November 28, 2000

Art Sellers Look to Use Coupons in Settlement

By CAROL VOGEL
Embroiled in a scandal over price- fixing and collusion, Sotheby's and Christie's asked a federal judge yesterday to approve a plan to offer discount certificates to auction customers as part of a $512 million settlement of a class-action civil suit. The certificates, which could be used by people who wanted to sell at future auctions, are part of a settlement that the auction houses agreed to last month. The agreement received preliminary approval this month by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan. As part of Sotheby's and Christie's obligation to buyers and sellers, the companies said, they would pay $50 million each in certificates. But Judge Kaplan has questioned the suitability of substituting $100 million in coupons for cash. The auction houses made their cases yesterday for the coupon plan. Sellers, they said, could have up to five years to use their coupons and could transfer them through a jointly appointed certificate administrator, which they said would create a secondary market. The proposal for administering the certificates was filed yesterday in the Federal District Court. It specifies that the certificates would be redeemable by customers who were overcharged as far back as seven years for buyers and five years for sellers in either the United States or Britain, where 80 percent of Christie's and Sotheby's worldwide sales take place. Auction house customers who were entitled to certificates but who did not want to use them would be able to go to the certificate administrator, who would find a party who wanted to buy them. In their papers, the auction houses asserted that this arrangement would create premium sales prices for the certificates by establishing a concentrated marketplace for those most interested in buying them. Judge Kaplan has scheduled a hearing on the final settlement for Feb. 2. Shares of Sotheby's rose 50 cents yesterday, to $22.38. Christie's is privately held.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/28/business/28AUCT.html

Legal war over trashed artworks settled

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD ebolstad@herald.com
JURASSIC ART: Marc Leviton stands next to his Recyclosaurus, part of the Young at Art Museum's permanent collection, but not currently on display. Five years ago, 11 of sculptor Marc David Leviton's creations were dumped outside the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, left mangled behind the Harrison Street building in a pile of trash. ''I was so devastated by that action, that someone could be so callous,'' Leviton said. ''It's like watching yourself be murdered. It's just totally crippling.''
More: http://www.herald.com/content/sun/docs/102844.htm

Tracking an Elusive Map Thief

Author Documents Story of Theft, Intrigue

CHICAGO (AP) -- Miles Harvey was sipping coffee and reading a newspaper article as he relaxed in a coffeehouse fit to inspire anyone in search of adventure. At Kopi: A Traveler's Cafe, clocks give the time in Pago Pago, Paris and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Masks from Bali adorn the walls. Lonely Planet travel guides and maps line the shelves. But all it took to send Harvey, then a literary critic for Outside magazine, on an intellectual adventure that would consume the next four years of his life was a newspaper article about a convicted thief of antique maps named Gilbert Bland Jr. That was 1995. Now, in his new nonfiction book, The Island of Lost Maps, Harvey details his quest to understand how and why the mild-mannered antiques dealer allegedly stole scores of centuries- old maps from some of the top research libraries in the United States and Canada.

Elusive thief

Ultimately, Harvey's quest would turn into an unfulfilled obsession to get to know the slash-and-dash thief, a man so elusive the book's only picture of him shows Bland handcuffed outside a North Carolina courthouse with his hands hiding his face. "I can't tell you how many times people described Mr. Bland as bland," Harvey said during a recent interview inside Chicago's Newberry Library, which Bland visited but left without making off with any maps. Nineteen other libraries were less fortunate. In institutions from the University of Chicago to the British Columbia Archives in Victoria, the enigmatic Bland drew little, if any, attention as he allegedly made off with rare maps the FBI valued at about $500,000.
"Medium height, medium weight, middle-aged, middle everything -- he was a cipher, a blank slate. ... He was Bland," writes Harvey. Just a razor blade And that made it all too easy for the former petty crook to take a razor blade, slash the maps from the valuable books that had been protected for centuries, and quietly walk away unnoticed. "I describe him in the book as less of a con man and more of an un-man -- you know, just someone who didn't look for a lot of attention one way or the other," says Harvey, himself a lover of maps old and new. "The great mystery about him is his mixture of a meek exterior and this totally brazen act, not only going into libraries and literally slicing maps out of books as people must have been watching," but also openly selling the maps to dealers and collectors.

Plea bargain

Ultimately, Bland, who also went by the name James Perry, served less than 1 1/2 years in prison for convictions in three of the cases. In a federal plea bargain, Bland got limited immunity from further prosecution. He agreed to try to match the stolen maps with their rightful owners, and authorities have not pursued the other cases. Harvey describes Bland as intelligent, and he labels him the "Al Capone of cartography." "He certainly wasn't a violent man as Capone was," Harvey says. But, "like Capone, he figured out ways to make money by finding people's dark needs and servicing them. So that whereas Capone was running ... liquor and gambling and prostitution, Bland was running maps." Colorful figures Harvey's research for the book took him coast to coast and into Canada as he prowled the genteel and intriguing subculture of map collectors and experts. The Island of Lost Maps is home to such colorful and not-so-colorful figures as: * W. Graham Arader III, a charismatic but brash collector who boasts of selling $10 million in maps a year. Some collectors blame Arader for making maps so trendy among "nonexperts with cash to burn and corporations with offices to decorate" that he sent map prices skyrocketing, knocking middle-class collectors out of the market. * Mr. Atlas, the pseudonym Harvey gives a "giant collector" who greets Harvey at the door of his tightly secured home with a map for a shirt, a Cheshire-cat grin, big, square eyeglasses and, of course, a house full of valuable maps. Then there's Bland himself, albeit through the accounts of others. Bland rejected Harvey's requests for an interview, finally telling Harvey in a telephone conversation the author said both men recorded: "I do not wish for you to communicate with me in any way and in any manner. ... If you do, I will try to bring criminal charges against you, and I will certainly bring civil charges against you." So Harvey talked to people who might have known something about Bland's Army service in Vietnam to a rejected daughter to the judge who fined a skinny, redheaded 18-year-old Bland $100 in a stolen- vehicle case. Extensive research The Island of Lost Maps marks the major literary debut for Harvey, who turned 40 on Oct. 21. He has had children's books and short stories published, but this is his first book aimed at adult readers. Harvey read hundreds of books in his research, toured a modern map company and learned why it may have taken 17th-century mapmakers, working without modern technology, months or years to draft a map. His book reads like a good detective novel. It is packed with literary allusions, but without literary snobbery. A Hardy Boys mystery, The Clue in the Embers, is in there, along with references to William Shakespeare, the ancient scholar Claudius Ptolemy and even The Warren Commission Report. 'Lure of the unknown' The book is also metaphorical, comparing Harvey's effort to understand Bland to the labors of mapmakers and explorers of centuries past. "In some way, trying to map this other person's life, this unknown life, was like the same challenge in real fundamental ways that the cartographers of these old maps had in trying to map an unknown world," Harvey says. The book interweaves details of Bland's life with tales of other cartographical crimes and obsessions. And there are plenty, from purloined maps to a little cartographical dirt on brothers Christopher and Bartholomeo Columbus to stories about John Charles Fremont, aka the Pathfinder, a reckless explorer whose effort to cross the Rockies in the winter of 1848 left 10 men dead and forced others into cannibalism. Along the way, Harvey began to see himself as a cartographer "writing about the lure of the unknown."
http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/breakingnews/2000/11/22/maps1122_01.html

Roban en Tequisistlán 8 óleos del siglo XVII

René Ramón Alvarado, corresponsal, Tezoyuca, Méx., 26 de noviembre ¤
Ocho óleos del siglo XVII fueron robados de la antigua iglesia del pueblo de Tequisistlán, de donde fueron arrancados con todo y protección, informó Germán Venado Gutiérrez, asesor jurídico y de cultura de este ayuntamiento. Cada pintura medía unos dos metros de altura por uno de ancho. Se ubicaban sobre los muros del ex centro religioso, que en la actualidad funciona como biblioteca pública. El precio aproximado de cada obra es de unos 200 mil pesos, declaró el funcionario, y su contenido reflejaba la forma de vivir de los texcocanos durante la época de evangelización, así como la vida de frailes. El ayuntamiento presume premeditación, y espera el apoyo del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia para presentar la denuncia respectiva ante la Procuraduría General de la República.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/02an2cul.html

(Eight paintings from the 17th century were stolen from an old church in the town of Tequisistlán, State of Mexico. Each painting measures two meters high by one meter wide and were taken together. The old church is now used as a public library and the works of art were hanging on its walls. Each of the works is valued at $20,000 dollars and the works portray the way of life of the Texcoco people during the time they were evangelized, reported La Jornada. (English summary by http://www.artdaily.com/ )

Poor scratch a living from fossil trade

Brazilian palaeontologists protest that precious relics are being snapped up by tourists and foreigners

Alex Bellos in Santana do Cariri Tuesday November 28, 2000
Francisco Antonio keeps dozens of perfectly fossilised fish, insects and flowers in his front room. "You find these everywhere here. If someone wants to pay me for one, then maybe I can buy myself a kilo of rice." Mr Antonio supplements his meagre income from working on the land in the drought-afflicted north-east of Brazil by selling fossils to tourists and palaeontologists. He is known locally as a "fishmonger", because of the abundance of fish fossils in the Araripe mountains, which is the world's most important site of the early Cretaceous period. Mr Antonio, 56, will sell you items worth several hundred pounds in Europe or the US for the equivalent of some spare change. Researchers have found about 30 species of fish here, almost all the orders of insects, crustaceans, and 18 types of flying pterosaurs. The only three- dimensional fossil of a dinosaur's soft tissue was found here in the 1990s. But the remoteness of the Araripe mountains, 1,100 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, combined with the poverty of the local population and the absence of any policing, has allowed most of the fossils to end up in foreign museums or private collections. Brazilian scientists are enraged by the plunder of their national heritage. "We have all the deficiencies of a third world country in terms of infrastructure and supervision", Alexander Kellner of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro said. "It is just not fair that other countries with more money can come and take things away." "In Brazil there is an active palaeontological community. The primary material which is leaving the country is hindering our research." Artur Andrade, a geologist who works for the ministry of energy and mines, believes there is an organised system of fossil trafficking. "We are impotent because the statutes are so archaic", he said. Two years ago Santana do Cariri, a small town in the heart of the Araripe region, reopened its paleontology museum. Its coordinator, Maria Iva Peixoto, said it had helped to stop trafficking because local people brought fossils there instead of selling them. Sometimes the museum's director pays small amounts to the "fishmongers" for valuable items. But the illegal trade continues. European academics, who are often more interested in their own research than in the issue of Brazilian sovereignty, regard the fossil trade as beneficial. David Martill, a paleontologist at Portsmouth University, said: "I personally have no interest in seeing the trade stopped, provided that the material ends up in a scientific collection rather than on the top of someone's mantlepiece." He added: "Also, the trade provides work for some very, very poor people, honest people who are close to starvation when the crops fail - as they do frequently in the [Araripe]."
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,403717,00.html