I’m abetting the Criminal Element again, this time with an article about the most spectacular modern art forgery scandal of the last twenty years. Between 1994 and 2008, Knoedler & Company — the oldest art gallery in the United States — sold for $80 million dollars forty paintings created by some of…
From Thailand with Love: Operation Antiquity
In yet another scrape with the Criminal Element, I talk about an operation smuggling a different sort of pot (not the green kind) from Thailand into the U.S. A crowd gathered outside the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, on the morning of January 24, 2008. They weren’t museum junkies;…
Life Imitates Art
A post for my blog went free-range on me and ended up on Criminal Element. It’s a true-crime story that may sound a mite familiar if you know what The Collection is about: “In December 2002, two burglars broke into the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They didn’t use…
“Crimes Against Art” YouTube Channel
I’ve started a new side project — a YouTube channel called “Crimes Against Art.” It started as (a) a way to organize some of the research material I’ve found over the years, and (b) a way to learn how YouTube works. I’ve been reading and posting about art-related crime for…
Movie Minute – Art and Craft
Art and Craft is the remarkable true story of Mark Landis, a schizophrenic Mississippi man who over the course of thirty years forged hundreds of works of art and donated them to four dozen American museums. Landis, a gifted copyist, is able to duplicate pretty much any 2D artwork he…
Criminal Element: What’s in Your Museum?
I’m back among the Criminal Element again, this time with a story about antiquities smuggling: Our story begins with a pot and a pig. In 1970, an Italian man working on a canal near Naples discovered a remarkable piece of crockery: a 27-inch-tall, double-handled chalice or krater, black with red…