What are the ways you can protect your art work from theft and forgery? What's used for detection?

Question

This is for research for a novel, when art theft detection is used for businesses, homes, art galleries, studios and museums? What special methods are used through high-tech to detect a theft or forgery?

Answer 1

To detect forgery or to ascertain a piece as an original there are many methods. Most of them are low tech like comparing brushstroke patterns. The hightech analysis is using different wavelengths of light to analyze the pigments. In different times, regions, and different artist had access and used different pigments. In the past they were all natural pigments today there are a lot of synthetic pigments. In rare cases they will also take a sample from the edge of a painting to analyze the canvas used or chemically analyse the paint.

I am not away of any modern artist who use any sort of hightech method to certify their painting as original. If you wanted to make something hightech up it might be best to reference methods used to prevent fake currency.

Answer 2

I guess you don't need any high-tech anything to determine that there has been a theft of a painting. But there are such things as motion detectors and silent alarms that go to the police dept for when the painting is stolen. Forgery on the other hand would depend on how famous the painting is and forgery can also mean that some unknown has duplicated a famous painting and calling it original. In that case they would use tests such as ultra-violet light to determine the age of the paint pigment. I suppose there are professional art authenticators too. But I am not so sure there is any one and only hi-tech method of determining forgery.

Answer 3

I am not certain how 'high-tech' the methods have become, but I do not think that they have significantly changed the way they verify the authenticity of art work
there is a way of x-raying it to see if the artist painted something underneath. the canvas and materials are tested for age, pigments are tested. and dated scientifically. there are several methods. forensics has grown by leaps and bounds but I do not know how high-tech it has become. And, no matter what the science proves, it won't be able to say for certain who painted a particular piece. that takes an expert.

hope this helps a little