James Ratcliffe, pictured, is director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register, London. James spoke with Mark Rowe of Professional Security Magazine about the ALR and about the importance of secure and legitimate transactions in a risk-heavy and variable market place.
1) What is the Art Loss Register, who set it up, who uses it and how does it work?
The Art Loss Register is a company that runs the world’s largest private database of stolen or looted art. We offer those in the art market, such as dealers and auction houses, the opportunity to check with us whether items that they are buying or selling have been registered on that database, and thus to see whether there is a prior claim to the work. Through this mechanism we also offer the victims of crime, their insurers, and law enforcement agencies the chance to locate stolen artworks as they move through the art market, and hopefully to reunite those pieces with their rightful owner.
2) Do you think that the internet is making art crime easier or harder?
This is a difficult question as the answer is two-fold. The internet has made information more accessible which has no doubt made the more traditional forms of art crime difficult to accomplish. For example, it is much harder to steal a painting in one country and then sell it in another. On the other hand, it is possible that the internet makes some other forms of art crime, such as the sale of fakes and forgeries, easier as works can be sold online without any kind of inspection by the buyer. That is why, especially now with the continual growth of the Internet, buying from reputable sources and doing your research is of upmost importance.
3) Readers of Professional Security Magazine may be working with private clients who seek art – what advice can you give to them about dealing and trading art safely and securely?
We would always advise anyone involved in a transaction related to art to do their research properly. Treat it as you would any other purchase involving a similar sum, but with the added caveat that you should probably only buy things that you like. Ask questions about where the work is from: who has owned it before you; what is it’s provenance, or ownership history; does the dealer own it or is it on consignment; and, of course, we would also recommend asking whoever you are buying from whether they can provide a certificate showing that the piece has been checked against the Art Loss Register’s database. Keep records of where and when you acquired it, and insist on being given, and keeping, the paperwork. Then it is also important to protect your purchase through insurance and protecting its condition.
4) How does the Art Loss Register categorise its database? Perhaps you can tell us a little about the sheer range of what counts as art?
We have all sorts of categories in our database. A simple way to look at it might be to think about the different types of item that can be registered, and then also the different reasons for registering them. So people can register pictures, sculpture, collectables, jewellery, watches, books, anything really that might be sold at auction. In terms of the range of what might be included it is enormous: film props from Ghostbusters, cars looted by the Nazis, the teeth of a US President, and of course hundreds of thousands of paintings.
People can then register such items in all sorts of circumstances, ranging from the obvious such as theft or looting through some of the more obscure such as the registration of items covered by a freezing injunction or that are the subject of a dispute. For permanent collections, such as museums, we also offer the opportunity to register items proactively so that they are already on the database. This means that if the item is stolen and reaches the market before the theft is noted – we can notify the rightful owner of the problem.
5) What are the risks involved with buying art as an investment?
The first risk to consider is the financial one. Art can lose value just as easily as gain it, it is a continually fluctuating market. Beyond that there are two particularly relevant risks in buying art as an investment. One is authenticity, and the question of whether what you are buying might lose its value overnight if it turns out not to be by the artist that you believed had created it. The other is the difficulty of provenance for artworks. Claims are made against stolen and looted art decades after they have been lost, sometimes many years after the current owner bought it without any idea of the issue. That is why it is so important to research an artwork before acquiring it.
6) What parallels and points of difference can be drawn between art and other markets?
An obvious point of difference is the fact that so much value is concentrated in what is usually a relatively small physical object. That is rare in comparison to other markets where more often an asset is either very large in scale, such as property, or is intangible, such as a financial investment. It is this concentration of financial value in a small physical object that makes maintaining the security of that object so important. If it is lost or damaged then that can destroy the value in it. But in many other ways the art market is just like many others: it is highly leveraged, it is prone to volatility, and some people make money from it and others lose money.
7) Is there anything else about the Art Loss Register that the readers of Professional Security Magazine should know about?
The sheer range and scale of what we do is often something that people don’t realise. We have half a million items registered on our database and we are searching about 400,00 items against the database every year as they move through the art market, whether it be with our nearly 100 auction house clients, one of the many dealers or banks that work with us, or one of the numerous international art fairs such as TEFAF, Art Basel, Frieze Masters and Masterpiece.
8) Could you share a recovery story with us?
We are constantly working on the recovery of stolen art, with over a hundred cases on the go at any one time. One recent one that was interesting for us was the recovery last year of a piece of jewellery designed by Anish Kapoor, better known perhaps for some of his larger scale work such as the Orbit tower in London’s Olympic Park. The case illustrated many of the issues that arise in recovering stolen art. The jewellery, a gold pendant, had been lost immediately after its purchase in London in 2013, when the buyer left it in the back of a cab. An insurer paid out on the loss and asked the Art Loss Register to add the item to its database. Nothing further was heard of it until 2015, when we identified it in a search against our database carried out by an individual who had acquired the piece when he bought the entire contents of a storage unit on which rent had not been paid. We were able to recover the pendant for the insurer and sell it for their benefit, which meant that they could set this off against the original claim. Sadly for the man who had found it in the contents of the storage unit he had not acquired good title to this stolen property, but the insurer did provide him with a small reward in recognition of his honesty in checking whether there might be a claim against the piece. One thing that made the case particularly memorable was that when the jewellery was collected, the pub at the end of the road was called “The Provenance”. Given that our work every day relates to establishing the provenance, or ownership history, of artworks this seemed particularly apt when recovering an item where the chain of provenance had been broken!
Pictured: James Ratcliffe is director of recoveries and general counsel at the Art Loss Register, London. Image courtesy of the Art Loss Register.
