Introduction

It seems that the phenomenon of crime plays a defining role in our contemporary and fully connected society. In some places across the globe, crime has grown to such an alarming proportion that it has managed to destabilize entire States and regions.1 Add to this reality the fact that political crises, energy crises and social crises also take place on a growing scale. This is the new normal, according to Jeremy Rifkin [Rifkin, 2013, p. 75]. Zygmunt Bauman has a similar understanding: the “fluid” reality of any globalized society now presents a permanent “state of crisis” [Bauman, 2016, p. 10].

Art criminality is no recent phenomenon, but it has also been catapulted by the aforementioned context. It is (or should be) a cause of great concern, but due to its very specific nature, it is heavily underestimated by state's actors, by the academic environment and by the society in general, regardless of its great potential and ubiquitous damages. Compared to other forms of crime that are more focused by academic discussions, art crime has a more limited area of knowledge.

The following research hypotheses were defined (in order to validate possible conclusions): the possibility to assess knowledge on art fraud and forgery cases and the lessons that can be learned from them. A simple methodology was used to verify the sources of information regarding this topic: dialectic (approaching a truth through examining and interrogating ideas, perspectives or arguments), monographic (an article written on a single/ specialized topic aiming to provide suitable answers to an inquiry) and bibliographic (collecting sources of information from scholars and scientists).

The justification to this work is based on the importance of researching and deepening the discussion of an underestimated3 area of expertise: art criminality must gather more attention from the society and public authorities, for it has potential to generate great damages, as it will be shown throughout this article. Two main research questions were defined: how does art criminality manifests itself? What lessons can be learned from known art forgery and art fraud cases in order to better prevent and enforce this type of criminal endeavor?