INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION FORCULTURAL PROPERTY PROTECTION
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Reposted from Allied Universal
The nature of security programs is changing. Higher demands for customer service; increased use of technology; evolving threat scenarios, even language skills remain at the core of day-to-day security functions.
At the same time, the labor market continues to tighten and the challenge of attracting and retaining qualified staff is becoming difficult. Still, many corporations are choosing to outsource non-core service functions, such as security, to focus on their core competencies and rely on their security partner to recruit, develop and retain quality security staff.
Below are key lessons learned on keeping up with the evolving challenges of building and maintaining best-in-class security officer teams.
1. It starts with recruiting. How you attract future team members to your program is crucial. Your job postings should clearly promote the benefits and opportunities of being part of your team. At the same time, you need to get out into your community and talk about the team and the environment you are creating with your security program. Share the skills, culture and values you are integrating into your program.
2. Meet basic needs: There are three specific elements that must be met to attract the right staff. If these three needs are not completely met, the revolving door will ensue:
First, there must be a livable wage to reduce your officers from having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, which is so common today. Also consider the distance from home and working a schedule that meets family and lifestyle expectations is also just as critical.
3. Develop security staffs’ hard and soft skills: Training is an essential requirement for anyone wishing to work in security, and is also a key component of recruiting, developing and motivating high-quality security teams. Security work has always depended on a range of “hard” skills. Typically, these skills included knowledge of and execution on policies and procedures, such as access control and emergency response. But in today’s information age, where people rely on the Internet for information, this has never been more important. Managers must implement innovative training to help security officers know all procedures.
4. Career pathing to your team member’s best potential. Whenever hiring and retention gets tough, we all rationalize it by claiming “it’s the money.” Without a doubt, wages will always be a key component and basic need of any employee, which is why it ranks as Number 1 on this “Basic needs” list in point 2 above.
But once someone is onboard, is it always money that leads them away? No, not always. Many workers are looking to learn and develop in order to build a security career. If they don’t see opportunity with your program they will go looking for it elsewhere. Companies that can’t promise any kind of advancement opportunities soon fall behind those that do. Entry-level staff need to be able to see how they can become supervisors. So, when more money isn’t an option, make sure a future can be. Pave the way for your team through succession planning and skills development.
5. Communication and recognition goes a long way: The way officers are treated will go a long way towards building ownership in your program. Employees want to be respected, informed and appreciated. Great security teams are engaged, provide feedback and feel part of the overall strategy.
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Reposted from American Libraries Magazine
The American Library Association (ALA) announced April 9 it will make available $1.25 million in emergency relief grants to libraries that have experienced substantial economic hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic. ALA invites public, school, academic, and tribal libraries across the US and its territories to apply for grants of $30,000–$50,000 from the ALA COVID Library Relief Fund. Libraries serving low-income and rural communities, or communities that are predominately Black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and people of color, are especially encouraged to apply.
These funds are intended to bolster library operations and services, including technology access, collections, digital instruction, staffing, and outreach. Funds can be used to maintain and amplify existing service strategies or add new ones.
“Libraries have demonstrated extraordinary innovation over the past year in creating new materials, programs, and service delivery models, but they are being asked to do more with less,” ALA Executive Director Tracie D. Hall said in an April 9 statement. “This new grant program recognizes those efforts and seeks to strengthen them, especially in communities where the need is greatest.” Hall added that this fund is the first part of a larger fundraising effort to support libraries, with more announcements planned in the coming months.
The ALA COVID Library Relief Fund is supported by Acton Family Giving, as part of its pandemic grantmaking response. Initial seed funding was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The application deadline is May 20. Awards will be announced at the end of June. Additional information and award guidelines are available on the grant application site. ALA’s Chapter Relations Office will administer the ALA COVID Library Emergency Relief Fund.
Our access to around-the-clock news greatly increases our visibility to acts of crime and violence. To avoid becoming a victim of crime ourselves, there are preemptive strategies we can implement in our daily lives to maximize our personal safety and security and minimize our exposure to threats. The following are some best practices to help you reduce your risk, deter criminal activity and increase your safety at home, online and in public places.
Reposted from Artnet News
Dutch authorities have linked a suspect to two major art thefts that took place during the early days of lockdown last spring.
The police announced on Tuesday morning that they had arrested a 58-year-old man on suspicion of stealing both Vincent Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) and Frans Hals’s Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer from two museums in the Netherlands.
The suspect, who has not been named by police, was arrested at his home in the town of Baarn, near Hilversum in the Netherlands. Neither painting has been recovered.
The first crime was committed around 3:15 a.m. on the morning of March 30, when a theft arrived at the Singer Laren Museum, smashed through reinforced glass doors with a sledgehammer, grabbed the Van Gogh canvas, and fled into the night on a motorcycle. The robbery was captured on security videos, released via a Dutch crime show in late April.
A few months later, in June, art detective Arthur Brand caught wind of a “proof of life” photograph circulating in the criminal underworld. It showed the front page of the New York Times, the back of the Van Gogh painting, and a biography of infamous art thief Octave Durham, titled Meesterdief (Masterthief).
Durham went to prison for stealing two other paintings by Van Gogh, and the inclusion of his biography in the hostage-like photograph bolstered law enforcement’s belief that the Singer Laren thief was a copycat.
The Van Gogh painting was on loan to the Singer Laren Museum from the Groninger Museum for a temporary exhibition, and was the only Van Gogh in the Groninger’s collection.
“Compliments to the police for their detective work. No robbery should go unpunished,” said Evert van Os, the managing director of the Singer Laren museum, in a statement. Although the painting itself remains missing, “everyday we hope to receive good news,” van Os says, “so that visitors to the Groninger Museum are able to enjoy this fabulous artwork again.”
The second robbery, of a Frans Hals painting valued at $17 million, stolen from the small Hofje van Aerden museum near Utrecht, was another nighttime theft. Thieves made off with the painting on August 27, 2020, at around 3:30 a.m. after forcing open a back door.
The jovial picture is a popular target for thieves: it had been stolen once in 1988 and again in 2011. Police are hoping it will be recovered for a third time.
Reposted from WFAA
At Fair Park, the Hall of State remains closed due to damage it sustained during Texas's historic winter storm in February. Yet, on Wednesday, Dallas city council members took the first step to getting the symbolic museum back open.
On Feb. 17, when the storm was grappling much of Texas, the Hall of State lost power. Unable to heat pipes inside, administrators were called early in the morning about sprinkler system pipes bursting.
Documentary filmmaker Mark Birnbaum compiled multiple videos of the pipes gushing water into the East Texas Room.
The Hall of State houses and features several collections of recognizable Texas art and artifacts. It also honors some of the state's heroes like Sam Houston and Davy Crockett.
In one area of the museum, you'll find Tom Landry's Super Bowl rings that he won with the Dallas Cowboys. Another? Davy Crockett's pistol and Santa Anna's spurs.
In the East Texas Room, water damaged the gum-paneled walls, orotone photographs taken by Polly Smith showing scenes throughout Texas in the early 1920s and 1930s, and murals depicting the region before and after oil was discovered.
Dallas City Council members passed a resolution Wednesday that would allocate $376,092 to restore and refurbish any damaged pieces.
However, roughly $3 million is still going to be needed to repair infrastructure to the building.
Karl Chiao, the executive director for the Dallas Historical Society, said the whole ordeal was a nightmare. The two things a museum tries to avoid most are fire and water damage.
The Dallas Historical Society has managed the building since 1938.
"You know, this happened around 4 a.m., and by 10 a.m., we had 25 to 30 people here helping," Chiao said. "We've got over three million items in our collection, and this is one of the three most historic buildings in Texas behind the Alamo and the State Capitol."
Roughly 1 to 4 inches of water had to be swept out of the building erected for Texas's Centennial Exposition in 1936. Fans are still drying it to this day.
Birnbaum captured volunteers in February, moving artifacts into the Great Hall, some of them needing to be dried out.
One of the soaked items was Quanah Parker's doeskin pipe bag. Parker was a war leader of the Kwahadi band of the Comanche Nation.
Interior damage was also done to the East Texas Room ceiling and other ceiling areas around the museum. The walls in the East Texas Room will likely have to be repaired, and the sprinkler system will also have to be fixed.
That is where the $3 million derives from.
Council members will likely approve the needed cash, because the City already spent $14.4 million on restoration to the building that was finished in December.
The funds were secured by voters in 2017, when a majority approved a bond sale for financing the renovation.
Chiao is looking forward to when repairs actually begin. He hopes the building can reopen in the coming months.
"It feels a little bit like Groundhog Day," Chiao said. "We just got done doing this renovation, and now here we are again. It's a little frustrating, but the good thing is we've done it before."
Reposted from Government Executive
Smithsonian Institution facilities remain closed to the public indefinitely, but the agency’s union is worried about employee safety when operations resume, based on problems encountered by staff who have been required to report to worksites over the past year and those involved in limited reopenings in the summer and fall.
On March 14, 2020, the Smithsonian closed all of its locations (the majority of which are in Washington, D.C.) as the lockdowns for the novel coronavirus pandemic began. Between July and September, the National Zoo and seven museums reopened with restrictions, but then all were closed again in late November due to a spike in coronavirus cases in the Washington region. Despite being closed to the public, many employees, such as security officers and facilities workers, still have to be on site, which has been an ongoing problem, according to American Federation of Government Employees Local 2463, which represents Smithsonian employees.
“We have had since Day 1 numerous problems beginning with trying to be on the [Smithsonian’s] committee, on the COVID team, so that bargaining unit employees could have a representative,” said David Hendrick, president of AFGE Local 2463. “They refused my numerous requests to allow the union person on the committee.”
There are over 6,300 employees at the Smithsonian, of which 3,215 are bargaining unit employees. Many union members have been working on site during the pandemic, and “the majority are minorities and a large part of that is African American,” according to Hendrick. Those are communities that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.
On-site employees have been working “side by side with outside contractors who repeatedly fail to wear masks,” Hendrick said. “On numerous occasions they do not have adequate [personal protective equipment] supplies. Cleaning procedures after someone is found to be infected are below standards or not [happening] at all.” Also, “on some occasions when they come down with COVID the Smithsonian claims they caught the COVID virus at home and refuses to pay them while they recuperate at home.”
WUSA9 first reported in April 2020 that contractors were working at the Museum of American History, which prompted employees’ concerns for increased risk of exposure.
As of this March 1, there had been 242 COVID-19 cases among Smithsonian staff, of which 97 were teleworkers. At least 145 of the staff infected were bargaining unit employees, Hendrick was informed by the Smithsonian (a Smithsonian spokesperson told Government Executive the agency would not disclose the numbers).
Union members are “concerned with what's going to happen to them once the public comes in because of the lack of Smithsonian following the COVID recommendations, providing adequate supplies and ensuring that the employees are safe,” said Hendrick. “They’re scared not only for their health” but also their families’ well-being.
Union representatives also expressed concern that the Smithsonian won’t follow the Labor Department’s “presumption of workplace causation” for federal workers who contract COVID. Employees have an easier time claiming benefits if it is assumed they caught COVID at work. The presumption of workplace causation was first enacted last May and then updated in the recent coronavirus stimulus package.
The problems during the pandemic are part of the Smithsonian’s overall goal of saving money and an ongoing “class war” with bargaining unit employees being viewed as the “lower class,” Hendrick said.
A year later, “I’m concerned still,” said Jarvis Waller, an officer in the Zoological Park Police and shop steward for AFGE Local 2463, who experienced many of the challenges that Hendrick mentioned. “Yes, we have a new president that has basically done a 360 compared to the last president and everyone’s getting tested and everyone’s getting vaccinated, but I’m concerned about my agency.”
The availability of personal protective gear and clearing supplies has been an ongoing concern at the zoo, in particular.
Also, “they didn’t put out the information that you get up to 15 weeks if you come up COVID-19 positive,” which was a provision in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” enacted on March 11, according to Waller.
Reggie Booth, executive vice president of the union local, said in some situations management took pre-existing conditions into consideration for those who had to work on site, but not for all. Also, “the employees aren’t receiving ample notification when someone tests positive” and they are worried when the public is allowed back in, “are they going to be kept safe?”
Alise Fisher, a Smithsonian spokesperson, told Government Executive that the agency has an established process for reporting and investigating coronavirus cases. She said that about 90% of staff has been working from home and gave the following statement on what they’ve been doing to protect those who can’t:
“To protect themselves and each other, our employees conduct a daily self-check of their health before coming to work, follow our ‘stay home if sick’ policy, wear appropriate face coverings in the workplace, practice safe social distancing, and wash and sanitize hands regularly. Among other safety measures, we have installed directional guidance and signage where needed to accommodate safe social distancing; reduced occupancy throughout staff areas, such as break rooms; installed protective safety shields; and used a risk assessment and mitigation process before conducting work activities involving more than one staff member. Where needed, we provide additional personal protection equipment to further reduce risks. If employees self-identify as having a medical condition that makes them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are currently asked to stay home and paid their normal salary.”
The Smithsonian has not received a direct allocation of vaccines yet, but is providing staff with information on how to get shots in their respective areas. Also, “we did not have any documented cases of visitor-to-staff transmission or vice versa while our museums were reopened” for a period of time last year, Fisher said.
Government Executive provided the Smithsonian with a list of some of the union’s concerns––regarding personal protective equipment availability, contractors coming into facilities, a union representative allegedly not being allowed on the Smithsonian’s coronavirus committee, employee testing and tensions between the union and agency. In response, Fisher told Government Executive:
“The Smithsonian’s first priority is to protect the health and safety of our staff and visitors, which includes ensuring the availability of sufficient [personal protective equipment] for our staff. Our COVID-19 response team leaders meet with the union regularly to discuss plans and solicit feedback. We recognize that the union is an integral part of the reopening process and will continue to seek their input, abide by all obligations, and strive to strengthen our partnership.”
The Smithsonian inspector general said this fiscal year it plans to review the agency’s implementation of the emergency management program in response to the pandemic as well as its use of $7.5 million in funds from the CARES Act.
Starting January 22, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser allowed museums to reopen with no more than 250 people per floor and without guided tours. Then she announced on Monday that starting May 1, museums, galleries and exhibits could operate indoors and outdoors at 50% capacity.
Several for-profit museums in the D.C. area have reopened between January and March, The Washington Post reported. Fisher didn’t have a target reopening date for the Smithsonian to share, but said they are “actively planning” for when it is safe to do so.
Reposted from ABC News
An art piece by an American graffiti artist showcased in South Korea was damaged by a couple in their 20s who thought the sets of paint and brushes laid in front of the artwork was for spectators' use.
Staff at the gallery exhibition noticed new brush strokes on the wall -- small swipes of dark green to the right of center -- last Sunday. After checking the security camera, two suspects were taken by the police for investigation.
The agency that organized the exhibition told ABC News that it is currently negotiating with the artist to take appropriate steps.
"We called the police immediately and talked to the insurance company for the damaged artwork," Kang Wook, the CEO of Contents Creator of Culture, co-organizer of the exhibition, told ABC News. "But as the agency in charge, we will do best to minimize the harm to the couple who unintentionally vandalized the work."
According to Kang, the graffiti was not framed due to its large size. The vandalized art was 22.9 feet by 7.8 feet, and was the only piece in the exhibition without frames.
“Given the circumstances, the young couple does not seem to have done it intentionally.” John Andrew Perello, who goes by the name JonOne, told ABC News. “I hope the piece gets restored to meet the Korean audience like before.”
The damaged art piece by JonOne is worth around $440,000, according to its agency. The graffiti "Untitled," which attracted even more public attention in South Korea after it was painted on, will hang until June 13, at the Street Noise exhibition at the Seoul-based Lotte World Mall.
The decision to display performance equipment in front of JonOne's work goes back to 2016. JonOne completed the artwork in question during a graffiti museum show, "The Great Graffiti,'' in Seoul Arts Center at the time. When the piece was complete, it was displayed along with the props used by the artist, in the same way the display is on now.
"The paint and brushes used by the artist comprise a complete set with the graffiti canvas work," said Kang. He explained that the props were part of the exhibition to help highlight the history of the artist's work.
Since the accidental painting, the agency in charge of the exhibition has provided additional guidelines for spectators and increased the surveillance around the work to prevent such misunderstandings from taking place again.
"Due to the characteristics of contemporary art, there will be many happenings like these going forward. Exhibit organizers must take extra care in physically protecting the artwork, as the audience may mistake the art like that of JonOne's to something they can scribble on," Ha Jae-geun, a Korean pop culture expert, told ABC News.
JonOne, who now lives in Paris, received France's Legion of Honor in the culture and communications category in 2015. France's premier award goes to those recognized for their service to the country.
Reposted from The Guardian
The Victoria & Albert Museum is a strange place to be on this late-February morning. The staircases and deserted hallways echo to my footsteps. A top-floor gallery looks naked, with gaps on the walls and improvised labels where works of art should be. Next to the doors leading to the courtyard, the plaster casts are swaddled in bubblewrap, as if sheltering from the chill.
It isn’t just London’s museumland, of course. Galleries and museums up and down the UK are stuck in suspended animation. Closed along with nearly every public building a year ago, they were permitted to open again in the summer, before having to bolt their doors again a few months later. Places in lower-risk areas stuck it out into December, before succumbing to the latest national lockdowns. According to the latest plans, it will be mid-May at the earliest before we’re able to step inside again.
But what actually happens when museums pull up the drawbridge and pull down the shutters? Do staff just flick off the lights , turn on the burglar alarms and head home? The V&A possesses more than 2.3 million books and artefacts stored across multiple locations. Who’s been looking after them?
The V&A’s deputy director, Tim Reeve, in a corridor somewhere between Fashion and Buddhism, is eager to point out that there’s more going on in the empty building than one might think. Spry in a suit and a William Morris-print mask, he points out the work they’ve been doing while the place is closed: repainted gallery spaces, roof repairs, the former foyer repurposed as a socially distanced cafe.
Reeve halts next to a gleaming new mosaic floor with the pride of a man showing off some lockdown DIY. “We’ve been meaning to do this for years,” he explains. “But it would have meant four months of disruption. There are very, very few silver linings with Covid, but this is one.”
When staff shut the doors on 17 March last year, a week before the UK officially went into lockdown, the assumption was they’d be back in a few weeks, says Vernon Rapley, the museum’s head of security. “We just closed everything up as normal. A bit like Christmas Day.” Rapley, a former Met policeman, actually had a pandemic crisis plan ready to go. Problem was, it wasn’t the right one. “We’d never considered the scenario where government turned round and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to close.’”
All of a sudden, security were pretty much the only people allowed on site. Among myriad mundane but crucial tasks, guards did everything from assisting the exhibition team to lay out signage, to replacing pest traps and batteries on humidity monitors.
A museum’s primary duty is to care for the objects in its collection; “condition-checking” artefacts is especially important. The security team added this to their skillset, too. “Is that object ‘sweating’, does everything look the same?” Rapley says. “We became mini-technicians. Some of my guys, they hadn’t really had time to look at the objects before.” One day, he came across a guard staring into a case. “He looked really nervous and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I was just looking.’ I said, ‘Absolutely perfect!’”
Security of a more obvious kind was also on their minds. Last March, thieves broke into the coronavirus-closed Singer Laren museum in the Netherlands with a sledgehammer and made off with a Van Gogh. Anxious that the V&A shouldn’t suffer the same fate, Rapley started posting plentiful photos to Twitter, making it clear he and his team were very much in the building. “It’s always good to remind people,” he says.
As soon as it closed, Glenn Benson, the V&A’s senior safety adviser, was feverishly finding ways they could reopen. Making the museum Covid-secure was a gargantuan task. The main V&A building in Kensington covers 12 acres and has seven miles of gallery space, plus more miles of gloomy Edwardian corridors and backstairs rooms. Benson and his colleagues had to account for every inch, assessing ventilation and where hand-sanitiser points and Perspex screens should go, if headsets on displays were safe, what could be cleaned and what couldn’t.
Working from floor plans, Benson’s team calculated how many visitors could be let in, allowing for a two-metre bubble around each and factoring in what they christened the “clutter factor” – what the rest of us refer to as art works. It became clear that only a fifth of normal visitor numbers could safely come in each day – alarming for a museum that derives much income from footfall.
Even trickier was making the V&A’s notoriously cramped backstage areas Covid-safe. “The V&A is a village,” Benson says, explaining that nearly 1,000 people currently work there (even the British Museum doesn’t have so many). “We have workshops, we have cinemas, we have shops, we have cafes, close-contact activities, everything.”
As spring became summer, some of the first to come off furlough were the conservators, who clean, research and restore objects – tasks that, for obvious reasons, can’t be done from home. Senior textile conservator Frances Hartog spent her final hours in the museum last March shrouding delicate silk kimonos in protective coverings and installing pest traps, not knowing when she’d return. When she came back to the studios in July, it was to a world transformed. To minimise contact, her team has been divided into two separate bubbles, working split shifts; she’s also been taking weekly lateral flow tests. “Of course everyone’s anxious, but we all need to take the rules seriously,” Hartog says.
A sculpture conservator, Sarah Healey-Dilkes, adds that, to reduce the number of people on site, everything possible is being done virtually. Instead of objects that have been borrowed from other museums arriving guarded by a “courier”(usually a conservator or other specialist), which was standard practice pre-pandemic, now V&A staff are holding up iPhones as they open crates, so their counterparts can observe remotely.
Others in the V&A team did the same in reverse, surveying the de-installation of a Balenciaga couture loan show at the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou entirely online. Meanwhile, the exhibition crew have been on endless early-morning video calls with curators in the Middle East, arranging for objects to travel for what the museum hopes will be a grand curtain-raiser when it reopens, a new exhibition called Epic Iran.
“We’re used to finding solutions,” says senior exhibitions manager Claire Everitt cheerfully. “When you’re installing a big, complex show, things are changing all the time. You get good at improvising.”
Hanging over everything, of course, are immense storm clouds. While hundreds of institutions were bailed out by the government’s £1.57bn culture recovery fund, the V&A and other directly funded museums such as Tate and the British Museum were not permitted to apply to the main scheme. Instead, they’ve been waiting on the Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport for handouts of up to 25% of their normal grants – a figure that, in many cases, won’t cover the shortfall, even with a top-up recently announced in the budget.
The V&A is in a deep hole, says Reeve. “We depend heavily for our livelihood on visitors, whether it’s joining as a member, buying a ticket, shopping in the shop, signing up for an online course. And we’ve gone from 4 million people a year to 15% of that.” Income is down by something like 70%, he adds. “It’s kind of catastrophic.”
Last September, the V&A announced that it would shed more than 100 jobs, mainly retail and visitor-facing roles, 10% of the overall workforce. A few weeks back, the Guardian reported that some departments were facing cuts of up to 20%. The museum has confirmed that a major curatorial shake-up is under way, redesigning how departments work; the number of jobs that hang in the balance is now 140. Altogether the museum says that it needs to find “sustainable savings” of £10m each and every year, going forward.
“We’ll have to be a smaller organisation,” says Reeve. “There are lots of things we can do to reduce expenditure. But if we’re looking at 500,000 visitors this year, maybe 1 millon next year, it’s not the same as 4 million people.”
Some have raised eyebrows that the museum is still pushing ahead with a grandiose new project, V&A East, a vast “creative campus” and open-storage facility in the Olympic Park in east London. The V&A’s Museum of Childhood is also undergoing a £13m revamp. Other institutions have put expansion plans on ice; in September, America’s Smithsonian Institution cancelled plans to rent part of the same space, blaming the pandemic.
While there are doubts about whether the original opening date of 2023 will be met, Reeve insists that V&A East will not be cancelled. “It’s a commitment we’ve made,” he says, pointing out that much of the funding comes from elsewhere, and they in any case need to vacate their current storage facilities in west London, which the government wants to sell off.
More, though, it’s philosophically important they plough ahead. “It’s about audience,” Reeve says. “It’s the right project in the right place at the right time. I believed that pre-Covid; I think Covid has made that even more the case.”
Others aren’t so sure about the changes. Angered by what they saw as a lack of consultation, one staff member described a “hollowing out [of] the expertise of the museum”, with the loss of conservators and period specialists.
A survey last November reported that six in 10 UK museums were worried about their future; at least 4,000 people are known to have lost their jobs in the museum sector already.
In Britain, the final straw for many has been the government’s decision to pause museum reopening until 17 May – five weeks after non-essential shops (including commercial galleries and libraries). Reeve, ever-buoyant, says having a clear date is “helpful”, but admits it’s “frustrating”.
Crucial as all the behind-the-scenes work they’ve been doing is, the whole point of a museum is that it’s open to the public. “When you work in exhibitions,” says Everitt, “you’re always thinking about the finishing line. We want people again.”
Reposted from The Daily Beast
On March 18, 1990, two men posing as Boston Police Department officers gained entry into the city’s famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and, after 81 minutes, walked out with 13 works of art—including Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and Vermeer’s The Concert—valued by the FBI at approximately $500 million. In the 31 years since that St. Patrick’s Day heist, none of the pieces has been recovered, and none of the individuals responsible for the theft has been definitively identified, or brought to justice. It was one of the crimes of the century, and it continues to confound authorities and journalists to this day.
Yet as suggested by This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, perhaps the greatest mystery of all isn’t that the crooks initially got away with their loot, but that no one has since squealed—this despite the fact that the museum continues to offer a $10 million reward for information leading to the art’s recovery.
Director Colin Barnicle’s four-part Netflix docuseries (premiering April 7) takes a jaunty look at this infamous heist, which began in the wee hours of March 18, when museum security guard Rick Abath allowed two uniformed strangers into the facility. There, the faux-cops bound Abath and his colleague with duct tape in the basement, and then took their sweet time snatching a strange collection of works from various rooms, as well as grabbing the building’s VHS security camera tapes. There was no apparent rhyme or reason behind the items they targeted, but the patient thoroughness of their activity, as well as their familiarity with the museum—including the location of a secret room’s door—indicated that they may have benefited from inside knowledge or assistance.
Suspicion first fell on Abath, who had previously opened the museum door leading to the street just minutes before the disguised thieves arrived. This is a Robbery spends considerable energy looking into Abath, a stoner-rock slacker by day who didn’t really like his job or his bosses, and who had let someone into the museum—a clear violation of security protocols—the night before the heist. Abath doesn’t participate in the series, but Barnicle does include snippets of a CNN interview with him, as well as an audio recording of his chat with former Boston Globe investigative journalist (and Spotlight team member) Stephen Kurkjian, during which he denies any involvement in the crime.
This is a Robbery has a propulsive momentum that doesn’t interfere with its comprehensive examination of its story’s numerous angles. Utilizing an array of graphical timelines and maps, photographs, and archival news and crime scene videos, it lucidly details the multiple threads that comprise its tale. Interviews with investigators and local journalists help convey the atmosphere of this particular Boston era, while a sense of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comes courtesy of long nocturnal trips through its inviting, ornately decorated hallways. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Barnicle’s chosen form, and his dramatic recreations (shot melodramatically, with actors’ faces always obscured) are a superfluous annoyance. However, thanks to sharp cutting by a team of four editors, the series moves smoothly back and forth in time, and between locales and personalities, to provide a coherent account of the complicated saga.
Though Abath was a promising initial suspect, attention soon turned to Myles Connor, an infamous New England art thief who was as brash as he was talented. The only problem was that Connor had an airtight alibi: he was behind bars for a prior offense when the robbery took place. Nonetheless, thanks to present-day interviews with Connor and others, This is a Robbery surmises that Connor may have had a hand in the burglary via his association with Bobby Donati, an Italian mafioso with whom he’d previously partnered on an art-snatching job. Donati thus had experience with such plots, and moreover, he had a motive—namely, to get his underworld pal Vincent Ferrara out of prison.
It’s there that This is a Robbery dives headfirst into a tangle of Italian mob connections and conspiracies, resulting in a persuasive theory that Donati and his close confidant Bobby Guarente concocted the plan, which was then carried out by a group of gangsters—led by Carmello Merlino, and including Charlie Pappas, David Turner, George Reissfelder, and Leonard Dimuzio—that operated out of Merlino’s TRC Auto Electric shop in Dorchester. Through analysis of these characters’ whereabouts and history, as well as anecdotes from their relatives, Barnicle’s docuseries comes up with a reasonable hypothesis about who pulled off the heist. It additionally deduces that in the aftermath of the crime, the art may have been transferred by Guarente to Hartford, CT gangster Robert Gentile, whose house eventually became the subject of a raid that, alas, turned up no hard evidence.
This is a Robbery is most illuminating when exploring the motivations of thieves who pilfer priceless one-of-a-kind artworks. While sales on the black market are an option, the series reveals that such paintings and sculptures can also be used as collateral for drug deals, thereby functioning as illicit pseudo-currency for big transactions. More stunning still, they’re often sought as leverage against future incarceration. In other words, a thief could theoretically trade a Rembrandt in their possession for a lighter sentence regarding an unrelated case—a “get out of jail free card” situation that Connor himself pioneered. That Guarente, Merlino and company didn’t cough up a painting in order to free their arrested cohorts, then, might mean that they didn’t actually have anything to do with the heist in the first place.
Reposted from The New York Times
Should museums tell the public about missing art?
Two pieces of gold and silver-encrusted Italian Renaissance armor, which had been stolen from the Louvre in 1983 and found this year in a family’s private collection in France, were discovered the way stolen art often is: An expert crosschecked the items against an online database of lost and stolen art.
But museums have at times withheld information about thefts, fearing that revealing security weaknesses could make other institutions less likely to loan them art or that it could encourage other thefts, according to current and former museum officials. Art security experts say the failure to report thefts, particularly involving items stolen from storage, has prevented museums from recovering items.
Philippe Malgouyres, the curator of heritage art at the Louvre, said that when he started working in museums decades ago, he heard stories of thefts and disappearances that had not been reported.
“Our purpose is to preserve objects for the future and for the public,” Mr. Malgouyres said. “When we fail to do that somehow, when something is stolen, it’s a very painful experience, which led some museums in the past, especially, not even to go to the police sometimes, because they were feeling so embarrassed about it.”
He said that while the armor that was recently recovered was not as well known as many other pieces in the Louvre’s collection, he had thought it would eventually be found because it had been cataloged in a database of art thefts in France.
Now, public museums and galleries act in a more transparent way, said Sandy Nairne, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London and the former director of programs at the Tate Gallery.
“In the past, there was a kind of instant reaction of institutions that wanted to protect their sense of integrity that made them very cautious about talking about it,” said Mr. Nairne, who led a team at the Tate that recovered two J.M.W. Turner paintings in 2002, eight years after they had been stolen while on loan to a museum in Germany.
On Sunday, the newspaper El País reported that the National Library of Spain had discovered in 2014 that one of its holdings, a 17th-century book by Galileo, had been replaced by a copy but did not report it to the police until four years later, when researchers had requested the work.
Although it is obvious when artwork that is on display is stolen, museums can sometimes take years to realize that pieces in storage have been taken, said Tim Carpenter, a special agent with the F.B.I.’s art crime team.
“It might be 10 or 15 years before they do an inventory and say, ‘Hey, where is this piece?’” he said. “You can imagine how difficult it is trying to play catch-up on a 15-year-old crime. It makes things infinitely more difficult for us.”
A comprehensive inventory of a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has hundreds of thousands of objects, is time-consuming and expensive, but poor record-keeping can hamper an investigation of theft.
In one case that Mr. Carpenter worked on, a major museum discovered the disappearance of artifacts 15 to 20 years after the theft. The authorities knew where the artifacts were but could not recover them because the museum was unable to establish that the items had belonged to it; the museum’s most accurate inventory was from the 1920s, he said.
The advantages of reporting thefts are clear: Members of the public can help identify stolen art, and it’s more difficult for thieves to sell. In 2011, after a drawing attributed to Rembrandt was stolen from an exhibition at a hotel in Los Angeles, the authorities released an image of the piece. Days later, it was left at a church.
However, there are also instances when keeping thefts out of the public eye is advantageous for investigative purposes, said Lynda Albertson, the chief executive of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art, an organization that researches art crime.
In 2013, when thieves stole 27 pieces from the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, the police kept quiet about the theft and, as a result, recovered most of the pieces, she said.
“Sometimes they’re very quiet, not so talkative or splashy,” Ms. Albertson said of the division of Italian police that focuses on art crime. “That discretion has been quite helpful.”
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