John Kerr, The securitization and policing of art theft: The case of London: Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel (Eds), Contemporary perspectives on the detection, investigation and prosecution of art crime: Australasian, European and North American perspectives
| Author | Julian R. Murphy |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865816661809 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Sparrow, M. K. (2015). Measuring performance in a modern policy organisation. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Kennedy School/National Institute of Justice.
John Kerr, The securitization and policing of art theft: The case of London. Ashgate: Surrey, 2015; 204 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4451-6, £65 (hbk)
Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel (Eds), Contemporary perspectives on the detection, investigation
and prosecution of art crime: Australasian, European and North American perspectives. Ashgate: Surrey,
2014; 276 pp. ISBN 978-1-4094-6313-9, £75 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Julian R. Murphy, Judge’s Associate, High Court of Australia, Australia
What better time to be reading and thinking about art crime than in the wake of one of
the most highly publicised and hard fought art fraud trials conducted in Australia’s
history: the case of the counterfeit Brett Whiteley paintings. Prosecuted in the
Supreme Court of Victoria, the jury spectacularly returned guilty verdicts after the
judge had given a rare Prasad direction, essentially an invitation to the jury to acquit.
The media circus around, and the public interest in, that case show our peculiar fascin-
ation with this subject, a fascination which has propelled books like The Art Thief
(Charney, 2007) and The Art of the Con (Amore, 2015) into bestseller lists around the
world. Such books make for gripping reading, but for readers looking for a more com-
prehensive introduction to this issue there is John Kerr’s The Securitization and Policing
of Art Theft: The Case of London and Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel’s edited
collection, Contemporary Perspectives on the Detection, Investigation and Prosecution of
Art Crime: Australasian, European and North American Perspectives. These two works
are major contributions to the recent efflorescence of study in an arena that, only
15 years ago, was chronically under-researched.
John Kerr’s monograph is the more specific of the two publications. Kerr’s book is, as
its title suggests, a sustained look at the actors and processes currently operating in
London for the prevention and detection of art theft (as opposed to other art crimes
like trafficking, forgery, ransom, looting and vandalism). The book is firmly grounded in
quantitative and qualitative research; Kerr conducted 33 interviews with art detectives,
insurers, loss adjusters, police officers, artists and even a convicted forger. He also made
site visits to 50 galleries, museums and other institutions – private and public – in
London and greater Europe. The result is, as one would expect, an informed, eviden-
tially grounded and exhaustively referenced survey of the field.
The tripartite task Kerr sets himself at the book’s outset is not a modest one – to
survey the security and policing geography of London’s art world, to assess the efficacy
of current security measures and to propose innovations. Yet, the book fulfils its brief,
although one might lament the limited attention paid to the last topic – innovation and
future directions. Over the course of the book, Kerr works systematically through what
he identifies as the four institutions combining to create the modicum of security that art
objects enjoy in London: ‘private security, the insurance industry, the public sector and
self-policing by the art world’ (p. 1). It is the interrelations between these institutions that
Kerr is most interested in, particularly those between the private and public players. This
is, really, the burden of the book – that the security of art works is co-produced by the
Book Reviews 309
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