The Midas Crutch

Greed, gold and stolen art


by Alia Dharssi--Ubyssey.Online


Friday, October 3rd, 2008


It must have seemed like a typical cool and cloudy Vancouver night when
the security guard at UBC’s clifftop Museum of Anthropology stepped out
to have his smoke break. After the guard walked out to enjoy a
cigarette, thieves wearing gas masks and armed with bear spray entered
the museum, according to a CBC interview with Anthony Shelton, the
museum’s director. The masked robbers proceeded to contaminate the
interior of the museum with a powerful bear spray. The fumes would have
made it difficult for anyone who tried to stop them, but apparently no
one did. They made off with 11 sculptures by iconic Haida artist Bill
Reid—ten of which were made of gold—and three Mexican Zapotec Indian
gold-coloured necklaces. When the security guard returned from his
break, everything seemed normal. The robbery wasn’t discovered until the
following morning, when the museum’s security guards were conducting a
shift change.


How the thieves managed to pull off the heist, which occurred between
May 23 and May 24 2008, is still unclear, as is the motivation behind
the act. Authorities are unable or unwilling to confirm many of the
details about the case, which is still under investigation. The theft,
which involved works totalling approximately $2 million, is one of the
most significant art robberies in Canadian history.


One rumour describes the thieves calling the museum the day before
claiming to be the alarm company. They explained that the alarm would be
malfunctioning that night and that the museum should simply ignore it. A
CBC article claimed that four hours prior to the robbery, important
surveillance cameras in the museum had stopped recording. An electric
alarm alerted campus security to the fact that the cameras had gone
offline, but this information wasn’t acted on. According to Douglas
Reynolds, who owns a gallery that specializes in historic and
contemporary Northwest Coast Art, the construction going on at the
Museum of Anthropology probably contributed to the lack of response.
“You have a large renovation going on, workmen going in all the time,
systems were just not in place like they normally are.”’


Though a robbery of this magnitude at a public institution is rare in
Canada, the illegal trade in arts and antiquities has increased
substantially over the past decades. Today, it forms a transnational
market that some claim is surpassed in size only by drugs and arms.
Worse still is that the billions of dollars made from this illicit trade
every year may be funding criminal networks. All the while, fragments of
our cultural heritage are disappearing, piece by piece.


Bonnie Czegledi is one of a handful of lawyers in the world that
specialize in international art and cultural heritage law. She explains
that frequent theft of pieces from small to medium-sized galleries,
museums and archaeological sites adds up to a bigger problem than
individual high-profile thefts, such as the one at the Museum of
Anthropology. “It only makes the news when a bigger statue or important
piece is stolen; however, if we dealt more effectively with the smaller
incidences, we would be more prepared to handle the big events.” For
instance, in Iraq, looting of small pieces is happening all of the time
and, in the process, an important part of the world’s cultural heritage
is being lost.


Many stolen works of art are never recovered and form what experts refer
to as the “Lost Museum,” a fictional museum that holds all of the
artwork ever stolen. If you were to meander through its halls, you would
see a room of lost paintings by European artists like Picasso and Monet.
However, in the midst of the maze of stolen works, you might also find a
bronze woman posing for a photographer who is waiting for her in
Vancouver`s Queen Elizabeth Park, where she was grabbed from a tableau
of statues. Another room might be reserved for an exhibit of stolen
cuneiform tablets that have been looted from archaeological sites in
Iraq.


Fortunately, the Bill Reid pieces didn’t end up in this inaccessible
museum. “The RCMP had a real team on this case and they just went all
out,” said Karen Duffek, the curator of Pacific Northwest and
Contemporary Visual Art at the Museum of Anthropology. By the end of
August, all of the missing items had been recovered, although not in
their original condition. A chunk of a dark argillite pipe carved by
Reid is still missing and the Mexican necklaces were badly damaged.


RCMP Constable Annie Linteau referred to the recovery as “amazing in
itself.” She partly attributed the success to the wide publicity the
theft received through the media and the Art Alert Register, an
organization that disseminates information to relevant organizations,
such as galleries the criminals might attempt to sell the works to. “The
market had been literally saturated with information.” It would have
been very difficult to re-sell the works.


“Publicizing is the most important thing to do…we have to speak to the
media and make the material too hot to handle,” Czegledi said on a phone
call from Toronto. “Secrecy only helps the criminal.”,


The Museum of Anthropology’s open response may have to do with Bill
Reid’s importance and the fact that the museum is a public institution.
Moreover, they feared that the gold pieces, which included seminal works
from Reid’s career, might be melted down. “That’s why the museum very
quickly got out the value of the materials, so that the thieves would
know that it wouldn’t be too smart to melt them down,” Duffek explained.


Most art crime in Canada, however, consists of theft from private homes
or commercial galleries that aren’t inclined to go public when pieces
are poached. There is a reluctance to discuss this issue in the art
world. Some of the local art gallery owners I met were hesitant to speak
to me or to be quoted by name. One of them suggested that she would be
reluctant to publicize an incident because it might give other people
ideas. Another concern expressed by art dealers is that publicizing a
theft might ruin a gallery’s reputation. Heffel, an important Canadian
fine art auction house, declined to be interviewed for this story,
stating in an email that “art theft is a sensitive issue, and in light
of recent art thefts in and around Vancouver, our comments could
potentially be misconstrued.”


“It’s really hard to solve a problem when it’s shrouded in secrecy,”
Czegledi commented. “There’s no hope of a recovery.” She noted that it
is unfortunate that there is still some fear in the business, despite
cases where people have been able to recover stolen works precisely
because they were publicized.


Small art robberies occur often in Vancouver. Gallery owners say that
thieves are usually after sculptures or metallic pieces they can melt
down quickly for profit. It’s plausible that the thieves who robbed the
Museum of Anthropology were after quick money. “They also grabbed three
Mexican necklaces that were of no particular value,” Duffek said. “But
they were gold coloured, so they were obviously lured by gold.”


Going through the trouble of stealing $2 million gold artwork by an
iconic Canadian artist and melting it down for $15,000 worth of gold may
seem ridiculous, Reynolds said, but “people will do a lot for $15,000
regardless of what the actual value is.”


There was a flurry of thefts of Northwest Coast art in the mid 1990s.
Thieves broke into a number of galleries, including Reynolds’s,
targeting specific works. Fortunately, that subsided and, in the last
ten years, the Northwest Coast art scene has experienced mostly amateur
thefts. “More recent thefts have been unprofessional and just really
smash and grab. There hasn’t been a huge crime scene up until, of
course, you have the huge break-in at the Museum of Anthropology.”


Thieves tend to target metal works and sculptures in local galleries.
Few paintings are stolen from local galleries because, unlike
sculptures, they are difficult to profit from without being caught.


However, some thieves are after culturally valuable Pacific Northwest
Coast art, especially historic pieces, which have risen in value in
recent years. In October 2006, the Dundas Collection, a collection of
19th century artifacts pertaining to the Tsimshian people of BC, was
auctioned off for $7 million at Sotheby’s Auction House in New York. Of
especial note was a record-breaking $1.8 million paid for a prized
shaman’s mask. “I think these record prices getting set in New York
shows the importance of Northwest Coast art internationally and also
brings a lot more attention to the art,” Reynolds said. “The historic
work has been undervalued, in my opinion, for years.”


As prices soar they attract collectors. Northwest Coast art moves
further and further from home, away from the community that influenced
the art and out of public view. “The objects are completely ripped out
of their contexts,” Duffek said, “and seen in terms that have nothing to
do with their original meaning to people.” The price also attracts
thieves to museums and archaeological sites. All of which results in the
gradual disappearance of our cultural heritage.


The prospects for resale may have motivated a robbery at the Fort
Langley National Historic Site this September. Thieves stole three
colourful ceremonial masks, one ceremonial drum, and a cedar weaved
basket belonging to the Kwantlen First Nations Community from the site’s
museum. Thieves gained access by smashing their way through thick glass
that led into the visitor centre. They proceeded to break the Plexiglas
back of the exhibition case holding the works and made off with pieces
worth $5500. The items were taken from a small blind spot in the
museum’s sensor system.


In addition to the theft at Fort Langley, September also saw the robbery
of $18,000 worth of religious items, many of them made of precious
metals, from a church in Surrey. A local gallery owner I spoke to said
he had $30,000 worth of Pacific Northwest Coast jewellery pieces stolen
from his gallery in a robbery that occurred a year and a half ago. None
of these pieces have been recovered. And this is only handful of
robberies—a small part of a global problem. Artwork is regularly looted
the world over, particularly from remote archaeological sites that are
not well protected.


To deal with the problem, Czegledi suggests we examine the experience of
other nations. For instance, Canada could look to the American
guidelines on sentencing cultural resource crimes in order to use
incarceration as a much-needed disincentive.


“The fact that countless pieces of cultural heritage, which, although
deemed small are being stolen at an increasingly rapid rate from
hundreds of sites, galleries and public institutions in a systematic
operation, constitutes a significant loss rivalling high-priced thefts.
Little by little cultural heritage is being lost and destroyed,”
Czegledi said. “If we deal with the problem of illicit trafficking at
the first stages there will not be the groundwork and established
network there to carry out the big-name heists.”


When I spoke to Matthew Petley-Jones, a local gallery-owner, he told me
about a group of thieves who broke through his gallery’s storefront
window to grab a sculpture on display. It was a nice piece, but not on
the same level as the Bill Reid sculptures. The people who steal in
Vancouver are not usually the ones “with a desire for Van Gogh”—they’re
just trying to make a buck.