NEW TSA REGULATIONS FOR SHIPPING ART EFFECTIVE IN AUGUST
Randy Kennedy reports in the New York Times that workers responsible for safeguarding art will soon have a new category of anxiety: 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 August 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 an airline security screening. Since last February, airlines have been required to screen half of their passenger-air cargo (and, since late 2008, all cargo on narrow-bodied jets). But shippers say that several categories of cargo, including art, pharmaceuticals, high-tech equipment, and perishable food, are almost always passed over when airlines have discretion because of the difficulty of searching such crates should an explosives-residue test or bomb-sniffing dog give reason to do so.
Since news of the requirement began to spread last year, many large museums, like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery in Washington have enrolled in a federal program that allows them to create secure screening facilities within their own buildings. In these rooms, the institutions can inspect art, crate it, and mark it with special seals, locks, and tape that will mean that its chances of being rescreened by airline personnel are minuscule. Many large art-shipping companies have also become certified to screen and securely pack art themselves.
Art-shipping experts say that the burden of the new regulations will fall more heavily on galleries and private dealers than on museums, which typically plan exhibitions years in advance and can arrange for shipping that avoids passenger planes. Galleries, on the other hand, often put together shows much more quickly and strike last-minute deals for buying and selling art that can mean that a piece in New York needs to be in Zurich or Beijing the next day.
Jan Endlich, the chief registrar for Cheim & Read, the Chelsea gallery, which sends about half of its art shipments as commercial passenger-plane cargo, said in an e-mail message that “the beauty and horror of a gallery situation is just how quickly and last-minute it can react, and change course.” But he and others in the gallery world said that even large galleries were unlikely to set up their own secure facilities under the federal screening program because of the requirements of space and resources, and so will rely on art-shipping companies that have become certified screeners. This will add time and cost to shipping art, some of which is now crated in-house, and sometimes in collectors’ own houses.
Douglas Brittin, the air-cargo manager for the Transportation Security Administration, said the likelihood of airline personnel needing to open art crates or other complex cargo would probably remain low even after August. (In all, thirteen thousand tons of cargo a day is transported by passenger airlines, according to the agency.)
