Part II: Tracking the Munich connections, ideas from ChatGPT

In "The Munich Connection" we listed artworks that American museums published on the Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal whose provenance contained the word "Munich".

How to go from there to a map of the WWII and postwar art dealing networks? There is a lot of data and it is held in different places for different purposes. How not to get lost in it all? 

In this day of LLMs, it seemed reasonable to see if ChatGPT had any advice.

Prompt:

You are an art detective. You know the names of ten dealers based in Munich who were guilty of trading in Nazi looted art. What you’d like to find out is the names of the intermediaries they used postwar to launder looted artworks and sell them to American museums. You can obtain provenance from museums, from looted art databases and from restitution cases. You have access to a knowledge graph that can tell you who people are. Please suggest a plan. 

Experiments in Automated Entity Extraction with Pinpoint: Toledo Museum of Art Provenance PDF

Pinpoint is a tool for investigative journalists. It performs automatic entity extraction from PDF files. Can it be useful for processing provenance texts?

In this post, we examine the results for the Provenance Research PDF file published by the Toledo Museum of Art and archived at: 

https://web.archive.org/web/20121224083005if_/http://www.toledomuseum.org:80/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Provenance-Research-lowres.pdf

Since the Toledo Museum of Art doesn't appear to publish provenance on its Website in 2024,  this older PDF file offers insights to the ownership history of artworks.

Detecting looted art and forgery with help from ChatGPT

 Formulating questions for an AI Chatbot can be a good way to clarify issues and methodologies.

In the conversation below, I ask ChatGPT for help in detecting patterns in the false provenances of looted art and forgeries that have been identified and debunked. ChatGPT reformulates the questions and adds some insights that can be useful. 

(Introduction to a series on analyzing provenance with ChatGPT)

Can you help me to detect looted art and forgery?

Q?