What is art crime?
Noah Charney: Art crime is any criminal act that involves objects of cultural heritage or national patrimony, as distinguished from mass-produced collectibles like baseball cards. The most common categories of art crime are theft and theft during war, looting, forgery and deception, vandalism, and iconoclasm, which is the intentional destruction of artwork. LE: In various interviews, you have said that you developed an interest in art crime while researching your first novel, The Art Thief, and realized that there was no field of study devoted to this subject. When you decided to pursue a PhD in the history of art theft at Cambridge University, did you have a difficult time finding support for your dissertation? NC: Absolutely. There was no field of study that dealt specifically with this phenomenon because it fell between criminology, art history, archaeology, sociology, and security studies. So I was essentially forging a new field of study. The advisor who finally took me on at Camb
