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Showing posts with label Fall 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fall 2014. Show all posts

December 23, 2014

Neil Brodie 'considers the issue of the Sevso Treasure from a new angel' in the Fall 2014 issue of The Journal of Art Crime

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin,
  ARCA Blog Editor-in-chief

In the Fall 2014 issue of The Journal of Art Crime, Neil Brodie publishes "Thinking Some More about the Sevso Treasure". Here's the abstract:
On 26 March 2014, Hungary announced its purchase of seven pieces of Late Roman silverware, part of the so-called Sevso Treasure (Hungary 2014). The Treasure had been the object of conflicting ownership claims since its existence was first made public in 1990, and until the Hungarian purchase had been considered unsalable because of the suspicious circumstances of its discovery and early trading history. In his 2012 paper entitled “Thinking about the Sevso Treasure”, John Merryman had used the example of the Sevso Treasure to explore some of the issues surrounding the museum acquisition of problematical antiquities, and in light of his discussion made a recommendation for its future disposition (Merryman 2012: 51-66). Although this recommendation has been partly overtaken by events, his discussion of the issues involved is still topical, made more so perhaps by the Hungarian purchase which has effectively sundered the Treasure into two parts, with its balance of seven pieces remaining in the private possession of the Marquess of Northampton – an outcome that Merryman was keen to avoid. This article considers the issue of the Sevso Treasure from a new angle, concluding that the parties really to blame for the unfortunate affair of the Sevso Treasure are the various dealers and their expert advisors who worked together intentionally and unintentionally to transform the archaeological assemblage into a valuable and marketable commodity, and, ironically, in so doing, rendered it unsalable.
Neil Brodie is Senior Research Fellow in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow. Neil is an archaeologist by training, and has held positions at the British School at Athens, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, where he was Research Director of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, and Stanford University’s Archaeology Center. He was co-author (with Jennifer Doole and Peter Watson) of the report Stealing History, commissioned by the Museums Association and ICOM-UK to advise upon the illicit trade in cultural material. He also co-edited Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade (with Morag M. Kersel, Christina Luke and Kathryn Walker Tubb, 2006), Illicit Antiquities: The Theft of Culture and the Extinction of Archaeology (with Kathryn Walker Tubb, 2002), and Trade in Illicit Antiquities: The Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage (with Jennifer Doole and Colin Renfrew, 2001). He has worked on archaeological projects in the United Kingdom, Greece and Jordan, and continues to work in Greece.

Subscriptions to The Journal of Art Crime or individual copies of eEditions or printed issues may be obtained through ARCA's website here.

December 22, 2014

The Fall 2014 issue of the Journal of Art Crime is now available

The Fall 2014 edition of The Journal of Art Crime is now available. Editor-in-chief Noah Charney writes to readers:
Welcome to the new issue of The Journal of Art Crime, and thank you for subscribing. Your subscription supports ARCA in our research and educational endeavors, and we are grateful for it. Lauren Zanedis served as proof-reader in this issue, and I was ably assisted by my fellow editors, Marc Balcells and Christos Tsirogiannis, who are both far more organized than I. 
In this issue you’ll find academic papers on Adam Worth (the Napoleon of Crime), national prosecution of cultural heritage, art crime in Slovenia, the Ka Nefer Nefer mummy mask and the Sevso Treasure. We are also looking forward to ARCA’s next academic publication, an edited collection of essays, half of which were published in the Journal of Art Crime, half of which are new. This collection will be published in late 2015 by the fine academic press, Palgrave, and all profits from it will go directly to support ARCA. We are also planning the next ARCA symposium in London, following the great success of last year’s event at the Victoria & Albert Museum—it will be held next Fall at The Courtauld Institute. And the latest news for the Journal is that we have been invited to join the prestigious HeinOnline catalogue of academic journals, which means that the JAC will be available in thousands of research libraries around the world. Having been courted by several fine publishers, we are pleased to sign on with this one and look forward to the chance for a vastly expanded scholarly readership. 
We hope that you will enjoy these articles. Best wishes and thanks again for your support.
Noah Charney
Founder, ARCA
Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Art Crime

In this issue:

Academic articles: "Thinking Some More about the Sevso Treasure" by Neil Brodie; "The Case of the Ka Nefer Nefer Mummy Mask" by David Gill; "Outline of the Benefits coming from a National Prosecution Service in Cultural Heritage Protection" by Paolo Giorgio Ferri; "Adam Worth: A Critical Analysis of the Criminal Motivations Behind the Man Who Stole the Duchess of Devonshire" by J. Mark Collins; "Criminality Related to Cultural Heritage - Analysis of Interviews" by Viktorija Zupancic and Bojan Dobovšek.

Regular Columns: "Learning from the Herm: The Need for more Rigorous Due Diligence Searches" by David Gill; Not in the Headlines "Emptying Spain: The W. R. Hearst Case" by Marc Balcells; and Lessons from the History of Art Crime "Art Crime in Pop Culture: a Year in Review" by Noah Charney.

Editorial Essays: "Why Hong Kong can save the Ozone Layer but not China's Cultural Heritage" by Toby Bull; "Attitude or Action: Closing the Gap Between Words and Deeds in the Restitution of Looted Cultural Property in the Second World War" by Christopher A. Marinello and Jerome Hasler; and "A Brief History of Art Theft in Conflict Zones" by Noah Charney.

Reviews: Marc Balcells on Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of Art Crime: Australasian, European and North American Perspectives edited by Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel; Kirsten Hower on The Art of the Steal (2013) and The Best Offer (2013); Catherine Schofield Sezgin on From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town by Ingrid D. Rowland; and Marc Balcells on Indiana Jones sin futuro: la lucha contra el expolio del patrimonio arqueológico by Ignacio Rodríguez Temiño.

Extras: Kirsten Hower's "Q&A with Ron Pollard"; JAC Essay Collection; ARCA 2014 Award Winners; Contributor Biographies; and Acknowledgements.

Subscriptions to The Journal of Art Crime or individual copies of eEditions or printed issues may be obtained through ARCA's website here.