We knew this was on the horizon didn’t we? As much as it causes consternation it will cause even more.
New Rule on Cargo Is Shaking Art World:
“Collectors and dealers of fragile, phenomenally expensive art have never wanted for reasons to stay awake at night. A piece could plunge from a wall. Somebody could stumble into it or step on it or add a new color to it with a splash of red wine. Contemporary art, sometimes made to resemble trash, has occasionally been mistaken for it and thrown away.
But those responsible for safeguarding art will soon have a new category of anxiety, the stuff of real nightmares: the possibility that airline employees could open carefully crated works of art to search them the way checked baggage is sometimes searched now, poking around Picassos instead of sweaters and socks.
The Transportation Security Administration has mandated that beginning on Aug. 1, all items shipped as cargo on commercial passenger airplanes — estimates are that as much as 20 percent of art shipped around the world travels this way — will have to go through airline security screening.”
(Via NYT > Art & Design.)