Anyone who deliberately damages art in a museum is regarded as under a delusion, either due to mental illness or a failure to perceive the nature of what they’re doing. But in reality, people touch art all of the time.
Author Archives: Erin L. Thompson
Erin L. Thompson is a professor of art crime at John Jay College. Her first book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, was an NPR Best Book of 2016. Follow her on Twitter at @artcrimeprof.
A Benin Bronze With Fishy Provenance Goes to Auction
While conversations about historic monuments ignite public debate, a small sculpture which was likely looted heads to auction at Christie’s Paris.
The True Cost of Museum Fakes
The Museum of the Bible recently admitted all of its Dead Sea Scroll fragments are forgeries. But when fake antiquities are donated to museums, taxpayers lose.
Stolen Deities Resurface in a Dallas Museum
A blogger’s shaky snapshots from an exhibition opening reveal where a Lakshmi-Narayana statue stolen from a temple in Kathmandu in 1984 had ended up: the Dallas Museum of Art.
Museums Should Consider Why They’ve Become Targets of Attack and Protest
A terror plot targeting the British Museum was recently thwarted, but the reasons why it became a target in the first place go far beyond the current political climate.