cool," she opines, having finally worked out that, "some of the biggest spenders in the art market right now are people who made their money in non-democracies with horrendous human rights records."

In case we get the wrong idea, Sarah goes on to reassure us that, "Some of my best friends are high net worth individuals,"  thereby revealing the standard art market obsession with the wealth of others.

It's disappointing to see Dave Hickey withdraw, but in reality his line of sophisticated, well-informed, no-holds-barred, occasionally cuss-laden criticism never had much to do with the art market anyway (his great essay 'The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market' was about his love affair with cars as much as it was about the art market). Unlike the Jerry Saltz's of this world who long ago disappeared up the all-consuming fundament of reality game-show television, Hickey has held fast to aesthetics, to a brand of uncompromising, theoretical art criticism that has become one of the most conspicuous casualities of the money-obsessed art market.

Sarah Thornton

Why did Sarah Thornton call a cab? Her departure will be seen by many as the art world's loss. She is an intelligent and observant commentator, albeit queasily in thrall to the celebrity-dominated upper reaches of the blue-chip art market (as her strangely boastful reference to her High Net Worth friends makes clear).

Many of her ten reasons for quitting are understandable, but most of them have been part of the art market for the past twenty-five years. Reporting on art sales has always been a repetitive, largely pointless activity (but arguably now more so than ever), while it has long been common knowledge that art fairs churn out vapid post-event press releases and spin false stories to a credulous press. In fact, many of the practices we see around us today were coded into the market's DNA way back in the early modern era. But on one matter she is right on the money.  

Back-office manipulation, money-laundering, weird third-party underwriting and other forms of exotic financial chicanery have become far more widespread in recent years, frequently whispered about over  cocktails but never exposed by a now largely supine press fearful of litigation.  

Sarah is not the only one who has had to bin a story for which a bullet-proof case can be made but which is spiked on the grounds that it won't get past the lawyers. (Sorry if I seem to be getting at the lawyers again; I know they're only doing their jobs, but look what's happening as a consequence.)

Cheerio, Dave and Sarah. My guess is that you'll both be back.

The Horror, The Horror: Neil MacGregor recalls The Shock of The Thing

Some of us never fully recover from horrific experiences, nor indeed from the more gory horror films.

Hitchcock's Psycho made an indelible impression on me as a youngster and I still flinch whenever I see that little bald-headed organism come snarling out of John Hurt's chest cavity in Ridley Scott's masterly Alien. But I shuddered even more when I watched John Carpenter's 1982 chiller, The Thing.

Little did I realise at the time that the film was actually based on real-life events experienced by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. It seems Mr MacGregor is still suffering nightmares after surviving that alien invasion while working as a young archivist at the British Museum's Antarctic Research Laboratory in the 1970s. Acclaimed film director John Carpenter turned those stomach-churning events into The Thing.

"Give us back our Things"

Mr MacGregor has now bravely agreed to revisit the terrifying time when he and a group of trainee universal museum directors found themselves trapped in an inhospitable environment, invaded by grotesque extraterrestrial parasites (right) demanding the return of their cultural property from Universal Museums.

He will be recounting his experiences in the inaugural Robert Hughes Memorial Lecture entitled The Shock of The Thing at the National Gallery of Australia on 13 November.

It is clear from Mr MacGregor's glassy stare in the pre-event publicity flyer (above left) that he is still suffering inner turmoil, ever fearful that the aliens, infected by the deadly Cultural Property Restitution virus will return to attack his institution and take back their "Things". One can only sympathise.

Kurt Russell as a young Neil MacGregor in The Thing

Unresolved childhood traumas don't last forever, but denial will only make matters worse. Better to take the same course of action as Kurt Russell, who played the young Neil MacGregor in the film (left) —sit down, open a bottle, and accept your fate — the aliens are coming...you can run, but you can't hide.

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Neil MacGregor, Director, British Museum, London, will present The Shock of The Thing, the inaugural Robert Hughes Memorial Lecture at the National Gallery, Australia on Tuesday November 13.

Venue: James O Fairfax Theatre
Price : $20, $15 members (Bookings essential)
Booking: Bookings

Art vandals: hanging's too good for them

The conflation of criminal acts and celebrity culture is becoming ever more prominent and it's hard to know what to ascribe it to. Historically, art fakers and forgers have been drawn predominantly from the ranks of failed painters and sculptors whose own work was never good enough to win them entry into the legitimate market. Following the defacing of a Mark Rothko painting at Tate Modern, we can add graffiti artists to the rogues gallery.

The most recent slippage between crime and celebrity comes with the decision by a Houston, Texas "art dealer" to stage an exhibition of paintings (to call them works of art would be to bastardize the English language as well as aesthetics) by Uriel Landeros, who spray-painted a Picasso canvas at the Menil Gallery in June this year.

According to CBC News, Landeros has been "on the lam" since being charged with the descration of the Picasso work, but this hasn't stopped James Perez (above left), owner of the Cueto James Gallery in Houson, from offering Landeros the oxygen of publicity.

One glance at the execrable objects hanging behind Perez in the image above is enough to confirm Landeros as laughably devoid of talent and Perez as an attention-seeking opportunist. To add insult to the injury felt by thousands of Menil Gallery visitors who value their local culture, Perez has said of Landeros's act of vandalism, "It's just taking something and making it your own. I like what Uriel did. That it makes it yours," at a stroke cementing his own philistine credentials.

Landeros did not make the Picasso his own. The restorers will restore it (they have almost completed that process), Picasso's fame will endure and Landeros and his crapulous Houston cheerleader will descend back into the swamp of oblivion where they belong.

Perez is confident that his gallery will be packed to the rafters on the opening night. Pigs will feed at the trough whatever the farmer fills it with.

Who's to blame? Such egregious acts of vandalism may be partly motivated by a common misunderstanding of a number of seminal moments in recent art history, a few of which include: Marcel Duchamp for changing the rules of engagement as to what constitutes art; Robert Rauschenberg for erasing a De Kooning drawing and thereby claiming authorship of it; Andy Warhol for predicting that "everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes"; Richard Prince, Sherry Levine and the 'Pictures' generation for photographing other artists' photographs; Banksy for smuggling his stencilled works into the Tate in the belief that they deserved to be there; the media for giving broadcast time to convicted art forgers like John Myatt; law enforcement agencies for failing to hand down proper sentences to criminal vandals; speculators and hedge fund managers for turning the art market into a casino. All of us for treating museums and galleries as places of worship.

But the real issue here is to do with ethics, or the lack thereof. Perez's failure to do the right thing and give Landeros a wide berth will only encourage others to take the spray-can, the knife, and the felt-pen to our greatest works of art.

According to a Texas district attorney, Landeros faces between two and ten years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

Why not make that the full ten years and $100,000?

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Image above: Houston Chronicle/ Melissa Phillip/Associated Press

Could New York legal ruling deliver greater transparency to the art market? The jury’s out

Thanks to Larry Rothfield’s Punching Bag blog for drawing attention to the recent law case in the New York Supreme Court which, if it is upheld, could force fine art auctioneers to disclose the identities of consignors to their auctions.

The implications for an art market that thrives on its inherent opacity are interesting, to say the least.

The ruling concerns a case that dates back to 2008 when Albert Rabizadeh, a Long Island dealer, bid $460,000 (including buyer’s premium) at William J. Jenack auction house in Chester, New York (above left) for a Russian silver and enamel box by the imperial jeweller Ivan Petrovich Khlebnikov (1819-1881).

When Rabizadeh later failed to pay for the lot, Jenack sued Rabizadeh in the New York courts before reoffering the box in their May auction. The New York Supreme Court ordered Rabizadeh to pay the full original price of $460,000, less the $109,250 which the box realised at the May auction.

However, instead of complying with the court order, Rabizadeh counter-sued, arguing that the original contract was effectively void on the grounds that the auction house had failed to disclose the identity of the consignor.

His case rested on what is known in contract law as The General Obligations Law § 5-701(a)(6) which requires that the necessary memorandum of sale, “be it in one writing or multiple writings, reveal the identity of, not merely a number assigned to, the parties to the contract.” (See a link to the original Appellate court judgement at the foot of this piece.)

In a surprise judgement in September, the New York Supreme Court upheld Rabizadeh’s argument, ruling that for a sale contract to be binding it must specify the names of both buyer and seller.

Perhaps understandably, the Jenack auction house is appealing that judgement and it has now been joined by Christie’s. So what chance of this ruling be upheld?

Larry Rothfield is understandably interested in the implications for antiquities sales since it is a reasonable assumption that a legal obligation on the part of auction houses to reveal the identity of their consignors might go some way towards reducing the number of illicitly-acquired antiquities reaching the open market. After all, it is common knowledge that the big auction houses are less than diligent in screening the provenance of goods consigned for sale.

But there are other implications for fine art auctions in general. Auction houses are already required to make clear, via a symbol in their conditions of sale, which lots in the catalogue are the subject of “irrevocable bids” (third party underwriting of guarantees.) Given that the bigger fine art auction houses now frequently act as principals in auction transactions rather than as agents for the vendor, this Supreme Court ruling, if it is upheld, would surely require the auction houses to specify when they are themselves vendors in the transactions. At present that is far from clear.

On a positive note, the ruling, if upheld, might help provenance research since it would offer immediate clarity on the most recent owners. It would also deliver a long-overdue death blow to the risible “Swiss Private Collection” — surely the most obscurantist citation in the antiquities trade — while the traditional “Property of a Gentleman” may no longer be sufficient either.

The identity of consignors has for generations, indeed centuries, been shrouded in secrecy. The vast majority of dealers, and indeed private private vendors, do not want their identities revealed when consigning goods to auction. My guess is that overturning that tradition would be widely perceived as a step too far. For good reasons, the notional transparency that is permanently on everyone’s lips never actually materializes in practice.

At a recent open forum at a major fine art fair in Miami, the distinguished panellists were asked by a member of the audience whether they thought greater transparency and openness would improve the art trade or impede it. After much shilly-shallying and mumbling into water glasses the consensus seemed to suggest that, depending on how far it went, it could irreparably damage the trade.

The art law professors will have their own opinions, but I, for one, cannot see a New York judge upholding a ruling that could blow a big hole in New York’s status as a fulcrum of the international art market. The inexorable growth of China is enough of a challenge to the American art market without judges, largely ignorant of the nuances of the art trade, sticking their oar in as well.

The Swiss Private Collection may yet survive...

View a PDF of the September 19 court ruling in William J. Jenack Estate Appraisers & Auctioneers, Inc. v Rabizadeh here

Rotterdam Art Heist: Real Theft, Real Value, Real Business

I’m afraid I just can’t leave this one alone.

Referring to the perpetrators of the recent multi-million dollar Rotterdam art heist, retired FBI art investigator Robert Wittman has told America’s National Public Radio channel: “...they don't have a plan for monetizing the artworks.”

Bob Wittman has many years of experience as a cop, but, with respect, Bob, how do you know what plans the Rotterdam art thieves have, or don’t have? Law enforcement agencies currently know nothing about these people, their nationalities, their motives, or the channels in which they move. If we did know from deep past experience, then more of these crimes would have been solved. The truth is our lamentable record in cracking major art thefts is surpassed only by our laughable failure properly to secure our galleries and museums.

Instead all we have on the Rotterdam heist are a few seconds of grainy CCTV camera footage that might have been shot by Eisenstein on a bad day. So will someone please tell me the purpose of what Kunsthal director Emily Ansenk herself described as a “multi-million-euro high-tech...state-of-the-art security system” if all it can do is mimic out-takes from early Expressionist cinema?

And the Oscar goes to....the CCTV camera companies! (for pulling off the greatest multi-million-dollar heist of all).

Asked whether art thieves, unable to sell their works, end up destroying their loot, Bob Wittman opined, “They don't destroy them because they know there's a lot of value.”

And that is surely the issue, despite what just about every media channel has been peddling over the past week — that these works have no value (because they can't be sold). But who said the thieves intend to sell them?

There is value in stolen art and like everything else it is represented by a price. It may not be the price a conventional collector or a dealer might pay on the legitimate market. It certainly wouldn’t be what an open public auction would bring. None of these routes to market are available to art thieves. But that doesn’t mean there is no value in these stolen works. The thieves know there is value; ergo, they are not stupid. I’d venture they are not even “terrible businessmen” as Mr Wittman contends. They may not conform to Bob Wittman's model of what a businessman should be, but that doesn’t mean these people are not good at their own branch of business. It may be dark and subterranean, but it’s still business and they may be good at it, otherwise they would not do what they do. (They beat a “multi-million-euro high-tech...state-of-the-art security system” for starters.

That is the real economy of art theft and if we treated these crimes (and yes, their perpetrators) with some (albeit grudging) respect we may get closer to cracking them...and to properly defending our museums.

Will we never learn from art theft? Value is in the eye of the holder

"The Rotterdam art thieves won't find collectors for their multi-million dollar loot," thundered The Guardian's Edward Dolnick following the recent multi-million dollar heist from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum.

As usual there was no shortage of experts on hand to sprinkle words of wisdom before the scribbling press pack, in the process effectively congratulating the criminals on a great job and confirming how hugely valuable the works would be on the open market.

But the overriding message — a now wearily familiar tune — was that the thief or thieves were just plain stupid because nobody in their right mind would buy these works and no auction house or dealer would handle them. But of course that's not why the criminals stole them.

If we think about this another way, heists like this aren't stupid at all. If works of this importance had no economic value at all to thieves — what economists like to call 'utility' — thieves wouldn't steal them. The price that a Picasso might make on the legitimate open market is only one kind of value. Art market journalists, economists and others spend a good deal of time pondering how blue-chip works of art can justify the astronomical prices they achieve (see, for example, the perfectly sensible questions arising from the recent sale of Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild for £21 million). So why do we see the potential 'black market' price of a stolen work of art as less meaningful, or useful to those holding it, than the prices achieved for comparable works at a high-end auction? Context is everything.

As some commentators rightly pointed out, there are multiple ways in which these works can deliver a return on the risks involved in stealing them. Many people still smell the rat scuttling around the Turners stolen from the Frankfurt Museum and subsequently returned to the Tate after money changed hands. A certain sfumato shrouds all art theft and recovery. And there are many cards that can be played by not-so-stupid art thieves holding stolen Picassos and Matisses — The Collateral Drugs-and-Arms Card; the Insurance Ransom Card; the Reduce-My-Jail-Time Card; the list goes on.

And finally, as Museum Security Network founder Ton Cremers rightly pointed out, and as the heist confirmed, the Rotterdam Kunsthal was woefully deficient in its security. Owners of works of such art historical importance and market value will surely look more closely in future before loaning those works to poorly secured venues.

Greece prepares for fresh assault on the British Museum over the Parthenon Marbles

The Greek Ministry of Culture has just announced that it will re-establish a special advisory committee to coordinate actions aimed at securing the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum. The president of the Melina Mercouri Foundation, Christoforos Argyropoulos; archaeologist Dr Elena Korka; attorney Irini Stamatoudi, who heads the Intellectual Property Organisation; and foreign ministry representative Panos Kalogeropoulos were listed as members of the committee, announced by Alternate Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras on Wednesday.

"Greece's moral right is above every objection that is based on arguments aired as mere delay tactics, and aiming to brush aside the basic principle that is universally applied, namely, the necessity of cultural monuments to be repatriated, meaning a return to the place of their origin," Mr Tzavaras said.

That word "universally" jumps off the page. I'm not so sure the British Museum — the self-styled "universal" museum par excellence — would subscribe to any principle, basic or otherwise, that would support the repatriation of cultural monuments to their place of origin.

Meanwhile, December could be crunch time for the Greek economy, with commentators of every stripe queuing up to predict Greece's exit from the Eurozone. Were that to happen it would surely increase the desire for repatriation of the Marbles as Greece seeks to reassemble its sense of national pride and cultural identity. If the Marbles are essential to the British Museum's tourist revenues — which we know them to be — it logically follows that they would bring a similar benefit to the New Acropolis Museum were they to be installed where they belong in the new museum's beautiful Parthenon Galleries.

It will be interesting to see whether this new cultural committee manages (where past initiatives have signally failed) to maintain its momentum and presses its claim through the proper diplomatic channels with a tough follow-through.

Farewell "tough cookie" Robert Hughes

The great Australian art critic Robert Hughes has died in a New York hospital after a long illness. He was not only a writer of coruscating criticism, but a fearless opponent of an often mindless art market populated at the top by people with more money than sense.

The brief video conversation between Hughes and art collector Alberto Mugrabi (posted below), whose father is said to own around 800 Andy Warhol paintings, is as telling a tribute to Hughes as one could wish for.

Marion Maneker's Art Market Monitor blog — a lamentably unquestioning cheerleader for the art market — described Hughes's approach in this clip as "bullying," failing to appreciate that this was the essence of Hughes's style and critical mindset. If he appeared bullying it is perhaps because Mugrabi was made to look like a man without any real opinion or critical apparatus of his own.

"It reminds one of the great antipathy that exists towards the art market," concluded Maneker. You're misguided there, Marion. It reveals how there are still a few people (Hughes's death sadly now makes it one fewer) who know that the art market would be a better place were it not entirely dominated by people with no properly developed opinions but who are rich enough to stockpile works of art as if they were cans of beans.

As Hughes departs Mugrabi's apartment, the New York dealer is heard to mutter, "He's a tough cookie." He was, and for that very reason he will be sadly missed.

Tom Flynn's speech on the Universal Museum at London Parthenon Marbles colloquy

Gagosian's art police close ranks to protect Hirst's flayed saint

I visited the Masterpiece fine art fair in Chelsea today to report it for the US press. The fair is essentially a carbon copy of the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht but with the Dutch charm of TEFAF replaced by a hefty dollop of London snobbery. Where Maastricht comes across as stylish, welcoming, expansive and friendly, Masterpiece is snooty, stand-offish and socially constipated. But it's probably different if you're stinking rich. I guess it's all in the body language.

Earlier in the day I'd been wondering how the traders at Barclays and other banks spent all the cash they syphoned out of the system by fraudulently manipulating the LIBOR inter-bank lending rate. Now I know. They taxi over to fairs like Masterpiece and pump all their ill-gotten gains into Riva power boats, Rolls Royces and kitsch contemporary art. The Rolls Royce on display had lambswool carpeting in the boot to 'cosset' your luxury luggage.

The whole laughable jamboree is staged in a massive marquee the size of Ukraine, the façade of which is made to look like a Georgian terrace (above left).

The Ghost of St Bartolomew at Masterpiece

And then there's the art police. I emerged from one of the wide avenues to find myself in a huge open space in the centre of the marquee. To the left was a champagne bar the length of the QE2, to the right a neon sign for Le Caprice restaurant and everywhere there were banquettes on which the poor exhausted millionaires can languish and pour Ruinart fizz down their parched Ultra High Net Worth Throats (UHNWTs). It resembled the Business Class lounge at Heathrow.

Looking out over this elegant scene was a gold-plated écorché figure by Damien Hirst, way up on a pedestal. It's called St Bartholemew and the last time I saw him he was flat on his back at the Pangolin bronze foundry in Gloucestershire being lovingly burnished by one of the foundry's devoted staff. So I'm accustomed to the shiny flayed chappie with his skin draped over his arm, bless him.

I reached for my camera — not, I hasten to add, to photograph the Hirst, which I have enough images of already, thank you — but to take a shot of this incomprehensibly vast public space in the centre of the marquee. Where TEFAF would be heaving by 11am most days, this place was as deserted as a De Chirico piazza.

No sooner had I taken the shot when two unfeasibly well-groomed 20-something supermodel types materialised out of nowhere, hair flowing, Colgate fangs bared.

"Excuse me," they brayed in cut-crystal Manhattan Wasp accents, "You can't photograph that."
"Can't photograph what?" I asked, genuinely baffled.
"The sculpture," they said, gesturing towards the Hirst.
"I wasn't taking a picture of that," I replied. "I was photographing this huge public space."
"This is a project space," they hissed in unison. "If you want to photograph the sculpture you need to apply to the Gagosian Gallery for permission. We hold the rights. You can't publish it anywhere without permission."
"Ah, I see, you hold the rights. I'm very pleased for you," I said. "How much is it? The sculpture, I mean." (I knew they wouldn't tell.)
"We can't disclose the price."
"But if I was Brad Pitt and asked you, would you tell me then?"
"Brad Pitt wouldn't need to ask and we wouldn't want anyone knowing the price of the works he buys either," they sneered, entirely missing the point.
"Can I touch it?" I said, now determined to provoke.
"No, you can't. It would damage the surface of the work. It's gold-plated on solid silver and it's very fragile."
"Ah, so hang on, let me get this straight. I can't touch it, I can't photograph it, I'm not allowed to know the price of it. Are you sure I'm even allowed to look at it? What's the point of it?"

They looked me up and down as they would a dog turd that had suddenly materialised on the lovely Masterpiece carpet.

I strolled away. The two Gagosian shop assistants resumed their sentry positions on the nearby banquette, hauteur intact. St Bartholomew looked calmly out over the deserted champagne bar.

They really need to keep riff-raff like me away from the luxury goods.

(I have removed the St Bartholomew from the image above, not out of obedience to the delusional Gagosian Gallery, but because the scene looks better without it, illustrating the vacuousness of the contemporary art market.)