The economics of art markets is an area open to econometricians, theorists, economic (and of course art) historians, labour economists, and students interested in the economic analysis of legal problems. This volume covers a large number of issues including auction anomalies, the management of museums, the excess supply of labour in the performing arts, the economic analysis of property rights and art thefts, and investment in artworks. It also discusses what can be learnt from history on the behaviour of collectors and on prices of originals with respect to copies.

The coverage of topics reflects the expansions of markets for artworks during the 1980s, as well as the increasing number of discussions on the legal foundations, and property rights of arts-related organisations. During the preceding decade, research on the economics of the arts was much more characterised by issues related to the organisation and the financing of the performing arts industry, with the seminal contributions by Baumol and Bowen and Peacock. Though some important contributions are still being made to this more policy-oriented field, research has, as in many other areas of economics, shifted to less normative work.

This book examines the ancient origins of debate about art as cultural property. What happens to art in time of war? Who should own art, and what is its appropriate context? Should the victorious ever allow the defeated to keep their art? These questions were posed by Cicero during his prosecution of a Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, for extortion. Cicero's published speeches had a very long afterlife, affecting debates about collecting art in the 18th century and reactions to the looting of art by Napoleon. The focus of the book's analysis is theft of art in Greek Sicily, Verres' trial, Roman collectors of art, and the later impact if Cicero's arguments. The book concludes with the British decision after Waterloo to repatriate Napoleon's stolen art to Italy, and an epilogue on the current threats to art looted from archaeological contexts. Margaret M. Miles is an archaeologist and art historian, now Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She has held fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Rome. She has excavated at Corinth and Athens, and did architectural fieldwork at Rhamnous in Greece and at Selinunte and Agrigento in Sicily. Her earlier publications include a study of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (Hesperia, 1989) and a volume in the Agora excavation series on the City Eleusinion, the downtown Athenian branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries (The Athenian Agora, Vol. 31: The City Eleusinion, 1998).

This book examines the ancient origins of debate about art as cultural property. What happens to art in time of war? Who should own art, and what is its appropriate context? Should the victorious ever allow the defeated to keep their art? These questions were posed by Cicero during his prosecution of a Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, for extortion. Cicero's published speeches had a very long afterlife, affecting debates about collecting art in the 18th century and reactions to the looting of art by Napoleon. The focus of the book's analysis is theft of art in Greek Sicily, Verres' trial, Roman collectors of art, and the later impact if Cicero's arguments. The book concludes with the British decision after Waterloo to repatriate Napoleon's stolen art to Italy, and an epilogue on the current threats to art looted from archaeological contexts. Margaret M. Miles is an archaeologist and art historian, now Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She has held fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the American Academy in Rome. She has excavated at Corinth and Athens, and did architectural fieldwork at Rhamnous in Greece and at Selinunte and Agrigento in Sicily. Her earlier publications include a study of the Temple of Nemesis at Rhamnous (Hesperia, 1989) and a volume in the Agora excavation series on the City Eleusinion, the downtown Athenian branch of the Eleusinian Mysteries (The Athenian Agora, Vol. 31: The City Eleusinion, 1998).

Discover the extraordinary stories behind the world's missing works of art.

New, small-format impulse-buy books make the perfect self-purchase or gift. Travel back in time to discover works of art that have vanished from the record, as well as those that went missing and have since been reclaimed or recovered.

From the treasures of Tutankhamun to the altarpiece of Ghent, a missing Fabergé egg, and Vincent van Gogh's majestic Sunset at Montmajour, numerous masterpieces have disappeared throughout history as a result of theft, looting, natural catastrophe, or conflict... And some have resurfaced decades or even centuries later. Lost Masterpieces examines the unique story of the most significant of these artworks, the artists who created them, and those thought to be involved in their loss. It explores the various means by which museum curators and international crime investigators have unearthed missing treasures. It highlights the moral dilemma of museums that have profited from looted works of art and examines the recent "heists" made by some nations in an effort to regain their nation's stolen works of art.

Delve into the mysteries of ancient Egyptian tombs, marvel at the hoards unearthed by archaeologists, and discover the skulduggery behind the disappearance of priceless Rembrandts and Vermeers. And see the world of art and antiquities in a whole new light.

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in art forgery, caused both by the advent of national museums and by a rapidly growing bourgeois interest in collecting objects from the past. This rise had profound repercussions on notions of selfhood and national identity within and outside the realm of art. Although art critics denounced forgery for its affront to artistic traditions, they were fascinated by its power to shape the human and object worlds and adopted a language of art forgery to articulate a link between the making of fakes and the making of selves. The Deceivers explores the intersections among artistic crime, literary narrative, and the definition of identity.Literary texts joined more specialized artistic discourses in describing the various identities associated with art forgery: the forger, the copyist, the art expert, the dealer, the restorer. Built into new characters were assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, and nationality that themselves would come to be presented in a language of artistic authenticity. Aviva Briefel places special emphasis on the gendered distinction between male forgers and female copyists. "Copying," a benign occupation when undertaken by a woman, became "forgery," laden with criminal intent, when performed by men. Those who could successfully produce, handle, or detect spurious things and selves were distinguished from others who were incapable of distinguishing the authentic from the artistic and human forgeries. Through close reading of literary narratives such as Trilby and The Marble Faun as well as newspaper accounts of forgery scandals, The Deceivers reveals the identities both authentic and fake that emerged from the Victorian culture of forgery."

Through much of its history, Italy was Europe's heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world's major museums, including the Getty, New York's Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital-a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be "the world's greatest cultural power." With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence-from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy's belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state-crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.

In The Optickal Illusion, Rachel Halliburton's meticulous recreation of Georgian society reveals the sordid details of a genuine scandal that deceived the British Royal Academy. Her debut novel questions the lengths women must go to make their mark on a society that seeks to underplay their abilities - a theme only too relevant today. It is three years from the dawn of a new century and in London, nothing is certain any more: the future of the monarchy is in question, the city is aflame with right and left-wing conspiracies, and the French could invade any day. Against this feverish atmosphere, the American painter Benjamin West is visited by a strange father and daughter, the Provises, who claim they have a secret that has obsessed painters for centuries: the Venetian techniques of master painter Titian. West was once the most celebrated painter in London, but hasn't produced anything of note in years so against his better judgment he agrees to let the intriguing Ann Jemima Provis visit his studio and demonstrate what she knows. What unravels reveals more than he has ever understood - about himself, about the treachery of the art world and the seductive promise of genius. The nature of truth itself is called into question in this story of envy, lust and corruption.

Torn Modernism illuminates an important moment in the history of the Kunstmuseum Basel's collection. In 1937 the Nazi cultural policy denounced thousands of works as "degenerate" and forcibly removed from German museums. The Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda correctly assumed that a portion of such works would find buyers abroad, in this way certain artworks deemed "internationally exploitable" reached the art market via various channels. Georg Schmidt (1896-1966), the museum's director at the time, managed in 1939 to acquire the Painting Animal Destinies by Franz Marc (1880-1916) and twenty avant-garde masterpieces all at once. In the catalogue, renowned experts trace the events based on the seizures in German museums and explain the historical contexts. The actors of the institutions and the art market are presented, and the Nazi regime's act of cultural violence is revealed, which resulted in an artificial fragmentation of Modernism into art that was "exploitable" on the one hand, and art that had been destroyed or forgotten on the other. Contributions on the auction of the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, on Georg Schmidt's approach, and on the classification of the acquisitions in the context of Basel's collection history bring specific Swiss aspects into focus.

This book brings together empirical and theoretical case-study research on art and heritage crime. Drawn from a diverse group of researchers and professionals, the work presented explores contemporary conceptualisations of art crime within broader contexts. In this volume, we see 'art' in its usual forms for art crime scholarship: in paintings and antiquities. However, we also see art in fossils and in violins, chairs and jewellery, holes in the ground and even in the institutions meant to protect any, or all, of the above. And where there is art, there is crime. Chapters in this volume, alternatively, zoom in on specific objects, on specific locations, and on specific institutions, considering how each interact with the various conceptions of crime that exist in those contexts. This volume challenges the boundaries of what we understand as "art and heritage crimes" and displays that both art, and criminality related to art, is creative and unpredictable.

"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

True tales of lost art, built around case studies of famous works, their creators, and stories of disappearance and recovery

From the bestselling author of The Art of Forgery comes this dynamic narrative that tells the fascinating stories of artworks stolen, looted, or destroyed in war, accidentally demolished or discarded, lost at sea or in natural disasters, or attacked by iconoclasts or vandals; works that were intentionally temporal, knowingly destroyed by the artists themselves or their patrons, covered over with paint or plaster, or recycled for their materials. An exciting read that spans the centuries and the continents.

Why was the Renaissance also the golden age of forgery? Forgery is an eternal problem. In literature and the writing of history, suspiciously attributed texts can be uniquely revealing when subjected to a nuanced critique. False and spurious writings impinge on social and political realities to a degree rarely confronted by the biographical criticism of yesteryear. They deserve a more critical reading of the sort far more often bestowed on canonical works of poetry and prose fiction. The first comprehensive treatment of literary and historiographical forgery to appear in a quarter of a century, Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 goes well beyond questions of authorship, spotlighting the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philosophy, and modern literature. The thirteen essays draw immediate inspiration from Johns Hopkins University's acquisition of the Bibliotheca Fictiva, the world's premier research collection dedicated exclusively to the subject of literary forgery, which consists of several thousand rare books and unique manuscript materials from the early modern period and beyond. The early modern explosion in forgery of all kinds-particularly in the kindred documentary fields of literary and archaeological falsification-was the most visible symptom of a dramatic shift in attitudes toward historical evidence and in the relation of texts to contemporary society. The authors capture the impact of this evolution within many fundamental cultural transformations, including the rise of print, changing tastes and fortunes of the literary marketplace, and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Contributors: Frederic Clark, James Coleman, Richard Cooper, Arthur Freeman, Anthony Grafton, A. Katie Harris, Earle A. Havens, Jack Lynch, Shana D. O'Connell, Ingrid Rowland, Walter Stephens, Elly Truitt, Kate Tunstall

The roll-call of wars down the centuries is paralleled by an equally extensive narrative of the theft, destruction, plundering, displacement and concealing of some of the greatest works of art during those conflicts - a story that is expertly told in this original publication. From the many wars of Classical Antiquity, through the military turning points and detours of the Fourth Crusade, the Thirty Years' War, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, the First and Second World Wars, and then onwards to the ongoing contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the history of art crime in times of war contains myriad fascinating and often little-known stories of the fate of humankind's greatest works of art. Plundering Beauty: A History of Art Crime during War charts the crucial milestones of art crimes spanning two thousand years. The works of art involved have fascinating stories to tell, as civilisation moves from a simple and brutal 'winner takes it all' attitude to the spoils of war, to contemporary understanding, and commitment to, the idea that our artistic heritage truly belongs to all humankind.

Over the past two decades, the need for legal expertise in the art business has grown exponentially. In this book, Martin Wilson, an art lawyer with more than 20 years' experience in the field, provides a comprehensive and practical guide to the application of UK law to transactions and disputes in the art world. Written in a style that is accessible and informative for lawyers and non-lawyers alike, Art Law and the Business of Art not only outlines and explains the relevant law but also how the art business operates in practice. Chapters cover the full breadth of legal and commercial issues affecting the sale and purchase of art in various contexts such as in auction houses, by museums, and private sales both with and without agents. Other issues such as artists' rights in their work, import and export of artworks, taxation, art disputes, anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance, bribery, and confidentiality and data protection are all examined in detail. Wilson also offers an in-depth discussion of the most pressing ethical questions involving artworks, including Holocaust restitution, ancient art and cultural heritage, and freedom of expression. This book will prove invaluable to lawyers advising on all aspects of art law and many others in the art business, including artists themselves, art dealers, and those working in auction houses and museums. It will also be crucial reading for scholars and students with an interest in art law and business.

Observer's Best Art Book of the Year, 2018 In 2007, Bolton Crown Court sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in prison for the crime of producing artistic forgeries. Working out of a shed in his parents' garden, Greenhalgh had successfully fooled some of the world's greatest museums. During the court case, the breadth of his forgeries shocked the art world and tantalised the media. What no one realised was how much more of the story there was to tell. Written in prison, A Forger's Tale details Shaun's notorious career and the extraordinary circumstances that led to it. From Leonardo drawings to L.S. Lowry paintings, from busts of American presidents to Anglo-Saxon brooches, from cutting-edge Modernism to the ancient art of the Stone Age, Greenhalgh could - and did - copy it all. Told with great wit and charm, this is the definitive account of Britain's most successful and infamous forger, a man whose love for art saturates every page of this extraordinary memoir.

In February 2012, in a Munich flat belonging to an elderly recluse, German customs authorities seized an astonishing hoard of more than 1,400 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. When Cornelius Gurlitt's trove became public in November 2013, it caused a worldwide media sensation. Catherine Hickley has delved into archives and conducted dozens of interviews to uncover the story behind the headlines. Her book illuminates a dark period of German history, untangling a web of deceit and silence that has prevented the heirs of Jewish collectors from recovering art stolen from their families more than seven decades ago by the Nazis. Hickley recounts the shady history of the Gurlitt hoard and brings its story right up to date, as 21st-century politicians and lawyers puzzle over the inadequacies of a legal framework that to this day falls short in securing justice for the heirs of those robbed by the Nazis.

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert "fictive-art" practitioner. In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge reflects on the most urgent question of today: where does truth lie, and how is it verified? Encouraging readers to critically question the role art plays in shaping reality, Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation defines a new genre of art that fabricates evidence to support a central fiction. Interweaving contemporary "fictive art" practice with a lineage of hoaxes and impostures dating from the 17th century, LaFarge offers the first comprehensive survey of this practice. The shift from the early information age to our "infocalypse" era of rampant misinformation has made fictive art an especially radical form as it straddles the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination. Artists deploy a wide range of practices to substantiate their fictions, manufacturing artefacts, altering photographs, and posing as experts from many different fields. A fictive-art practitioner herself, LaFarge explores and underscores the myriad ways art can ground or destabilize one's lived reality, forcing us to question our subjective experience and our understanding of what counts as evidence. Many examples of these curious and sometimes notorious fabrications are included - from nonexistent artists and peculiar museums to cryptoscientific objects like fake skeletons and staged archaeological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs "captured" in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology; from the work of artists like Iris Haussler, Joan Fontcuberta, and Eva and Franco Mattes to the enigmatic encyclopedia known as the Codex Seraphinianus, fictive art continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. With all the attendant consequences of mistrust, outrage, and rejection, fictive art practitioners both past and present play upon the fragile trust that establishes societies, underlining the crucial roles played by perception and doubt.

In this fascinating look at the creators of artistic fakes and copies, Sandor Radnoti explores the role of the faker in the art world, and tackles the question of whether fakes can be considered to be art in their own right. The Fake provides a thorough examination of the "parasites" of the art world, as Radnoti investigates the faker's motives and aesthetic sense, as well as the way in which the faker's own story acts as a critical appraisal of the center of the art world. If art is seen from both the center and the periphery of the art world, suggests the author, the viewer's questions about the art may be answered more accurately and appropriately. The Fake is essential reading for all philosophers interested in aesthetics.

The conclusion discusses specific steps that could be taken to halt the plunder. This text examines why the African past, namely its art and antiquities, is disappearing at a rate perhaps unmatched in any other part of the world. Each essay looks at the international network of looting and trafficking, and theconclusion discusses specific steps that could halt the disappearance of Africa'a cultural heritage. The text presents an indictment of African contributions to the problem, and the contributors include African government and museum officials, members of international agencies, academics and journalists. North America: Indiana U Press

All too often, museums throughout the world label their Roman sculpture and wall paintings as "Roman copy after a Greek original." In this book, Elaine K. Gazda and the contributors question the often too simplistic, deeply ingrained thinking that underlies this view of the relationship between Greek and Roman art. Examining the problems associated with such thinking by situating them within a broad chronological framework, The Ancient Art of Emulation calls attention to many of the sources underlying traditional ingrained prejudices. The essays in this book underscore the need, in the case of Roman art, to distinguish more clearly than we have done in the past what "originality"---or invention---meant to the Romans, and how those notions differ from what our Romanticist/modernist expectations have led us to expect in the present. This book builds upon revisionist scholarship of the past three decades, which redefines a number of the terms of discussion of "Roman copies" by reclassifying many of them as neoclassical or idealising works and treating them as legitimate expressions of Roman cultural concerns. The contributors extend that line of inquiry by considering recent discourse on copying and originality as well as on related issues such as imitation, artistic agency, influence, appropriation, and authenticity. The chapters are presented in an unorthodox reverse chronological sequence in order to emphasise how thought and tastes of recent centuries have conditioned our views of the classical past and how "the Roman copy" must be seen as an artificial construct, the product of modern prejudices and their intellectual sources. The Ancient Art of Emulation will appeal to a broad range of intellectual interests and humanistic disciplines. In addition to classical archaeologists and historians of ancient art, it will speak to art historians of later periods, practising artists, and art critics, as well as scholars and students who have an interest in the phenomenon of artistic imitation.

The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years. A monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America - all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel's unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript 'at a bookseller's in a back alley'. This was his reaction: 'The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold - as many of them were - cannot be told.' The members of de Hamel's club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime's experience.

At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Momuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis.

In this powerful memoir, Tasoula Hadjitofi reveals her perilous journey orchestrating "The Munich Case"-one of the largest European art trafficking stings since WWII. With the Bavarian police in place, the Cypriots on their way, seventy under-cover agents bust into the Munich apartment of a notorious Turkish smuggler suspected of holding looted antiquities. Tasoula places everything on the line to repatriate her country's sacred treasures, unaware that treachery lies in the shadow of her success. The Icon Hunter is a story torn from the pages of Tasoula's life as she and her Greek Cypriot family lose everything during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Hundreds of ancient Cypriot churches are destroyed, their contents looted and all signs of her Greek Cypriot culture erased as if it never existed. As a refugee, she wants justice. And then fate intervenes in the form of an archbishop and a dubious art dealer in search of redemption. Even as unspeakable personal tragedy strikes, she never gives up her search knowing the special place these antiquities hold in the hearts of Orthodox Christians. These icons are not just masterpieces-they are artistic manifestations of faith and a gateway to the divine. Using family and faith as her touchstones, Tasoula takes on these "merchants of God" as she navigates the underworld of art trafficking. Tasoula believes this to be her calling, and the Archbishop of Cyprus entrusts her-an ordinary woman, wife and mother-with the mission. In order to succeed, however, she must place her trust in an art dealer known for his double-dealing.