Sammendrag
Art scandals and revelations of financial frauds, of money laundering and sanctions evasion through art and antiquities, of the looting of antiquities to finance terrorism, of forgeries of artworks and of provenance, of tax evasion schemes using luxury freeports and offshore tax havens, or of NFT art fraudulent schemes and cybercrime, have over the past decade attracted far more public attention and scrutiny, and spurred (self-)regulatory action targeting art and antiquities market actors. AML, CFT, and the proliferating sanctions regimes have expanded the scope and purpose of due diligence and effectively enlisted art and antiquities market actors in intelligence gathering, crime-fighting and de facto policing, while stimulating new markets for compliance products and software (or RegTech, regulatory technologies). In this paper, I shall analyse the complex and relatively new dynamics of the fight against crime through art, antiquities, and luxury markets, and by/with private market actors, which is becoming prevalent across western jurisdictions, but also emerging in Brazil and other locations. This case, it will be argued, is uniquely revealing of the recent developments across the fields of transnational regulation and global crime governance, which are increasingly reliant on different forms of surveillance, intelligence manufacturing, (pre-emptive) risk and suspicion management, and “algorithmic governance” (Kalpokas 2019). To understand this dynamics we will need to think "regulatory capitalism" (Levi-Faur 2017) in tandem with "surveillance capitalism" (Zuboff 2019) and "capitalism with a human face" (Žižek 2009). First when integrating insights from across these different perspectives and beyond, will we be able to analytically approach the "compliance-industrial complex" (Kuldova 2022), or else the actors increasingly in business of privatizing and pluralizing global crime governance, and remark on the reasons for failure of these strategies in crime-fighting, while locating their success elsewhere. Using the case of the art market, we will be able to see how this form of regulation not only primarily generates markets for new (pseudo)policing technologies, but also becomes indispensable to assetization and financialization of art, antiquities, and other collectibles and hence to wealth creation. This case will thus force us to push beyond hegemonic understandings and conventional narratives of regulation, policing, as well as speculative wealth creation.
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