Art theft

Art theft is usually for the purpose of resale or for ransom (sometimes called artnapping). Stolen art is sometimes used by criminals as collateral to secure loans. Only a small percentage of stolen art is recovered—estimates range from 5 to 10%. This means that little is known about the scope and characteristics of art theft.

Individual theft

Many thieves are motivated by the fact that valuable art pieces are worth millions of dollars and weigh only a few kilograms at most. Transport for items such as paintings is also trivial, assuming the thief is willing to inflict some damage to the painting by cutting it off the frame and rolling it up into a tube carrier. Also, while most high-profile museums have extremely tight security, many places with multi-million art collections works have disproportionately poor security measures. That makes them susceptible to thefts that are slightly more complicated than a typical smash-and-grab, but offer a huge potential payoff. Thieves sometimes target works based on their own familiarity with the artist, rather than the artist's reputation in the art world or the theoretical value of the work.

Artò

Artò is a frazione (and parish) of the municipality of Madonna del Sasso, in Piedmont, northern Italy.

Overview

It is a village located some km west from the Lake Orta.

History

Since 1928 Artò was a separate comune (municipality).

References

External links

Media related to Artò at Wikimedia Commons

Artà

Coordinates: 39°42′N 3°21′E / 39.700°N 3.350°E / 39.700; 3.350

Artà is one of the 53 independent municipalities on the Spanish Balearic island of Majorca. The small town of the same name is the administrative seat of this municipality in the region (Comarca) of Llevant.

Population

In 2008 the municipality of Artà had a population of 7,113 recorded residents within an area of 139.63 square kilometres (53.91 sq mi). This equates to 50.9 inhabitants per km². In 2006 the percentage of foreigners was 13.2% (890), of which Germans made up 3.9% (262). In 1991 there were still 136 illiterates in the municipality. 1,292 inhabitants had no education, 1,675 only a primary school certificate and 1,210 had secondary school leaving certificates. The official languages are Catalan and Spanish (Castilian). The Catalan dialect spoken on the island is known as Mallorquí.

Geography

Location

Artà lies in the northeast of the island of Majorca, around 60 km from the island's capital of Palma. The Massís d’Artà, the highest and most compact massif in the eastern mountain chain of the Serres de Llevant, occupies more than half the area of the municipality. The municipality is located on the western part of peninsula of Artà and is bordered in the west by the Bay of Alcúdia (Badia d’Alcúdia), and in the north by the Mediterranean sea where its coast lies opposite the neighbouring island of Minorca. The coast of Artà stretches for 25 kilometres and, so far, has escaped being developed. Particularly noteworthy are the beach and sand dune formations of sa Canova d’Artà, the flat coastal strip near the settlement of Colònia de Sant Pere, the high rocky coves of the Cap de Ferrutx and a large number of smaller bays that extend from s’Arenalet des Verger to Cala Torta.

ART image file format

ART is a proprietary image file format used mostly by the America Online (AOL) service and client software.

Technical details

The ART format (file extension ".art") holds a single still image that has been highly compressed. The format was designed to facilitate the quick downloading of images, among other things. Originally, the compression was developed by the Johnson-Grace Company, which was then acquired by AOL. When an image is converted to the ART format, the image is analyzed and the software decides what compression technique would be best. The ART format has similarities to the progressive JPEG format, and certain attributes of the ART format can lead to image quality being sacrificed for the sake of image compression (for instance, the image's color palette can be limited.)

Usage by AOL

The AOL service used the ART image format for most of the image presentation of the online service. In addition, the AOL client's web browser also automatically served such images in the ART format to achieve faster downloads on the slower dialup connections that were prevalent in those days. This conversion was done in the AOL proxy servers and could be optionally disabled by the user. This image conversion process effectively reduced the download time for image files. This technology was once branded as Turboweb and is now known as AOL TopSpeed.