Art Crime Essay

1178 Words3 Pages

Kirill Rodin Art crime in UK
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls”. Art is the “place” where people can escape, in moments when they are lost ,it was there motivation, when they needed strength to achieve something, nut nowadays it has become an important commodity in the black market. Art crime currently is really an issue as in some countries it stays on first place, far in front of drugs and weapons. There are so many forgeries, that regularly some are found in museums and galleries. In this essay I will talk about History of art crime, famous cases and recent activity. Also I will cover organisations that are involved in the preserving and finding lost art pieces.

1. “Figures suggest these thefts total more than £300m a year”[1]. This article was published in 2013 November, meaning that such numbers were relevant to 2012, and currently situation is much worse, as art theft is constantly raising crime. Gangs has found art as the alternative “currency” for trading, due to it’s much easier to transport a particular piece of art, like canvas, than a bag full of cash. Also there will be always collectors who can’t legally get some piece to their collection, so they are ready to risk with their freedom and use the service of black market.
British police concludes that criminal organisations are ready to use extreme actions in order to their hands on the target of robbery. They cover all places where valuable pieces can be located-“museums, libraries, archives and private collections”[2] in order to keep their stockpiles. Statistics says that 60000 items of art were stolen since 1991, just from UK. Further saying, not only “light items” take the interest of underworld, like paintings and statues, th...

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...tural objects. It was done for a number of reasons: to provide a checklist of the information required to identify stolen or missing objects, certain list of documents to minimize the level of information needed to describe an item, to establish information networks that will allow diverse organizations to exchange descriptions of objects rapidly to increase the speed of investigations, if pieces of art has crossed the border. Even considering what efforts are done, still the network is limited, due to the majority of crimes keeps been unreported to authorities and less than half of countries that are members report only annually, so it is more difficult to track the progress.

3.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24956337
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24956337
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Chief_Police_Officers
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