HE EVENTS of Sept. 11 crystallized for the international arts community the importance of issues relating to risk and security in an age of global terrorism. It is safe to say that risk management was not the top priority for most art world insiders prior to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Typically, collectors, dealers, and museum directors and their advisers concern themselves with protecting collections against routine hazards, such as fire, theft and damage. During the 1990s the big new threat to valuation in the art market was the danger of inadvertently acquiring a looted or stolen work; worse was the discovery that a tainted work with defective title could already be in the collection.
World War II restitution issues, combined with beefed-up foreign or national cultural patrimony regulations, generated stricter standards for good faith purchasers to demonstrate their due diligence by researching and verifying gaps in provenance [history of ownership]. Before Sept. 11, faulty provenance would have probably ranked higher on the art world’s scale of “clear and present dangers” than the threat of terrorism.
