Keeping Precious Artwork Safe
New York Times
May 13, 2007

Stealing a painting, according to the artist Scott Richter, is a lot easier than you'd imagine. Perhaps not from major museums, which have sophisticated alarms and guards in every room. But after 30 years working as a painter, sculptor and teacher, Mr. Richter has learned that lesser institutions can rarely afford such tight security.

''A lot of galleries still use marbles behind the paintings,'' said Mr. Richter, who lives in Weston, Conn., and teaches drawing at the Cooper Union in New York. ''If you lift the frame, the marbles drop to the floor.'' Ideally, that creates enough clatter for an employee to notice; needless to say, it's hardly foolproof.

Mr. Richter hopes that galleries and small museums will someday forgo the marbles in favor of the Art Guard, his affordable palm-size alarm. The Art Guard screws into the wall, and a painting's backing wire is then draped over its top. If the artwork is knocked askance, the device emits an ear-piercing screech; this siren can be deactivated only by a key resembling a headphone plug.

Mr. Richter, whose own artwork has been shown at the Boston Center for the Arts and the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, cobbled together the first Art Guard prototype in 2005. Its centerpiece was an off-the-shelf personal security alarm, which Mr. Richter described as ''one of those things they make for nervous people.''

He tweaked the device's wiring, so that it would sound when jostled, rather than when a user pulled a chain. And he started sketching out other modifications, like a hole for the wall screw, and the smoothing of sharp corners that might damage a fragile painting.

As it evolved, the Art Guard slowly came to resemble a certain unavoidable gadget. ''Being a design fan, I was very impressed with the iPod, how it was so simple,'' said Mr. Richter, who began his career as an industrial designer for I.B.M. The influence is obvious: the Art Guard's center has a dial-like protuberance that, from a distance, could be mistaken for an iPod's click wheel.

Unsure how to get his device manufactured, Mr. Richter visited a Web site, GlobalSources.com, that connects aspiring entrepreneurs with international factories. He located a Chinese factory that makes personal security alarms and could easily adapt its equipment to produce the Art Guard.

There were a few snags -- most attributable to the language barrier -- as prototypes bounced between China and Connecticut. Mr. Richter kept insisting on a higher load limit, a stipulation the factory eventually satisfied in humorous fashion. ''They sent me a picture of a prototype holding up a car battery,'' he said. ''That seemed good enough.''

In the final stages of development, Mr. Richter and the factory considered powering the Art Guard with two AAAA batteries, which last longer than AAAs. But doing so reduced the alarm's volume to a dull roar; they instead settled on inserting a magnetic device that causes the Art Guard to chirp periodically when its AAA batteries are running low.

The Art Guard went on sale about three months ago, at the Web site ArtGuard.net. A pack of 10 alarms costs $399, or $375 if a customer purchases 10 packs at a time. To spread the word, Mr. Richter advertises in magazines like Art in America and ArtForum. So far, he said, one of his biggest sales has been to the new Hyatt Regency hotel in Kiev, Ukraine.

Guests at that hotel should be careful, then, about bumping up against paintings in the lobby. The Art Guard's siren is, as this reporter found out the hard way, extremely unpleasant, bordering on excruciating (in fact, I'm still nursing badly pummeled eardrums). Even if a thief somehow makes off with an Art Guarded painting, he may forever lose his ability to enjoy music.

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