Crime watch

It’s got to be said that art crime in NZ doesn’t feel like a growth industry. The biggest one in our history has got to be the large-scale removal of Maori taonga in the early days making everything since pale by comparison. When it comes to recent ransacking, people with contemporary art on their walls are unlikely to find it’s been included with the swag. Of course there have been some famous examples, the theft of the Tissot from the Auckland Art Gallery, the kidnap of Colin McCahon’s Urerewa mural, the life-sized nativity nicked from Taihape and never found, Christchurch’s painting Psyche by Solomon J Solomon. Some sculptures have been melted down and a few works have been poked, written on and spat at over the years, but the tally isn’t huge. There are always forgeries of course or at least talk about the possibilities but it’s probably at the low end of challenging the criminal justice system. Anyway, this is to let you know that a symposium organised by Louisa Gommans titled ARTCRIME2015 is going to take on this subject and give it a shake in September. You can find out more about it, speakers etc. and register here.