Daniel Grant has a nice piece in Gallerist about art storage facilities and their responsibility toward their clients. But his premise is that lots of stolen art might be contained in these types storage because there was a van Gogh painting found in a Madrid bank vault. Unfortunately, that van Gogh has not been authenticated and the whole story may be a bit of a red herring.
Nonetheless, these are some good and straightforward statements of the privacy expectations governing the art storage community:
“I don’t check on what people are storing, that’s not my business,” said Robert Crozier, president of Crozier Fine Art, a storage company with locations in Manhattan, Long Island, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia. Although he said that his company does not consult lists maintained by the FBI, Interpol or Art Loss Register of missing and stolen objects, Crozier mentioned a few instances over the years when a court order required him to “turn over our records.” However, he added that “we do extensive due diligence on our clients. Somebody can’t walk off the street and open an account to store their property in our warehouses. We have rules and regulations as to what can and cannot be stored, which we rigorously police.”
Crozier’s approach is standard for the industry. “I sort of know, but not really,” said Chris Wise, director of UOVO Fine Art Storage, a storage facility in Queens, when asked about his knowledge of work he safeguards. “A lot of people don’t share with us what they are storing. They send over a box from Europe and tell us to put it with their other boxes. They don’t want us to open their boxes to see what’s there, and I’m not in the provenance-checking business. If we had to check if pieces were stolen or if they were taxed at the right rate, storage would be a lot more expensive for our clients. So, I don’t really know what we have, and I don’t really want to have that knowledge.”
See No Evil: Is Missing Artwork Sitting Inside Secure Storage Facilities? (Gallerist)
