PART I: THE HEIST At 3:20 a.m. on October 16, 2012, the Trigion Security control center dispatched two guards to investigate an alarm trip at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. While Trigion supplied onsite guards for the art museum’s visiting hours, after closing, the museum made do with visits by… Read more
SoHo Sins by Richard Vine is an intriguing debut novel about the underworld of the New York art scene (now available in paperback!). Read David Cranmer's review of SoHo Sins by Richard Vine, and then make sure to sign in and comment below for a chance to win a paperback… Read more
Knoedler & Company began in 1846 as the Manhattan outpost of the French printmaker Goupil et Cie. It was America’s first storefront art gallery; it predated the Metropolitan Museum of Art by 24 years. During the Gilded Age, Knoedler moved from peddling inexpensive prints to dealing Old Master artworks to… Read more
A crowd gathered outside the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, on the morning of January 24, 2008. They weren’t museum junkies; they were federal agents raiding the place. By the end of the day, 500 FBI, IRS, and Customs agents had hit the Bowers and 12 other targets, including… Read more
Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor brings together the author’s direct experience from both fields to present an accessible, informative, and realistic overview of art crimes in today’s society. Art-related crime is a busy book genre these days. Most of these books are very specific—one case, one career, one… Read more
In December 2002, two burglars broke into the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They didn’t use helicopters or lasers or any of the stuff art thieves use in the movies; they climbed a fifteen-foot ladder to the roof and got into the second floor (European first floor), where the… Read more
The Scientist and the Forger by Dr. Jehane Ragai outlines the advanced forensic techniques being developed to help thwart art forgery. If you’ve watched CSI or any of the other TV forensic procedurals, you know that science has jumped into the crime-solving pool with both feet. Advances in DNA analysis,… Read more
What have you done, mother!? Is there a more iconic scene than the shower stabbing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)? Is there a more iconic art piece that Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreen prints? Seems only natural to combine the two and make the ultimate icon! Well, that’s just what… Read more
Aryan Art? A bizarre lawsuit has been filed against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The New York Post reports that 33-year-old Justin Renel Joseph is suing The Met for their “offensive aesthetic whitewashing” in several paintings depicting Jesus Christ as pale-skinned with blond hair. Joseph claims that this… Read more
This original blog post by author Anne Charnock is part 1 of a 2 part series including an exclusive Q&A featuring questions from YOU, the readers. To win a copy of Anne's new book Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, make sure you're signed in, and ask the author a… Read more
