Hot Art Read Online Free PDF

understood that very well.”
    The Czegledis moved to Canada before the genocide, and Bonnie was born in Toronto, where she began painting when she was ten. Her mother, though, wanted her to pursue a more practical profession. Czegledi hid her drawings under her bed but continued to paint even while she studied law at Toronto’s prestigious Osgoode Hall. In 1987 she graduated and joined a corporate firm. When a fellow artist needed a contract examined or paperwork for an exhibition looked over, she did so—often for free. Word of her interest in the area of art and law spread quickly through the community, and soon she began to receive phone calls about cultural heritage law.
    One afternoon Czegledi answered a call from a lawyer representing a client selling a valuable antique tapestry, worth in the neighbourhood of $20,000. The lawyer wanted Czegledi’s opinion: the tapestry had been stolen during World War II and was on a war-loot list. He wanted her to tell him how to sell it on the legitimate market without being caught. Czegledi was shocked, and laughed into the phone. She told him that it was a criminal act to sell the tapestry and that his client should restitute it to the rightful owners or country of origin. The lawyer berated Czegledi for being self-righteous and hung up on her.
    â€œYou shouldn’t be selling a piece of art if it’s been stolen!” she told me. “And you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that.” But soon she figured out that his attitude was the norm— it was her own that was deviant. The phone call came near the beginning of Czegledi’s steep learning curve. “Over a period of a few years, I discovered that the business of art is one of the most corrupt, dirtiest industries on the planet. There are no regulations and theft is rampant. It’s not pretty. The patina of loveliness that most people associate with art didn’t exist in the reality that I found. It was filled with criminals—and a lot of different kinds.”
    Instead of being scared off, though, Czegledi became intrigued. She decided she wanted to know everything about stolen art and the law around it. There were no courses she could take, so she would have to educate herself. She soon learned there was at least a fuzzy regulatory framework in place.
    In Lyon, France, there was Interpol, the international police organization established in 1923, which issued posters and CDS listing stolen artwork from across the globe. It had a database of stolen art. She flew to Lyon and met with Interpol staff.
    In Paris, there was the International Council of Museums ( ICOM ), founded in 1946, which provided guidelines for the buying practices of museums in most countries, but it was loosely organized. She met them too.
    In New York, there was the International Foundation for Art Research ( IFAR ), a private foundation established in 1969 that mainly represented the interests of archaeologists in studying the impact of the massive looting of cultural heritage across the earth. IFAR lobbied governments, hosted conferences, and had started to make its own list of missing pieces of art. Czegledi attended its conferences.
    In London, there was the Art Loss Register, a private company started in the 1990s that had created the world’s largest international database of stolen artworks; collectors, auction houses, museums, and galleries paid a fee to search it. So far, the database contained over 100,000 stolen pieces of art, including hundreds of Picassos. Czegledi met the owner, Julian Radcliffe, and brought one of alr’s staff to Toronto to speak to the art crowd.
    The most important international treaty was the unesco 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (Czegledi can say that really fast). Canada accepted the convention in 1978, the United States in 1983. “Basically, it says,