Buyer Beware

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For centuries, art crime was relatively harmless, at least from the perspective of the global economy and international crime. Forgers fooled the occasional buyer, tomb raiders dug up what archaeologists didn't have time to reach, and the occasional nonviolent thief would steal for reasons more often ideological than fiscal. Even vandalism was dismissed as part and parcel of the ravages of war.

But since the Second World War, art crime has evolved into the third-highest–grossing annual criminal trade worldwide, behind only the drug and arms trades. Most art crime is now perpetrated either by or on behalf of organized crime syndicates, who have brought violence into art theft and turned what was once a crime of passion (think of Vincenzo Peruggia's stealing the Mona Lisa in order to repatriate it to Italy, or Kempton Bunton's stealing Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington as a protest against taxes on television sets) into a cold business. Art crime now funds, and is funded by, organized crime’s other enterprises, from the drug and arms trades to terrorism. It is no longer merely the art that is at stake, and it is no longer a crime to be admired for its elegance.

Today, the largest victim of art crime is the art trade. This multi-billion-dollar legitimate industry is victimized to the tune of a conservatively estimated $6 billion per year, most of which goes into the pockets of organized crime. Here is a brief analysis of how the four main categories of art crime influence the art market. These encompass a myriad of sub-categories but are unified in being premeditated criminal activities — undertaken for financial and/or ideological reasons — that profit from, or reduce the value of, art and therefore affect the art market.

Vandalism
Whether the willful damage to art and architecture is ideological or simply spiteful, damaged art decreases in value, and destroying an artwork can turn a potential fortune into a pile of dust. However, for certain famous works, the cachet of having endured vandalism (or theft) actually increases value. It certainly adds to popular interest, as witnessed by the tour guides in Florence and London who love to recount the survival tales of Michelangelo’s David and Pieta or Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. The destruction of art can also raise the value of related works that survive — imagine a fire that consumes every Vermeer but one.

Forgery/Deception
This category encompasses a range of confidence tricks that involve the premeditated misattribution of art for profit. This includes a number of different methods, all of which take advantage of a degree of enthusiasm and wishful thinking on the part of the art trade. Everyone benefits if an artwork that comes on the market is legitimate: The owner makes money, the dealer receives a high commission, the buyer gets a new trophy, and academics get a new object to study. Because of this, there is a subconscious desire on the part of the members of the art trade for potentially questionable objects to be legitimate. This is where clever criminals can take advantage. The most common types of deception crimes are:

1. Wholesale Forgery: A new artwork is passed off as a piece that is either older than it really is or is by a more valuable artist than the one who actually created it.

2. Alteration Forgery: A legitimate work is altered in some way — a signature is added, for instance — that raises its value. Such alterations are difficult to detect, as scientific tests are designed to determine age, not attribution.

3. Provenance Forgery: The documented history of an artwork, as opposed to the work itself, is altered or falsified. Provenance is much easier to forge than the work itself. This technique is most often used to provide looted antiquities with a false history, suggesting that they were excavated before art exportation laws were put in place.

4. Willful Misattribution: The value of an artwork is intentionally overestimated. This is a question of connoisseurship, and the most frequent perpetrators are the very experts that the art trade relies on to determine the values of artworks, which ultimately, it must be remembered, are not intrinsic. A work’s value depends on a combination of its perceived authenticity and perceived rarity, and millions hang upon the words of experts as to a work’s authorship. One need only recall Bernard Berenson’s questionable, and profitable, attributions: Especially if an expert is paid on commission, there is the temptation to attribute a higher value. This is the easiest type of forgery to get away with, as an expert can always claim to have “made a mistake.”