New Year, New Questions

Tags

art crime, Einstein, interdisciplinary, Markham Caerus, provenance, quote, research

Click to visit the Gallery of Stolen Art on Pinterest

My first few months on A Year in Provenance have been mostly devoted to sharing information, plus a few personal ideas. This year, perhaps the goal should be to make things more personal. The starched collar of academic training will always wrap ’round its disciples’ work, demanding loyalty to the objective fact, free from private feelings and bias; in an academic setting, that is its strength. But a blog is a different animal— its strength is in its flexibility, its presence in everyday life, and its possibility of rapid and diverse dialogue. I want to explore more of these features this year.

The Problem of Public Awareness

Tags

archaeology, art crime, art theft, art trafficking, artefact, artifact, collecting, cultural heritage, cultural preservation, excavation, interdisciplinary, looting, public awareness

It is in the nature of research to take one in unexpected directions; what I was not prepared for was a single, simple idea that struck to the heart of a major problem of art crime. I was working on a post recently on how to recognise and protect archaeological sites for the general public; especially in North America, sites can be very hard to detect on the surface and artefacts hard to identify. Sometimes sites are damaged by people who don’t even realise they are on top of archaeology. Trying to develop a simple explanation of what sites and artefacts might look like, I realised I had a deeper question: what might be the consequences if I did?

Links: ARCA

Tags

ARCA, art, art crime, art forgery, art market, art theft, art trafficking, cultural preservation, interdisciplinary, international law, looting, provenance, repatriation, research, smuggling

The Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art is an important international organisation doing exactly what the name suggests, and their site is highly recommended. Conceived as a think tank, it connects professionals from the varied disciplines relevant to art crime worldwide, promotes scholarship, and emphasizes public outreach. The group organises conferences and training in interdisciplinary research, publishes, and keeps a blog on recent media relevant to art crime. It also has outstanding links to more specialised blogs and sites.

Click here or above to go to ARCA’s site.

 

New Links Page and Opening Link

Tags

archaeology, art crime, art theft, art trafficking, cultural heritage, cultural preservation, Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, interdisciplinary, museum, research, University of Cambridge

For anyone interested in knowing more about the vast, complex world of art crime, A Year in Provenance will now feature a links page, comprising the best resources on the internet. The global presence of the internet in the digital era may become the pivotal tool for reversing trafficking trends and protecting the world’s cultures, and this links page will try to provide the best sites for finding out about any facet of this interdisciplinary field: news items, ethical codes, threatened sites, missing art, repatriation efforts, and the list goes on. Since the difficulty of the internet is not finding information, but sifting through it, each link will be added along with a short post on what to find on the site, what it does best, and what to use it for.

New Glossary Feature

Tags

antiquities, archaeology, art, art crime, art market, artefact, artifact, cultural preservation, excavation, interdisciplinary, provenance, repatriation

Thanks to recent comments- and a few blank looks- A Year in Provenance now features a glossary page (see the menu bar at the top of each page, above the header, or Menu, below the header on the mobile version). Researching a subject that crosses boundaries, disciplines, and frequently, languages, flings a host of terminology at the reader; this new glossary project hopes to make this less baffling, if not actually clear! Even the specialists don’t always agree on meanings or usage of terms, so I shall do my best. Each new term will be added with a short post discussing what a term means in context, and what ambiguity, if any, remains; the glossary page will have the brief, precise definition for quick reference, and each term will be linked back to its explanatory post.