WYWH: The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art’s 15th annual Amelia Conference on Art Crime

September 11, 2025

By Tess A. Toland

The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) hosted its 15th annual Amelia Conference on Art Crime on June 21–22, 2025, in Amelia, Italy. The weekend event brought together scholars, practitioners, and professionals dedicated to the global protection of art and cultural heritage for a series of lectures, collaborative dialogues, and community-building events centered on the ostensibly complicated and seemingly limitless endeavor of preventing, combating, and redressing art crime.

Sun showers, rolling hills, and cobblestone streets greeted ARCA conference attendees in Amelia’s historic center on the evening before the conference. Dating back to the 2nd millennium BC^{, the hilltop city in Umbria overlooks sunlit fields, and twittering swallows soar alongside the massive pre- and early-Roman polygonal walls that encircle the city. The architecture inside the walls revealed a coexistence of Roman foundations and layers of Renaissance, Medieval, and Baroque designs. With breathtaking views, inimitable architectural layering, and a permeable sensation of something ancient hanging in the air, it became immediately clear that the conference’s location in Amelia, which is where ARCA maintains its headquarters, would foster truly meaningful conversations and collaborations aimed at protecting art and heritage worldwide.}

Day 1: June 21, 2025 (Saturday)

Day One of the conference began on Saturday morning in the 16th century double loggia cloister of what was originally a Franciscan convent from the 13th-14th century, and which now serves as ARCA’s headquarters and the location of its conference hall. ^{Attendees and lecturers milled about the cloister and conversed over morning coffees before the room quieted, and the lectures began.}

In between panels, conference attendees were invited to ask questions, some of which led to pointed debate. For example, one attendee sparked debate when he expressed concern regarding the pace at which a heritage commission was establishing museums within its state, arguing that rapidity could negate meticulousness and encourage oversight during collection building. In another lecture, an attendee prompted discourse over whether a ruler’s minor age should factor into assessing whether the transfer of ownership of an object of cultural heritage to another state was made under duress.

ARCA’s conference brought together a global network of people dedicated to preventing and mitigating art crime. Naturally, the meeting of distinct perspectives at the conference resulted in a range of differing views and opinions on how best to accomplish such an endeavor. The passionate discourses that surfaced during the Q&A sessions between panels evidenced our collective motivation, while highlighting the importance of honoring each other’s insights and fostering collaboration.

Panel 1 – Possession, Protection, and Progress: National Realities of the 1970 UNESCO Convention

Panel 1 examined the varying interpretations and implementations of the 1970 UNESCO Convention and highlighted the need to strike a balance between promoting cultural growth and protecting cultural heritage as nations continue to develop their arts sectors.

Ala’a Otain, 1970 Convention Team Lead for the Heritage Commission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Sofia Cecci, Advisor to the Heritage Commission, addressed Saudi Arabia’s efforts to balance cultural property protection while prioritizing arts as central to its national development. Saudi Arabia is currently prioritizing the arts as a key part of its national transformation plan, called Vision 2030. ^{The Kingdom is building a number of museums, which, as both lecturers emphasized, requires simultaneous prioritization of respect for and protection of cultural heritage.}

Tania Esposito, attorney at law and Deputy Head of the Specialized Body for the International Transfer of Cultural Property, Federal Office of Culture of the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs, spoke about Switzerland’s application of the 1970 UNESCO Convention in its fight against illicit trafficking. Ms. Esposito emphasized the importance of other legal measures, such as bilateral agreements, to strengthen communication and foster collaboration between nations.

Lectures were punctuated with breaks for espresso and pastries that offered quiet space for dialogue and reflection about the recent presentations as we understood them from our varying backgrounds.

Panel 2 – Gods on the Market: The Theft and Trafficking of Nepal’s Sacred Art

Sanjay Adhikari, Nepali lawyer and cultural advocacy expert, educated us on the intersection between Nepali art and religious practice. Mr. Adhikari’s lecture, entitled, Dear Art Curators: That’s Not ‘Art’, That’s Our Aji’s Beloved God, was a crash course in new and necessary perspectives on the disrespect that comes with misuse of Nepali cultural heritage. We learned from Mr. Adhikari that Nepali sculptures of deities are often used in religious rituals and meditation as conduits of worship. ^{These sculptures are meant to be touched, carried in procession, draped in cloth and jewelry, and presented with offerings. This physical interaction with Nepali religious sculptures is essential to their meaning because, in Nepali culture, these figures are not symbols of gods; they are gods. Nepali art is not just part of the country’s history; it is living, breathing tradition—living culture—and placing that culture behind glass in a museum severs it from its purpose.}

Following the morning’s lectures, conversation flowed during lunch at an osteria, where we unpacked presentations over pasta and wine.

Panel 3 – Reckoning with the Past: Rethinking Art, Antiquities, and the Role of Experts

Panel 3 analyzed present day approaches by museums, institutions, and market professionals to historically problematic acquisitions in the global art market. Pressures within and against the art sector are increasing the prevalence of ethical leadership, though there remains much room for improvement.

Yagmur Koyuncu, Analyst for the Circulating Artefacts Project at The British Museum, spoke about museum responses to demands for increased transparency and accountability in acquiring cultural heritage objects. Ms. Koyuncu denoted a shift in institutional responsibility as art market actors receive increasing pressure from governments, collaborators, and the public to acquire art ethically. This shift, a complex and multifaceted development driven in large part by the various stakeholders of arts institutions, is causing an increase in responsible practices. Institutions are pouring more funds into provenance research and due diligence to ensure artworks and artefacts are acquired legally, and to reject items whose legitimacy or origin is in question.

Aubrey Catrone, Director of Proper Provenance LLC and accredited member of the Appraisers Association of America, presented on art crime literacy in the fine art market and emphasized the importance of awareness and understanding of the types of illicit activities that plague the art world. Ms. Catrone pointed to gaps in due diligence within the art market, such as lack of provenance verification, incomplete or falsified ownership histories, and anonymity in art purchases and sales. This lecture highlighted that it is critical for art world professionals to continue prioritizing and underscoring their ethical obligations. In a market vulnerable to trafficking, forgery, and laundering, ethical diligence is essential to safeguard against irreparable harm to cultural heritage, and to maintain trust in and among art market actors.

Panel 4 – Due Diligence or Denial? Transparency in Museums and the Art Trade

Panel 4 addressed remiss provenance practices, lack of accountability, and complicity by academics, all of which enable cultural property trafficking.

Morgan Belzic, Ph.D., of the Mission archéologie française de Libye, the Laboratoire Herma at Université de Poitiers, and the Collections Support Directorate of the Louvre Museum, and Mélanie Theillet, student at École du Louvre, emphasized the value of comprehensive provenance in identifying and returning trafficked antiquities. They presented an example—a statue stolen from Cambodia during Cambodia’s civil war that appeared at an online auction in New York in 2024. The statue, a Sandstone Torso from the 11th century CE (the Baphuon Period), was excavated from an ancient temple in northwestern Cambodia, called Prasat Bavel, and displayed at the Wat Po Veal Museum in 1965. ^{The statue was stolen from the Wat Po Veal Museum during Cambodia’s civil war and eventually made its way to Spink & Son, Ltd., a London auction house with prior links to looted antiquities, in 1981. A private art collector in Chicago acquired the statue in 1982, after which the statue remained privately owned until it was put up for auction by Freeman’s | Hindman in September 2024. Diligent provenance research by Ms. Theillet during her internship with Mr. Belzic and the Herma Université de Poitiers Celtrac Team supported the investigation led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, and ultimately led to the restitution of the Sandstone Torso to Cambodia.}

Eleni Vassilika, Ph.D., expert in Egyptian and Greek Art & Archaeology, illustrated how the actions of one trafficker can cause widespread corruption by injecting falsified provenances and fabricated records into the market. Traffickers often take advantage of networks of dealers, restorers, and shippers, who, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, become complicitly entangled in these art crimes. Ms. Vassilika further addressed the collusion hidden amidst academic and institutional network dealings with arts institutions, which allows looted objects to slip into museum collections.

Day One closed with an evening at La Gabelletta, one of Umbria’s oldest hospitality structures (where, in the 1700s, travelers paid transit taxes to pass through the then-contested borderland^{), for a Gala Dinner. The night offered thought-provoking conversation, picturesque views, and delicious food.}

 

Day 2: June 22, 2025 (Sunday)

Panel 1 – From Courtrooms to Collections: Legal Challenges in Cultural Property Disputes

Day two began with a panel addressing the convergence of national interests, market players, and restitution claims on the legal battlegrounds of art and antiquities.

Mirta Aktaia Fava, internationally active lawyer and art advisor, examined two recent art restitution cases, Sotheby’s v. Greece and Safani Gallery, Inc. v. Italian Republic. In both cases, governments asserting ownership over antiquities put up for sale in New York were protected from litigation by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) ^{because they acted in sovereign, not commercial, capacities—setting precedent for foreign nations to be able to raise concerns about suspicious antiquities in sovereign capacities without fear of litigation.}

Yasmine Zanir, barrister-at-law at Liberty Chambers in Hong Kong, lectured about the Koh-I-Noor Diamond. ^{Ms. Zanir detailed the provenance of the Koh-I-Noor, from its mine of origin in India, through centuries of conquest, rebellion, and dynastic collapse, to its current place in the British Crown Jewels, to evidence the Koh-I-Noor’s complex chronology and demonstrate why, with four countries still claiming ownership of the diamond, it is one of the world’s most contested cultural treasures. (For further reading about the dispute: NBC, The Kohinoor diamond was obtained by the British Empire. Some argue it should be returned to India.)}

Panel 2 – Criminal Custodians? Legal and Ethical Fault Lines in Museum Work (Part I)

Dawn V. Rogala, Ph.D., Program Manager and Conservation Team Lead at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute in Washington, D.C., emphasized the importance of training federal government agencies in conservation knowledge, in order to better equip them to identify and combat illicit cultural property trafficking. Dr. Rogala is responsible for creating and overseeing a number of programs at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute relating to cultural heritage protection, provenance research, and anti-trafficking, including developing, in partnership with federal agencies, training workshops for federal law enforcement on these topics.

K.T. Newton, lawyer and Partner at ARGUS Cultural Property Consultants in Washington, D.C., spoke about the importance of bridging the gap between museum ethics and justice systems. When museums have contested or looted artefacts, ethical intentions sometimes clash with legal realities, creating a gap in how the museum can remedy the problem. Organizations like ARGUS, with experts in art crime investigations, art law, museum and estate security, cultural heritage, and foreign relations, assist clients in navigating these complexities.

Panel 3 – Criminal Custodians? Legal and Ethical Fault Lines in Museum Work (Part II)

Camilla Brunazzo Chiavegato, art historian and researcher at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, examined involvement of museum curators in art crime and argued that the lines between responsibility and complacence in institutional spaces are often blurred. This blurring, a result of the constant pull between ethical obligations to preserve the integrity of collections, and the ceaseless pressure to acquire rare works, functions as a sort of tug of war in which curators are at the center. This presentation shone light on the subjectivity of analyzing when an institutional actor has crossed an ethical fault line, and the reality that such a line often cannot be distinctively drawn.

Panel 4 – Criminal Custodians? Legal and Ethical Fault Lines in Museum Work (Part III)

Steven Gallagher, professor and faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, underscored the persistent illicit trade in cultural artifacts in Southeast Asia, which both damages cultural heritage and finances criminal activities. Persistence of looting in Southeast Asia is at a staggering scale. It involves a transnational crime network that is widespread, deeply embedded, and difficult to dismantle. Mr. Gallagher’s presentation made clear that regulation of Southeast Asia’s role in the global art trade is imperative to plugging a major source of illegal displacement of art.

Saskia Hufnagel, Ph.D., professor of law at University of Sydney Law School in Australia, examined the effects of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in the EU, US, and UK on the responsibilities of market actors, including art dealers, financial institutions, and other private entities. In recent years, regulations have been introduced in the EU ^{and US to expand AML regimes to specifically include the art market—a result of concerns that the art market is used by criminals to launder money and fund terrorist activities. Yet, while market actors work to comply with new AML regulations and reporting rules, they risk impacts to their business. Effective regulation thus requires a balance between stringent prevention of financial art crimes and adaptability for art market actors suffering from added burdens on business.}

Panel 5 – Truth in the Spotlight: Criminologists, Open-Source Evidence, and the Public Gaze

The final panel addressed how media and public discourse affect global perspectives on art crime, and how digital tools and investigations can be used to promote and achieve justice.

John Kerr, Ph.D., Head of Policing and Criminology at the University of Law, UK, argued that the media exploits art crime and distorts academic expertise, often brushing over the violence against innocents and involvement of crime groups that are prevalent in art crime, and replacing facts with inflated stories, such as that of a psychic leading a team of investigators to a missing artwork. Mr. Kerr concluded by pointing out the veritable fact that art crime is fascinating without exaggerative additions. Replete with shocking tales of greed, centuries-old secrets, family schemes, and considerable violence, art crime does not need to be fluffed for public enjoyment.

George Katz, a lawyer, investigator, and trainer at Bellingcat, UK offered a window into the value of high volumes of freely available data, and the challenges of verifying and authenticating such large influxes of information. Mr. Katz educated us on the utility of open-source research in investigations, which procures information in a uniquely sweeping manner, and the means by which open-source data can be made sufficiently sound to be introduced into evidence, including through extensive corroboration and data authentication.

Closing Remarks – Restitution in Amelia

Lynda Albertson, CEO of ARCA, and Stefano Alessandrini, Docent and Allied Researcher at ARCA, closed the conference with a touching story of restitution. Years ago, when ARCA was in search of a location for its headquarters, the city of Amelia offered them a space in the double loggia cloister that houses their archeological museum, the Edilberto Rosa Civic Archaeological Museum. ^{Amelia’s generosity in welcoming ARCA to its historical center came full circle when Dottore Alessandrini, working with the Italian Carabinieri and Ministry of Culture, facilitated a restitution to Amelia’s archaeological museum: four leaden figures of ancient warriors dating to the 1st century BC that were originally looted from the Amelia region. (For further reading: Journal of Cultural Heritage Crime, Amelia reunites with its warriors.)}

Following closing remarks, the museum opened its doors and welcomed lecturers and attendees inside to view the figures, a stirring close to a wonderful weekend.

Personal Reflection

There is something deeply symbolic about an international conference centered on preservation of art, history, and culture that is set in a place surrounded by all of those things. Amelia, Italy was an absolute joy to visit. Its scenery is utterly irreplicable in photographs, its people were breezily welcoming to us foreigners, and its unique fusion of architecture, spanning tens of centuries, left an inimitable impression on me.

Perhaps the setting of ARCA’s 15th annual Amelia Conference on Art Crime is what gave it such an open quality of dialogue. We conversed, listened, and shared meals together over two days spent in truly meaningful discourse. The diversity of voices forged real shifts in my perspective of the art world and market and taught me the importance of continuing to expand global definitions of cultural property to account for every type of cultural heritage.

A takeaway I gained from ARCA’s conference is that a network of trusted colleagues is essential to most thoroughly and effectively combating art crime. Distinct global perspectives are irreplicable resources when it comes to the protection of cultural heritage, and we must continue to foster environments in which we can learn from and educate each other. I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to attend ARCA’s 15th annual Amelia Conference on Art Crime, and I look forward to returning to Amelia’s beautiful historical center next summer.

About the Author

Tess A. Toland, Esq. is a New York-licensed associate attorney at Teahan & Constantino LLP, practicing in trusts and estates, tax, and art. Outside of her legal practice, Tess volunteers for the Center for Art Law’s Nazi-looted Art Restitution Database. Tess holds a J.D. from The George Washington University Law School (‘24) and a B.A. in Art History and Italian from the University of Virginia (‘21). Tess has been published in the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) Quarterly Journal, and in the Journal of Art History and Museum Studies (JAHMS), for academic papers written on topics in art law.

Photographs from the Conference by the Author.

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