Art courier

When a museum lends a major painting abroad, it almost always sends someone with it: a registrar, a conservator or a curator, whom the loan agreement calls the courier. The courier attends the packing and the closing of the crate, follows the loading onto the truck, sometimes goes out on the tarmac to watch the loading into the hold or the palletizing, stays with the crate through transshipments, then attends the unpacking after the acclimatization period and countersigns the condition report with the borrower. On the return leg, the same path runs in reverse. The agreement puts travel, hotel and a daily allowance on the borrower, a noticeable share of the budget for an exhibition bringing in dozens of works. During the 2020 pandemic, with travel impossible, lenders accepted the virtual courier: the courier follows packing, unpacking and the condition check remotely, by video, and the borrower performs each step on camera. Some lenders have kept the arrangement for less fragile works. For the insurer, the courier mostly changes the proof. Damage found at unpacking in the courier's presence, with the departure condition report signed in the courier's hand, can be placed in time with little argument, and the recovery action against the carrier or the handler becomes stronger. Without a courier, lender and borrower bounce the question of prior condition back and forth, and two policies may each assume the other one pays. The courier also has authority to halt an operation judged unsafe, a lift in the rain for instance. Not to be confused with the specialist fine art shipper, which packs, carries and handles under its own contractual liability, whereas the courier represents the lender and carries nothing.