The AGNSW van Mieris theft: what a daylight heist still teaches

Seventeen years on, a small 17th-century Dutch painting is still missing from a Sydney gallery wall, and nobody has ever been charged. That’s the plain, uncomfortable fact sitting behind the 2007 theft of Frans van Mieris’s A Cavalier from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It happened during opening hours, in a room full […]

Why wireless sensors fail in old stone or brick gallery walls

I was out at a converted bank building on Mostyn Street in Castlemaine a few months back, bluestone walls close to 600mm thick in places, and the gallery owner was showing me a battery report from her existing wireless system. Three sensors had dropped comms in the previous fortnight, all in the same back room. […]

Security considerations when consignment stock piles up

A Flinders Lane dealer rang me in March with what she thought was a good problem. Three estates had come to her at once, all wanting to consign through her gallery before a spring auction cycle, and suddenly she had 40 more works on her walls and in her back room than she’d budgeted floor […]

How to tell if a vibration sensor is actually calibrated for your frame weight

I was at a private collection off Wattletree Road in Malvern a few months back, walking a client through why her Sidney Nolan kept setting off the alarm every time a delivery truck idled outside. The sensor wasn’t faulty. It was calibrated for a frame roughly four times heavier than the one it was actually […]