There are a lot of reports in the news about the Palm Beach America’s International Fine Art and Antique Fair (see PalmBeachFair.com). This event is scheduled to run from February 1-10, 2008.
Of particular interest to me is the fact that the event has a “Vetting Committee“, described as follows:
Palm Beach | America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair employs a rigorous vetting process to maintain the highest standards of excellence for its clients. During the vetting process, a group of independent experts spend two days considering the artwork to be offered at the fair with respect to date, provenance, condition and authenticity. More than 30 national and international museum professionals and experts in their respective fields form the Vetting Committee.
Obviously, this is in stark contrast to the original prop hobby, in which a number of collectors as well as businesses/dealers/auction houses are averse to the notion of scrutiny in any form, in regards to pieces in their collections and offered for sale. Merely asking questions has been known to solicit reactions of defensiveness and objections.
TCPalm.com has a great feature on their website today covering the event, and the inspection and vetting process. The full article can be found here (“LINK“):
Palm Beach art and antique show continues this weekend
BY ERIKA PESANTES Sun-Sentinel
Saturday, February 2, 2008WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Before an art dealer could even hang a painting for sale at Palm Beach America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair, more than 40 museum curators, art experts and scholars from across the country and worldwide inspected each of the almost 400,000 pieces for stolen items and fraud.
The task began three days before the fair opened Friday and included the help of The Art Loss Register, a not-for-profit New York-based organization that tracks stolen and missing artwork, antiques and other collectibles.
“Many of these people are very experienced. They have great eyes,” said Gary Libby, chairman of the fair’s vetting committee. “They are the art police.”
The Register’s art historians cross-checked their computerized database, which lists about 200,000 missing pieces, for matches. Three experts flew in this week, one from as far away as London, to complete checks on about 2,000 items, inspecting stamps, inventory numbers and any unique markings to confirm no paintings or sculptures had been reported stolen, art historian Erin Culbreth said.
The Register, which offers item registration and search and recovery services to collectors, insurers, the FBI and Interpol, began its checks at the beginning of January, Culbreth said. Although part of the vetting committee, the organization does not verify authenticity, but simply checks that none of the works for sale actually belongs to someone else.
One case it wanted to take up was last week’s theft of a $12,000 painting, Our Lady of Czestochowa, from West Palm Beach’s Mary Immaculate Catholic Church. Between The Art Loss Register and vetting committee, the hours leading up to the fair are intense, and experts can pick up on the subtlest of clues to reveal an item is not what a dealer may say it is.
“It takes days of looking and consultation,” said fair director Michael Mezzatesta. “They make sure every item is as the dealer claims it to be.”
The vetting committee, with experts in Asian art, Tribal, Oceanic and African Arts, Early European, European 19th and 20th Century, Classical Art, jewelry and textiles, determined whether the descriptions of the pieces for sale were exaggerated, maybe even tweaked, or real. Most inaccuracies in descriptions are honest mistakes, Libby said.
“Everybody on the vetting team sees every object in each booth,” he said.
In one case, a dealer had mistakenly included a large Greek marble statue in a collection that just didn’t look right to the Greco Roman experts, said Libby, director emeritus of the Daytona Museum of Arts & Sciences. Black ultraviolet light revealed that the statue’s arms had been added later and its head was from a different sculpture altogether. The statue was tagged for removal and the dealer was apologetic, he said.
The pieces at the show come from 14 countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Italy, and date to the second and third millennium B.C.
“You can literally take a walk here through history, from Egyptian pieces to Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude … and take away something from each work,” Mezzatesta said, glancing at nearby galleries at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.
Although not used at the fair this year, Mezzatesta said thermoluminescence testing may be brought in next year. The method pinpoints the chemical components of materials used to create sculptures, porcelain and other pieces, and clues experts in on when the item could have possibly been created.
“Technology is a tool you can have,” Mezzatesta said, “but ultimately it doesn’t replace connoisseurship.”
Could you imagine a panel of original prop experts reviewing consignments for a large public auction, to ensure that the pieces are authentic and not stolen?
This article also references an organization called The Art Loss Register, which I was completely unfamiliar with, but reviewing the website is very insightful.
Reading the “History and Business” section of their website is quite remarkable:
The origin of the ALR was The International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a not-for-profit organisation based in New York. In an attempt to deter international art theft, IFAR established an art theft archive in 1976 and began publishing the “Stolen Art Alert”.
Ten years later, the magnitude of the problem was manifested by the fact that IFAR had over 20 000 manual records. While IFAR had been very successful in recording the details of losses, it was apparent that recoveries would only materialise if such records could be computerised and the database made available to worldwide law enforcement agencies and diligently searched against auctions and public art fairs. Substantial capital investment and a corporate vehicle were necessary.
The ALR was first established in London in 1991. Its founding shareholders included major businesses from both the insurance and art industries. Subsequently offices in New York, Cologne, Amsterdam and recently Paris have been established so as to cater for an expanding number of searches made on the database.
The ALR is now the world’s largest private database of lost and stolen art, antiques and collectables. Its range of services includes item registration, search and recovery services to collectors, the art trade, insurers and worldwide law enforcement agencies. These services are efficiently delivered by employing state of the art IT technology and a team of specially trained professional art historians. The worldwide team has been deliberately constructed so as to offer a range of language capabilities as well as specialities (modern art, old masters, antiquities).
Conceptually, there are two aspects to the business.
First, by encouraging both the registration of all items of valuable possessions on the database and also the expansion of checking searches, the ALR acts as a significant deterrent on the theft of art. Criminals are now well aware of the risk, which they face in trying to sell on stolen pieces of art.
Second, by operating a due diligence service to sellers of art and also being the worldwide focus for any suspicion of illegitimate ownership, the ALR operates a recovery service to return works of art to their rightful owners. In recent years, the service has been extended to negotiate compensation to the victims of art theft and a legitimising of current ownership.
The ALR’s pre-eminence in the field of stolen art has allowed the business to be instrumental in the recovery of over £160m ($320m, €230m) worth of stolen items.
This is quite an impressive organization.
It is inspiring to consider the organized effort toward oversight, both in regards to authenticity and clear title/ownership, in the art world, even reviewing activity surrounding this single event.
Jason De Bord