The extraordinary current craze around NFTs reflects their perceived value as a technological development that can bring greater certainty to questions of ownership and authenticity in fields like art and other collectibles. This is, among other things, the promise of crime prevention through technology, as ownership and authenticity are in the art world closely tied to criminal legal matters like theft, handling stolen goods and fraud. The crime prevention promise looks to fall flat though, as the technology seems to be less capable of delivering these benefits than has been assumed by its promoters. Much of the attraction of NFTs is therefore not actually based on effective crime prevention, but rather on hype. This paper explores the hype, and its relationship to the crime prevention promise of NFTs, through the lens of ‘the social lives of things’. We argue that as well as social lives, things have criminal lives. Analysis sensitive to the criminal lives of things finds an NFT trading scene heated by emotion: excitement, attraction, temptation, speculative euphoria and acquisitive, possessive sentiment. This creates a sense of object agency more active than the cold traditional vision of material structure presented in standard criminological treatments of things-in-the-world as passive opportunity structures. The hyped NFT market trades in affecting objects that create crime in emotional as well as structural ways. We therefore arrive at a conclusion opposite to starting assumptions: far from preventing crime, NFTs are making it.

The majority of the ancient rock art sites of the U.S. Southwest are located in rural locations that are difficult to monitor or police. These sites seem to exert a pull on humans, an attraction that not only provokes curiosity and wonder but also what can be classed as destructive responses or vandalism. Many crime control methods for reducing vandalism are based on traditional theories such as defensible space and broken window theory. In the case of rock art, however, these methods do not yield expected results and in some cases are even detrimental. Rural crime, including rural vandalism, as a whole is marginalized in criminology, which has been dominated by urban-focused approaches and theories. In the case of rock art, considering how security is approached and maintained ultimately leads to questions about human-object relationships with regards to crime and about object agency. By focusing on the policing challenges of one particular type of rural vandalism, we hope to contribute to the discussion of vandalism in rural spaces.

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In mid 2022, social media videos of an armed jewel heist during opening hours at the TEFAF art fair baffled the public. The thieves wore seemingly absurd costumes, and the art fair attendees only showed muted reactions to a violent and dramatic crime. Drawing on first-hand observational research at TEFAF before and after the heist, and on an extended observational methodology focused on the atmosphere of art commercial spaces, we argue that the affective atmosphere of the art fair had a direct influence both on how the thieves committed and how onlookers experienced crime. Within the art fair space, thieves conformed to art world conventions and fair attendees experienced dangerous events as being significantly less sinister. With this paper, we contribute to the growing concept of sensory criminology and the role that atmosphere and affect play in crime.

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