former Program Manager, J. Paul Getty Trust Information Institute
Consultant linking the arts and humanities to new media
Los Angeles, California
Art Theft
The first issue is going to bore you to death because it's basically that you must document an object or you cannot recover it if it is stolen. Everyone goes to sleep over that subject because everyone really wants to talk about cops and robbers or about fabulously expensive, famous things that are stolen. But the truth of the matter is that art theft is the second largest area of illicit traffic in the world after drugs. It even is ahead of weapons. It is a gigantic industry, and the real fodder for it is not fabulous works that everybody's heard of. It's all kinds of very precious cultural objects. Their preciousness is their cultural meaning and their content, not their price, though the prices, of course, have gotten high for everything, and that's what has fueled this market. So art theft is really about all the objects you haven't heard of, and that you don't think you care about until you either own them or know that they pertain to your history.
Kinds of Art Theft
Let me say something about the different kinds of art theft. There's garden-variety art theft, which is what happens when someone breaks into a home of a collector and takes a lot of stuff. And those people very often just lose their things--silver objects, anything in precious material, prints and drawings, antique furniture. That's garden-variety, generic art theft. On the museum level, that takes place as, often, an inside job. There are storerooms full of things, and nobody's checking. Some museums don't really know what they have. They have enormous collections, and they don't have the staff to make good records.
Then there's the theft of very famous masterpieces. That's the easiest to solve. Sting operations now are fairly common, where someone agrees to pose as a dealer and puts out word that he's looking for that piece, he has a buyer for it, and then they are able to recover it. So the famous things tend to get recovered eventually. It can be generations--but eventually they come back on the market, and then they're recognized.
Archaeological theft is quite another matter because in an archaeological site, stuff that's under the ground isn't documented. Of course, tomb robbers go all the way back to ancient Egypt and probably before. The idea of getting into burial sites and pulling out precious things is a very ancient form of crime and is not likely to stop.
So long as people are willing to buy things that don't have pedigrees that are authentic, as long as people are willing to create a market, they're going to cause theft to take place. So every collector, every museum curator who buys an object that is possibly stolen, they are in a sense participating in the crime. And they are ensuring that the crime will continue because they are the market.
Object ID
At the Getty Trust we developed an international standard for the minimal categories of information you need to record about an object in order to trace it and recover it. That's called object ID, and it's just ten categories of information plus an image. And I'm happy to say that it is starting to be used in cultures where there aren't means to hire highly trained people. The Church of Ireland is using it with volunteers to record all the objects in their churches. We're hoping that Russia will use object ID, because its churches are just being despoiled of icons. The Dutch are taking object ID to Vietnam and Mali.
Recording information is a difficult and complicated chore that nobody's interested in, nobody really wants to pay for. But the truth of the matter is, if you lose any object that's of value to you for any reason, you can't get the police to look for it without a description that is usable. Not a description of whatever esoteric information you think is important--it is, What can that whole world out there, that is responsible for tracing an object and getting it back, understand about the object so as to recognize it when it is found, to allow you to prove that you owned it? Because if you can't prove that you owned it, the police regularly turn stolen art back to the thieves. So, documentation, documentation, boring as it is--that's the big issue.
Most works of art are produced in some kind of environment where they are repetitious--landscape paintings, pottery, textiles--completely repetitious. So you have to be able to distinguish objects from each other that otherwise look alike. You need to have a unique identifier, need to find the detail in an object that makes it different from all the other objects. Those are often things that are wrong with it--something that went wrong in the firing of the pottery, a bubble, where the glaze melted in a certain way, something chipped. On a painting, or in anything that has to do with textile, the weave is like a fingerprint. The thread has a knot in it at some point that no other similar object has. You want to capture that. So, the minute differences between objects are very, very important to capture, because objects look so much alike, no matter how precious they are.
Communication with the Police and Others
The police come in, they're talking to either a rich owner or a curator. Those are two communities that do not know how to communicate. The insurance agent doesn't know how to communicate with either of those communities, but maybe with the police, a little. The customs people are in their own world, I'm sorry to say. These people need to be brought together to talk to each other and to hammer out methods for making information travel fast. The information about a stolen object needs to travel faster than the object. An object can leave the country in which it is stolen in less than twenty-four hours. The information can take weeks, months, and literally years to get circulated.
Well, what will help the speed? The Internet will help the speed. But if you're going to be shipping information around on the Internet, you have to have it standardized. People again have to agree on the protocols. Who is going to get this information? How much information should they get (because there is some information about objects that is confidential)? The owner of the object has to decide how much information to release. The police have to decide how much information they're willing to release. Everybody has to be able to maintain secrecy. But still, a certain minimal level of information has to travel very quickly to all these people. If the [Los Angeles] police department only transmits its information to Interpol and the FBI, that's not good enough. People need to transmit information not just among themselves. They have to get it out to the customs people, to the police, to the museums, to the dealers. You have to immediately let the word out to the people who might buy that stolen object.
There's a whole world, by the way, of international law concerning this because every country has a different rule about what the statute of limitations is. Sometimes the possessor is the owner. Sometimes there is a one-year, sometimes there's a ten-year statute of limitations. In the United States, you cannot transfer bad title, no matter what. So we have one of the most stringent laws.
