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Securing Pricelessness
DeliBoy writes "In light of public discussions over security after The Scream was stolen, CSO Online offers an interesting look at museum security. The article details a system designed without budget restrictions intended to secure a painting in a public gallery. Interesting how the consultant balances public access with the need for security, comprised of redundant vibration sensors, overlapping microwave and infrared motion sensors, and an old-fashioned guard. "
Create a super strong plastic box filled with a toxic substance (radioactive/chemical) that's not damaging to the art and have a guard stand outside while another looks on in a camera room somewhere else?
Security - $699
Museum Ticket - $17
Pricelessness - Priceless!
i wonder how they will be calibrating all these many things to fire the right alarm. a mischievious person might get some kicks by raising false alarms every now and then, as all he has to do is to point a finger near the painting. i also wonder how they will test it, and keep it maintained without a large time overhead.
Comment from the article, kinda interesting.
My experience with Museum Directors and Curators is they like to show painting without intrusiveness, such as a low rail or rope. One thing that is less intrusive than placing a low rail/rope across the painting, is putting pressure sensors undernest the flooring that are wired in an alarm point system. This can be addressable to the painting name, gallery and location. Which is capable of notifying the control room security staff as well as the guard in the gallery. Example: if the alarm should be activated the camera would automatic override the monitor that the security staff may be looking at to and give immidate location of the painting as well as the orgin of the alarm right on the monitor. It is also possible to have your CCTV system program to follow movement such as room to room. The options are unlimited with today technology.
P.S. Because of todays technology, the trend is now away from breaking after hours into museum-its now armed robbery during public hours.
Alton Malcolm
Chief of Security
A beowulf cluster of sec....no
Securing my preciiouusss...no
1. Steal Priceless Object 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
...do they mean one that always opens doors and pulls our chairs for the ladies, or one that shakes his fist at teen-aged whippersnappers?
Put a fake on display, and hide the real one somewhere else.
Keller likes to alarm windows and fasten them closed whenever possible.
Didn't anyone tell him that proprietary closed windows models are inherently insecure and that an open-window solution is the better route?
Moo.
Before anyone comes up with theories about manic collectors being behind of it all - there isn't a single case in history where a stolen painting was found in the basement of an art aficionado. It's mostly about blackmailing the insurance company in charge - it makes sense for them to pay 2 millions to the thief instead of paying 10 millions for the loss.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Snipers nest with a view of the door...or at least someone outside the place to see the getaway.
Most art objects are stolen to order, they are not crimes of opportunity. When a 'collector' is prepared to chough up enough cash professional thieves will invest the time and effort to defeat the security.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Sensors at the exits, guards in the parking lot, etc.
I was hoping this was going to be an article about people getting caught in comprising positions.
Not to mention that when you get guns pulled on you you generally try not to get shot. Even if it ends up costing you something priceless (which still ends up as being less precious than human life, no matter how fine the art).
and then catch those theives. Of course, some basic "preventive" security is must. some RFID also will help.
for anybody who doesn't know, or wasn't sure, which painting The Scream is, here...
My other sig is an import.
Just secure a thick sheet of glass/lexan/plexiglass between the pictures and the people!
DUH!!!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Send out the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you?
I'm not out of order! You're out of order! The whole freaking system's out of order!
It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original. Rather than being funny, it sounds like one of the better ideas.
Deleted
"I mean, it's not like we haven't already seen these paintings before.."
I never really appreciated Van Gogh until I was in the same room with one of his paintings. There is an important dimension which is lost in any reproduction.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Sure, if budget is no object...but it is.
I build an alarm system for a major campus art museum back in the day. This was no small affair - we were replacing an old system that never worked well. The old system had vibration sensors on all the panes in the skylights. Unfortunately these sensors were not only unreliable but also worked in groups of a couple dozen sensors for a skylight area and all sensors had to be calibrated together - a very time-consuming process as it involved after-hours work up on a 30-40 foot airlift (with all tools on teathers to protect the art, of course) and also involved removing the diffuser panel under each of the glass panes. Needless to say the skylights were soon unprotected. We replaced these with redundant infrared motion detectors covering all skylight entry points.
Also, the old system had sensors in groups so when an alarm went off (or went bad) you only got a general area of the problem. We replaced this with about 150-200 individual zones. Every door and every motion detector was on a separate zone. In addition, we had a custom made map of the museum with lights for each alarmed door or zone so the central guard could immediately see where the alarm was coming from. Problems were easy to fix - no hunting down a bad switch from among 20 or 30.
We had several pan/zoom cameras with motion-detection capability. A time-lapse recorder ran constantly and sped up to full-speed when motion was detected.
The security room was upgraded with steel walls and bulletproof glass. In addition, being a campus-run museum, a duplicate alarm receiver was installed at police dispatch (no maps, just a printer showing alarms).
The central guard could control all the lighting in the museum and speak to or listen to anywhere in the museum through the intercom/speaker system.
There's more but all-in-all it was a heck of a system and fun to build.
The end result: management cut back all but one of the off-hours guards (the one in the control room) and eventually cut that person as well since, after all, the alarms went to the police station anyway...
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Any work of art (or any physical object) will be lost at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not this century, but for any artwork, at some point, the circumstances will will collude to lose it it some manner. Increasing the efforts to counteract that may delay the inevitable, but will not prevent it.
So, what do you do? Encase the piece in extreme layers of security to stave off its inevitable dissolution - but then also greatly hinder any real appreciation of the work by spectators? It's not easy to enter a contemplative frame of mind facing a painting at four or five meters, through ten cm of safety glass and surrounded by armed guards.
Or, we accept its eventual destruction or loss as inevitable, relax the measures a bit, and let people appreciate it - _really_ appreciate it, up close and undisturbed - while it lasts.
If I'd been a sappy touchy-feely type, I'd made a comment about how that is a lesson for life as well, but I'm not, so I won't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Being Norwegian I was quite interested in this, as were the Norwegian media. The largest Norwegian television-channel, NRK, interviewed a biographer of Munch's. When asked what he supposed Munch would have thought of this theft he replied something like (and I'm translating off the top of my head here):
If it were on one of Munch's better day's he'd probably say something like: "The Geniality of the artwork lies in the Thought and the Act, not in the Result. The Thought caused the Act, and I did it. The work itself is of little importance." But, Munch was a temperemental man so he might have been livid.
And it wasn't exactly the only example of The Scream ("Skrik"), as there are several other versions made by Munch around the world. Still, I wish the thieves all possible good luck in selling the best-known image in the western world without being found out :)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
It's getting to you can't even speak without infringing someone's bs copyrights : "drivers wanted" (VW), "do the right thing" (Quaker Oats), "just do it" (Nike), "hello, world" (SCO).
Yeah, but thieves often cut paintings free of their frames to make them easier to move, hide, etc. It's kind of a lost cause to bug a painting, unless you put the locator in an indispensable part of the canvas itself, and I don't think many curators would do that to a pricless masterpiece.
Plus, to bring it back to someone else's point, most major art thefts are going to involve ginormous insurance liabilities. Those insurance companies don't want to encourage wary thieves to go poking through the Mona Lisa with a pair of tweezers.
John Hancock wuz here.
I believe he means indestinguishable (sp?) by someone standing a few feet away looking it it (EG: a collector), not someone with a lot of time and money pouring random chemicals on parts of the painting to determine the age.
ND
This statement is forty-five characters long.
Well, since you asked ...
Seriously, I don't see a problem with GP's idea. Last time I was at Le Louvre, admittedly in the late 80's, the Mona Lisa was behind plexiglass, reflected on two mirrors, and physically located at least a storey away (to me, a grade 9 student at the time, it seemed pretty cool). If it's that important, that's what the museum will do. For whatever reason, The Scream was not priceless enough to warrant this.
this seems like an obvious solution that I just thought of, but I'll post it anyways. For the really nice artworks that need protecting, the room has 2 doors to get into it (separated with a small hallway). Both doors cannot be opened at the same time. Have a sensor on the artwork that locks both doors when lifted.
Smithers! Release the robotic Richard Simmons.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
During the meeting I suddenly realized that the nice little painting hanging on the wall wasn't just a print... it was a real, live, authentic Monet.
I asked about it and the security guy shrugged. He said that like most museums they had far more art in storage than on display, and so they often used it in office decoration.
I mean, the thing didn't have so much as a plastic covering to protect against coffee spills. I remember thinking that there'd be no way I'd want such a thing in my office.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
This is the part that impressed me: 9 Closed-circuit TV cameras . . . Anti-integration makes things difficult for the bad guys; it means they will have to break two systems instead of one.
Redundancy is a Good Thing. Heterogeneous redundancy is a Better Thing. Here endeth the lesson.
www.wavefront-av.com
I'm a little concerned about the loss of large collections of priceless art due a bombing of a museum. This might be the destruction of the building with a bomb, missle, or aircraft. Or even the loss of the museum when the city around is destroyed by an atomic weapon. It seems that there should be plans to get, say, a hundred paintings maybe several hundred feet underground within ten minutes should authorities determine that a nuclear event is imminent. Especially for the collections like the National Gallery in Washington DC, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence.
Interestingly, I work at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg VA, and just got back ten minutes ago from a tour of the Maier Museum with a student discussion group I lead.
The Maier is the 1950's version of exactly what you describe. It was built in 1951 as a bomb shelter for the National Gallery in case of nuclear attack on Washington. There was a fleet of trucks always at the ready outside the gallery to grab the most "valuable" artworks and run them down to the Maier. The building is basically a blockhouse, although it has been spiffed up a lot since.
With advances in technology, it became clear in the 1970s that this just wasn't going to work. (Not to mention Lynchburg has a large number of nuclear industries here like Framatone, so we're a huge target anyway.) They quietly abandoned the whole thing about then and formally gave it up in 2001, but there's still a clause in the contract that we'll take art from the Gallery if there's a major concern. Given the inherent problems of moving very fragile art quickly, I suspect that nobody is really interested in doing something like this.
BTW: The Maier now focuses on American art from RMWC's collection. It's a damn good museum, especially given the size of the college.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"