We are pleased to announce the call for academic papers, professional presentations, and manifestations of artistic research for our next MACCH conference, taking place on Thursday 18 and Friday 19 March 2027 in conjunction with the closing days of the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht. This edition of our annual conference focuses on the valuation and regulation of high value unique goods and financial crime.

Crimes involving high-value unique goods, such as luxury items and works of art, have evolved in one surprising way: Where the lure for criminals once lay in stealing or forging such objects, it now lies in transforming them into financialized assets, for instance to obscure transactions, to launder money or to hide wealth and evade sanctions. This trend of assetization constitutes a move away from market transactions to capital investment, which poses new challenges in the fight against financial crime: when high value unique goods are financialized and controlled as revenue streams hidden from regulatory oversight, they can become priceless assets of subversion. In fact, high-profile cases have recently emerged of financial and tax fraud, money laundering, terrorism financing, and international sanctions evasion involving assetized high-value unique goods.

Key to the assetization of unique goods is their valuation, upon which subsequent collateralization, securitization, and derivation depends. For example, when high-value unique goods are priced publicly at auction, or when their value is privately appraised by experts, they can subsequently be insured and stored in custom bonded warehouses or so-called freeports. There, taxation is deferred, ultimate beneficial ownership must not always be declared, and legal title can be exchanged without needing to relocate the stored objects. The goods can then be monetized, even without having to be bought and sold again. Is the value of unique goods fundamentally malleable and prone to manipulation? What are the risks and vulnerabilities that emerge when their valuation and revaluation backs protracted (non-banking) financial services?

The fifth EU Money Laundering Directive established new due diligence requirements including for the trade in high value unique goods. For instance, art market participants are now required to conduct know-your-customer checks and to report any suspicious activity, much like financial institutions. However, the amount of suspicious transaction reports filed by art market actors to the Dutch Financial Inteligence Unit does not appear to be commensurate with market volumes. How do such reporting regimes around high value unique goods operate? What are their challenges in relation to information flows, data exchanges, and crime detection?

With this conference we aim to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives on the valuation and appraisal of high value unique goods, as well as on associated risks and vulnerabilities for financial crime. We welcome contributions from the academic fields of (economic) sociology, social studies of finance, cultural economics, anthropology, political science, archaeology, criminology, art market studies, legal studies, data science, etc., as well as from professional fields such as regulation and law enforcement. Artistic researchers are also encouraged to participate. Contributors may discuss all types of high value unique good and their assetization, including but not limited to art, watches, wine, musical instruments, digital artworks, NFTs, antiquities, rare books and manuscripts, jewelry and gemstones, fossils, militaria, coins, stamps, meteorites, cars, handbags, etc.

Conference contributions could address any of the following and other relevant questions:

• How exactly do high-value unique goods get appraised?
• Which individuals and organisations are involved in appraisal processes?
• Which devices and technologies do they deploy in appraising high value unique goods?
• Which individuals and organisations commission appraisals and for which purposes?
• What explains the apparent malleability of value of such unique goods?
• What are risks and vulnerabilities of value manipulation when it comes to high value unique goods?
• How are high value unique goods assetized (collateralization, fractionalized ownership, tokenization, etc.)?
• What risks and vulnerabilities for crime are associated with the assetization of high value unique goods?
• What is the potential of financial crime scripting in this domain?
• What are the challenges for regulation in terms of information exchange and crime detection?
• How can rules and regulations be adapted to better tackle crime through (assetized) high value unique goods?
• How can data, information, and intelligence sharing between public and private stakeholders in the realms of high value unique goods and their assetization be improved?
• What can be learned from private-private and public-private data-sharing partnerships in the financial sector?

We call for your submission of abstracts by Friday 11 December 2026.

The format of contributions is open. Please email your proposal of max. 300 words, including your name and affiliation to macch@maastrichtuniversity.nl. Selected contributors will be invited to participate in an edited volume to be published in the Springer Series Studies in Art and Heritage, Law and the Market (open access) or, alternatively, in a proposal for a special journal issue (t.b.d.).

MACCH organizes the conference in collaboration with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded research consortium PRICELESS.

Organizing committee:

• Dr. Christoph Rausch
• Prof. dr. Marieke de Goede
• Dr. Ali Reza Ghavamipour
• Prof. dr. Rachel Pownall
• Dr. Thom Snaphaan
• Prof. dr. Olav Velthuis
• Drs. Andrea Wiegman
• Prof. dr. Donna Yates