I fully approve of art theft. There should be honor among thieves of course. You shouldn't damage art. But if a painting isn't stolen now and then, well it wasn't worth painting in the first place. Really, what is art for but to enliven the doldrums of the rich?
A moment or three of aesthetic pleasure, bragging at parties, but really most days it's just so much wallpaper. No, the true purpose of art is to be stolen. Then the chase begins, the drama, the mystery, the appreciation of the craft of skullduggery.
Eventually you track down the blighter who nabbed the splotchy-whatsit, buy him a beer and throw him back in the clink. That's where he'll meet his next crew, plan the next heist, and start the whole glorious affair over again.
So cheers to the cheeky beggars who grabbed the Gogh, let the fun begin!
Or the painting gets sold to someone shady overseas for a private collection and it's never seen again. It's not like in movies, there's no romance or drama to it. Stolen art doesn't benefit the common good.
Dick's version of the Man in the High Castle has a good meditation on forgeries.
Mostly when people buy art, they're buying provenance, proof that a celebrity artist in history touched this particular object.
Forgers have gotten incredibly sophisticated, finding ways to duplicate the texture of historical paints and style of brush strokes of masters.
I think we'd do a lot of good for the world by commissioning as indistinguishable fakes as possible for all famous works, putting them in a room where the originals are all shuffled in, then sending them out into the world so any museum or private collector can have one, with some chance it's actually the real thing, but mostly the value would collapse to however sublime it is to actually look at the work.
The value of art is not just the ‘celebrity’ of an artist like he were an actor pimping out a cash-in film. Making a cultural contribution to the arts is a part of carrying your civilisation forward. The artist is valuable because they were the nexus point for many values and inspirations that speak highly to the culture that produced them. Cavemen don’t make the Mona Lisa or michaenglo’s David. These works (among many) stand as monuments to a time and place that produced a peak of artistic, scientific, technological and cultural success. Owning and safeguarding those art pieces connects you to the products of the success of that passed civilisation, you carry the memory and product of many people and imply a bright future for the sons and daughters of that culture by holding up their successes above the ravages of war and nature.
Making copies defeats the point and is basically copying someone else’s homework and handing it in as your own. You stripped the point of doing the work to begin with for the sake of ‘spreading the wealth’. You didn’t make better artists that will produce new valuable works, you empowered lazy forgers who should be conservators of the past at best with that skill set.
The aesthetic value is only part of what took and a lot structure and skill to create. Art is not about appearance.
Disagree. I think GP is correct: most of the market value of paintings is in provenance of the physical object.
The "nexus point for many values and inspirations that speak highly to the culture that produced them" is fully encoded in the information content of the painting. With sufficiently good copying techniques, a physical painting can be copied or digitized while preserving all this. After all, whenever discussing "values and inspirations", you're usually not staring at an original, but at a cheap photocopy in some book or on a webpage - and yet the "values and inspirations" get communicated and discussed.
The aesthetic value is indeed only the part of a work - but again, contained within the information content. This includes provenance of the information. E.g. you derive joy from knowing this image was painted by Picasso, even though you're looking at a compressed digitization of a copy of a copy of the original painting.
GP's proposal would crash the art value to aesthetics + "values and inspirations", letting the culture partake in it better, and cutting out the scarcity.
If your criteria for appreciating art is merely looking at the image, the market is already "crashed". Google images has reproductions of nearly all paintings and art pieces ready to go. That hasn't happened.
There is more information in an artwork than what is presented as the final result. The techniques that go into constructing a painting are not reverse-engineer-able in every instance. You may produce the same brush strokes and end picture, but how you got there will be a different method, you won't be using the construction lines or dynamic symmetry of the masters that's passed down usually via oral tradition. Preserving those techniques enhances appreciation of the art and is a perspective worth preserving for it's own practical benefits.
Hatsheput's (female ancient egypt pharoah) funerary tomb was the first building to have outward facing columns that you could walk through. That style of outward facing columns became the standard style of ancient greek buildings, with steps leading up to outward facing columns. Columns you could walk through used to be confined to courtyards due to inferior architectural ability. None of that could be inferred simply by looking at the picture without prior education. The provenance of who built that or ordered it to be built in that manner is completely unknown to me, and does not change the fact that it is obviously a valuable building and an intriguing place to learn about what made the leap in architectural technology possible, how that culture was ahead of the game, how those people lived to make such a thing possible and to study the value of having outward facing colonnades among other ideas. All without knowing the author.
A bit of a tangent, however mentioning 'private collection' reminds me of a 'private collection' that is today open to the public, a place that sat on my doorstep for years but I was unaware of. Free entry of course, like all museums, is relatively unknown in terms of galleries (certainly off the typical tourist trail), and well worth a few hours: Wallace Collection [1] [2].
If anyone's in London after the lock-down is over then it's well worth a few hours.
But we're talking about a painting that was sitting in a museum, stored and cared for in ideal conditions and available to the general public. Sounds like it already fulfilled its purpose, without needing to be stolen and traded around by thieves.
That seems cool in a movie, just like the mafia seems cool in movies. In real life it's just bad. When millions of dollars are at stake for a criminal gang, people are going to end up dying.
No cheers to the art thieves - go do something useful with your lives.
If you haven't seen the TV show _White Collar_, you might enjoy it.
But I somehow doubt that's the way things actually go. Given the quantities of dollars at stake, I imagine people tend to die in the process, and some of them are innocent bystanders.
I'm not saying you're right, but, humorously, the fame of the Mona Lisa is rooted in the fact that it was stolen at some point. Before that, it was an obscure and unimportant piece that most people had never heard of.
Theft: almost as good for the reputation of art as the death of the artist.
Leonardo da Vinci was considered one of the greatest geniuses of history long before the painting was stolen from the Louvre, so Mona Lisa was not "an obscure and unimportant piece". After all, there was a reason it was stolen in the first place.
It might be the theft which made it generally known and iconic even among people who don't care about art.
I agree but for different reasons. It reminds us that art isn’t permanent. Also, we need some attrition to make way for new art. Don’t get me wrong, most new art is hilariously terrible, but a tiny amount of it isn’t.
Ah yes cheers to the cheeky beggars...and if they had been caught in the act? What then? Surely they'd have given up their foolish ruse and not injured any local constables for tis' just a game?
Art is part of a story. Sometimes adding some action livens it up a bit and attracts a new audience. Other times the story was better to begin with, and the action distracts (and detracts) from it.
Another example is David Walsh, the founder of MONA in Hobart.
I think I read this in his book, that his interest in art and antiquities started because he needed a way to move his cash winnings from gambling overseas back to Australia.
You can't simply bundle up all your money and board a plane as there are limits on how much hard currency a country will allow you to remove - but not for artwork.
Unfortunately, by the time you catch him, the money has vanished into off-shore banks and the painting has moved from one mega-yacht to the next as collateral for trafficking arms, drugs, or flesh.
What is the end goal for the thieves? Seeing as you obviously can't sell stolen artwork on the open market- how many insanely wealthy private collectors can there be out there, who are willing to risk substantial prison time to own a stolen painting? I think many or most people who have that much money probably made it legally and don't have that kind of risk tolerance. And I doubt many mob boss/Tony Soprano types really have an appreciation for fine art.... So what's the market like?
(And if there is a market for shady wealthy stolen art buyers, how do you get connected with them? Seems like every node in a web of underground connections is someone the police can potentially arrest & flip, etc.)
Interestingly as I understand it part of the point is that by stealing the original you are able to create both better counterfeits and a market for them.
Think about it — obviously no one will buy a counterfeit "Starry Night" or whatever if it's hanging in a museum. But if it's stolen, all of a sudden there's the possibility that they can buy the original.
Not only that, but the counterfeit, created with extensive access to the original, is likely to be almost indistinguishable from it except by experts.
So the thieves steal the original, make a few copies, sell those for millions saying each is the original, then return the original to the museum. The best part is, the people who bought the counterfeits can't exactly go to the police. It's the perfect crime!
Sound crazy? This is what is speculated to have happened to the Mona Lisa some time ago.
The "Tony Soprano types" are probably more common - and perhaps less savvy - than you might expect. The type of person who thinks one can buy a hot van Gogh for a few million bucks is a pretty ripe target for counterfeiters.
The irony in that comment is that one of the Soprano actors is actually an artist (painter) and big art buff and scored big on finding a painting at a dealer that "didn't know what he had"..
That's funny. I know it shouldn't be, but it is always surprising when actors turn out to be very unlike those they portray. Infamous villains played by famously kind people, violent goons played by erudite and talented members of the arts community, etc.
All I remember from that book was that the kids botched seperating their laundry. It was a real snoozer, but it planted a persistent seed of doubt whenever I have to do laundry.
It's not that easy to sell counterfeit artwork. Anyone who's paying millions for an artwork will have the painting examined by a specialized consultant. The easiest way to spot a fake is to examine the pigments and whether a particular one was available by the time the artist lived. This is how the Rosales scandal was exposed in 2013.
Where are you going to find a specialized consultant expert enough to judge if its fake who also doesn't know that the painting he is looking at was recently stolen from a museum?
I don't think it's that hard to buy discretion if you're willing to pay a hefty fee. Besides how could anyone prove that you actually own the painting? I hire you, I fly you half the way around the world to a remote place where you're to examine the painting for a couple of weeks, you're paid and bye-bye.
I'm not saying that I know for a fact that this is how it's happening, but it doesn't seem far-fetched. What I do know is that a lot of what's happening in the art world is shrouded by a veil of secrecy.
The consultant doesn't need to prove it. The prosecutor does, if it gets to that point – but first there would be a police investigation, and the police have a variety of investigative techniques at their disposal.
Unusually tricky right now. Plus the number of people who can validate authenticity is quite limited and easily identifiable. A Van Gogh would be hard to forge but not that hard. There's recipes for paint/pigment manufacture going back centuries.
Are you implying that if they do recognize the original, they would report it as stolen?
It's an interesting question, and there are rewards for recovery so it's probably under the same trust calculus of any other criminal venture: pay enough that they don't.
Their ignorance is not required, they certainly should be aware it was stolen if they're any good at their job. All you need is someone who's willing to accept cash.
Thank you for posting this - I'd had pretty much the exact thought about creating a market for multiple copies earlier today when I first saw this story, and presumed (in my typically arrogant and self-regarding human fashion) that I'd had a somewhat novel thought.
Nobody wants to pay a million bucks for an authenticated accurate clone. The entire idea of the fraud described above is that people think they're buying the original.
Prints already exist, but nobody is paying big bucks for one.
Well people pay large sums for prints of the Great Wave, of which many thousands were made and are still being made. (Of course the trick is to know which prints are the earliest ones)
I think there's a genuine reason for them to be worth more since they are closer to the original painting. There's a fantastic (and long) series on Youtube about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhiMCSvtCc
If the original is now public domain and the replica is not advertised as the original, I'm not sure what the ethical issue is?
I do see a financial issue though, cheap clones are CHEAP - and if you want something that can nearly pass as authentic (which I'd argue is a work of art on it's own) you'd be looking at a very narrow market of buyers.
Again, as long as replicas/clones are labeled as such and the original is in the public domain.
Super rich person really wants that particular painting to hang in a private room where they can enjoy it.
And they go through a couple connections for plausible deniability -- buying it from some kind of "dealer" they can "assume" is "legit", and the "dealer" then connects with actual criminals to steal it.
If ever caught (unlikely), the thieves and "dealer" take the fall, not the rich person. Also the rich person may be halfway around the world in a country where there's literally zero chance of being caught/extradited.
But the thieves and dealer are going to make a helluva lot of money, obviously, for the risk they're taking.
I don't think plausible deniability works on one-of-a-kind artwork. Even if you assume your dealer is legit, any cursory research will tell you it was stolen. It would be like buying the secret formula for Coca-Cola and claiming you didn't know it was stolen because it went through multiple middlemen.
These aren't paintings that are on display to the public after they're stolen. They're kept in houses and families for generations, and by then, time has laundered their provenance. If you read art news, it's not uncommon for museums to have paintings donated to them by the grandchildren of the person who bought the painting, only to learn half a century later that the painting was stolen.
And if someone doesn't like their stolen painting after a while, there are plenty of dealers who will hook you up with a similarly amoral buyer. The fee is higher, to go with the risk.
There's an entire class of rich people who sometimes go by the label "globalist" who believe they are above national laws, and nations, themselves. They see themselves as "citizens of the world" and sometimes even think they shouldn't need passports to travel because their egos tell them they're so fabulous, and have the money to back it up.
I read a magazine or newspaper article about it last year. Many of them attend that big meeting of super-rich people and the politicians they've bought in Davos each year.
But I'm not sure it's entirely outlandish. The buyer just spins a story to the judge: "the dealer said he could acquire a van Gogh from someone's private collection, I loved its appearance, so I paid them to do that." The buyer could insist the dealer said the painting was unnamed, that they would have had no way of ever knowing it was the same one stolen from a museum, etc. (That they certainly never bothered to take a photo and upload it to Google Image Search because why would they?)
To complicate things even further, you can even say you assumed it was a different original version. Just Google "multiple versions of van gogh" and you'll see that the artist would make multiple versions of the same painting.
Obviously the buyer in this case does know what going on -- they initiated the whole thing. But as long as there are no records of communication and the dealer has been paid off to take the fall, they can play dumb in front of a judge if it ever came to that. With a good lawyer, they might very well get away with playing the victim.
If you have enough money to finance an art heist or buy a priceless Van Gogh from a "dealer", you probably have enough money to not go to jail over an art theft. The collector pays a replica price on paper but in reality pays much more to the dealer. If caught, you just say you thought it was a replica, the dealer says they thought it was a replica, their dealer says the same, and so on until no one ends up with any jail time.
> If you have enough money to finance an art heist or buy a priceless Van Gogh from a "dealer", you probably have enough money to not go to jail over an art theft. The collector pays a replica price on paper but in reality pays much more to the dealer. If caught, you just say you thought it was a replica, the dealer says they thought it was a replica, their dealer says the same, and so on until no one ends up with any jail time.
But that story just beggars belief. Sure it's a story, but one that makes no sense at all unless you're willing to entertain the ludicrous premise that someone would steal painting just to sell it as a cheaper replica. Furthermore, a professional art dealer could probably be expected to be able to tell the difference between a replica and a genuine painting. Otherwise, who would buy genuine paintings from him?
I think a prosecutor would be able to quickly identify an individual in the chain of custody who clearly should have known the painting was stolen, and is thus be guilty of receiving stolen property:
And you've just decided that the "replica" was so good that you paid stolen-art-on-the-black-market money for it, not "good replica painter" money for it...
The thing is your books say "good replica money" and only your crypto wallet or offshore account or shell company slush fund or pile of gold have the 'stolen-art-on-the-black-market' money removed from the balance sheet. Smart accountants are payed a lot of money to figure out exactly how to hide this from overworked and underpaid auditors.
Ash and Mickey have tried to capitalise on the theft of a rare Picasso by selling a fake to a well-known collector, Petre Sava (Peter Polycarpou), a vicious Eastern European gangster. They learn too late that Sava who owned the stolen original. Mickey is taken prisoner by Sava, leaving Ash and the others with just a few hours to return the real stolen painting, otherwise Mickey is a dead man. With their usual contacts unable to give any clues, except only the word that a Scottish crew were behind the theft, the gang visit renowned Picasso forger Dolly Hammond (Sheila Hancock) (the one who helped to create the fake). She points them in the direction of the McCrary brothers, the thieves in question, and are told that they stole the original painting for another renowned gangster, Harry Holmes (Martin Kemp). Time is ticking and Mickey is edging closer to death; if the group can't find the real painting, Ash will have to devise a plan that can get him back...
The timing of this is interesting. Are they merely taking advantage of most places having a skeleton staff during the pandemic, or is it something worse like the thieves anticipating the museum will be destroyed by starving mobs soon so they’re stealing the things they like the most before it’s too late? Also, could the museum director have allowed it to happen for a price? His reaction seems strange.
> Are they merely taking advantage of most places having a skeleton staff
This. Art thieves don't care for conservation, they are just extremely opportunistic. I expect this is just one instance we learnt of, simply because of the author's name being known to the mainstream. There is probably much more stuff getting stolen right now in Italy and Spain, which we won't know about for months or years - or even at all, unless we read specialist media.
There are also "backroom" sales, where these sorts of items can be sold in countries who have been embargoed. You trade this type of painting for a ridiculous amount of an embargoed country's goods or something and then you can smuggle this into Russia or China to trade for a non embargoed currency with an oligarch, since oil prices have plummeted. They, in turn, can hold on to it for a few generations, and sell it in grey markets for a good profit and some time.
I feel like this is one of those things people imagine happens, but actually never happens. If it did happen, eventually someone would get caught and we'd see evidence of said secret room and the painting would be recovered from a mansion or something. Instead, they're always recovered from warehouses or behind walls to in attics of crooks.
Yeah, after paying off the local officials to frame it that way. A rich person being accused of theft will tank their reputation, and if they spent $250M for the painting, they'll easily spend $10M to cover it up.
This is pure fantasy, who would spend $250m to acquire a stolen painting that they cannot resell? If it really is rich people buying them the purchase price is going to be a fraction of a percent of the amount you're talking about.
When your net worth is in the hundreds of billions, you can spend a couple hundred million to impress your "friends," and many billionaires do. Yeah, it's disgusting, but that's only because the modern global economy allows such disgusting levels of wealth.
The number of people with net worth in the hundreds of billion right now is... 1. The second-richest person is Bill Gates, at only $96.5 billion. By #10, we're at $50 billion. Fewer than 200 people are worth $10 billion. Granted, this only includes people with known net worths, but by the time you're hitting tens of billions, it's hard to hide that much wealth.
It really makes a huge impact on this conversation to say "billions" and "2.5M" and "200k," so thanks for pointing all of this stuff out. Leave it to HN to get buried in a pedantic technicality that has no effect on the points being made.
The "modern global economy" allows it? I suggest you look up the wealth (adjusted for inflation) of many, many historical business and political figures. Extreme wealth for a few is nothing new and if anything modern global economics and markets have done a massive leveling up of standards of living for many more people who aren't incredibly rich.
That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?
Seems like you took my statement "the modern global economy allows it," and inferred that I meant every system other than the modern one does not allow it. Of course not. Of course there are many systems that existed in the past that also allowed for gross levels of wealth disparity, but did I ever claim otherwise?
> massive leveling up of standards of living
For who? Impoverished workers in China and India? How have American labourers benefitted from globalism and Keynesian economics? They haven't, at least not in the last 50 years.
> That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?
I think you're just pretending you're naive, but you can feel free to look up many of the proposed solutions. UBI, wealth tax, limits on how much money can be passed through inheritance, etc. There are many solutions that have been _proposed_, but the problem is that with massive wealth comes massive power, and the individuals who possess disgusting levels of wealth will never let these solutions come to be.
> what they earned
Jeff Bezos has not earned 100 billion dollars. You could probably convince me that he's earned at least 1 billion dollars, but there is absolutely no way one man can generate that much wealth in one lifetime. He has stolen his wealth through asymmetrical agreements with powerless individuals, who chose to work for him rather than starve due to a lack of accessible jobs.
We've created a system that makes individuals dependent on large corporations for healthcare and rent, and then we wonder why poor individuals can't start businesses or change jobs freely (hint hint, it's due to food security and access to healthcare). If I point a gun at you and take your money, I haven't earned anything, have I? But if I starve you out, and tell you you can't see a doctor, then I can rob you of the value of your ideas and labor. For some reason our system allows that.
Bezos got a $300k interest-free loan from his mother to start his business. Are you telling me he earned that? No, it was given to him by birthright, and it's a luxury the vast majority of people don't have.
Bezos did not earn 100 billion dollars, he stole it.
Bezos doesn’t even have $100B, so the premise of your argument is nonsense.
Owning shares of something isn’t the same as liquid cash. And valuing 1 share at the most recent market closing price the same as a founder liquidating their whole investment is also nonsense.
FYI, all those worlds richest lists are clickbait.
> Bezos doesn’t even have $100B, so the premise of your argument is nonsense.
Oh, so that's how you're going to handwave this argument today. Got it, I wouldn't have bothered writing all of that up if I knew you were just going to stick your head in the sand.
Here's what happens when your boy Bezos gets too much power:
There need to be more checks and balances on individuals who possess this much power, or they need not be allowed to attain so much power in the first place. Your technicalities do nothing to fix this problem which affect tens of thousands of workers in this country, who are being forced to expose themselves to a deadly virus (or go hungry) so Bezos can buy another mansion and bang some more models. But I don't care that much, I suppose. If it isn't done democratically it won't be long before heads are rolling.
Michel Van Rijn was a 'famous' Dutch art smuggler. He explained that a lot of art was ordered. The extreme wealthy of the underground just buy it because they want it.
Edit: the Vice article doesn't mention the thefts and looting. There are other sources for this.
It is also unclear if he really is a former smuggler.
Edit 2: The other reason is it's relatively easy to steal art. And most thieves focus on that part. The selling part is difficult and is also why a lot of stolen art is later recovered.
Apparently they can be used as collateral between criminals for loans. They can also be used as an insurance policy if the criminal is ever caught. Offer to exchange the art for a lesser sentence. A literal get out of jail free card.
Thanks, I was familiar with the anecdote but couldn't remember the source. I did a quick search but didn't find it. I thought it may have happened with a major drug dealer as well? Not sure on that.
-A few years ago, months after Norway had witnessed a HEAT-style armed robbery during which a police officer was killed, Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ and ‘Madonna’ were stolen from the National Gallery to divert resources away from the ongoing manhunt after the HEAT robbery.
If you can get the goods to the Middle East (Qatar, UAE, Bahrain) I assure you there are filthy rich princes and sheikhs who (1) want to give the impression of a respect for fine art, and (2) are at absolutely no risk of prosecution, and (3) would drop the money just for fun / social posturing, not even as an investment.
Oligarchs, shady statesmen, (cyber)criminals, druglords, warlords. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the market for stolen work from one of the most famous painters.
I don't know what it's like in Northern Europe, but in Italy the motives can be more trivial than you'd expect.
In at least one case we know of, about 20 years ago, a local gangster had some beef with a bishop, so he got his men to break into the main church and steal a prized artwork. The painting was never found (afaik); the boss was later imprisoned for other reasons and basically admitted to his role in the heist, but can't remember what eventually happened to the artwork.
In another case, which was reported pretty recently, a long-stolen painting was found in a small hole in the external wall of the actual building it was stolen from. Motives were never explained by the suspected thief, and the theft happened so long ago that the statute of limitations impedes a prosecution anyway. The theory is just that "opportunity makes man a thief", as they say there: this guy might have seen an opening in the security procedures and might have gone for it, without really thinking about (or underestimating) subsequent steps; eventually he simply returned it (there is no chance that the painting could have survived for years in that hole with nay a scratch, clearly it was placed there very recently) once he knew he couldn't be punished for it.
Let me preface this by stating that I don't actually have any special knowledge of the art or criminal world beyond what I've seen in the movies, so the following is pure speculation.
I could imagine that if a thief's motive were purely financial, he/she could ransom the painting. "This is a priceless piece of world heritage that is heavily insured. Send XXX BTC to this wallet or I'll burn up the painting and send you its ashes."
As a rich art collector, you can buy a real Van Gogh for a fraction of its price. Can you risk jail? Sure, but who will know you own it anyway? It's not like you're going to expose it in your living room anyway.
Not only that, but as soon as you know there can be at least one person in the world willing to buy that stolen piece of art, it becomes a great asset to own even if you're not the said art collector. Let's say I'm a bad guy and I want to give another bad guy 2 million dollars but I don't want to be seen with or have to travel with a suitcase full of banknotes or with my own weight in gold bars. Just carrying a lightweight, low-profile cardboard tube containing those 2 million bucks as a painting is very convenient.
And don't forget the end customer is not necessarily someone living in the same country. What if he's a rich prince living in a rich country, far far away? He would be mostly out of reach.
I don't disagree with your comment. There are probably collectors who think like that. But I guess most collectors really like to show off their collections. Why having a good art collection if you cannot show it to anyone?
You can just enjoy it for yourself, in a private room. I'm not that much of an art fan, but I'd love to have an authentic Van Gogh in front of my bed. I guess a rich art fan who doesn't care about ethics would be thrilled as well.
It is effectively a kidnapping. The kidnapper gets a ransom. Otherwise known as a reward for “information leading to the return” of the stolen painting.
Check out The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), the classic is good too.
Interesting fictional perspective on the super wealthy and thinking they can have anything they want. legal or not. I expect it's not far from reality for some.
Eventually new technology exposes a counterfeit. There was a recent NOVA about fake dead sea scrolls and the competition between counterfeiters to create better fakes and forensic experts to weed them out. At the time the episode was filmed about a third of the scroll fragments owned by the Museum of the Bible were proven fakes. Now the rest of them have been proven false.
A lot of wealthy collectors who buy prestigious art never exhibit it in public. So anyone could get that thing and place it in a private vault. Other than that, my guess is that whoever stole it already has a client waiting to buy it. We could safely assume that the job is pretty much commissioned.
>Seeing as you obviously can't sell stolen artwork on the open market- how many insanely wealthy private collectors can there be out there, who are willing to risk substantial prison time to own a stolen painting?
There's zero risk involved if you're a Russian oligarch - the Russian constitution absolutely prohibits extradition and the Russian state has no interest in prosecuting wealthy, powerful and well-connected men for crimes that don't meaningfully harm and arguably benefit the Russian state. Much the same can be said for a number of Middle Eastern and Latin American jurisdictions.
This is a serious problem for stolen artworks. Back in the day the IRA stole several. The most use they ever were was as collateral to other illegal organisations. If you can find a decent history of them, it’s fascinating but the long and the short of it is that even to a large, well connected organisation they just proved more trouble than they were worth,
The truth is, the aesthete billionaire collector beloved by movies doesn’t much exist. Most truly expensive artwork is bought either as a store of value or to show off. Both require you to be able to publicise you have it.
Paul McCartney had his original Hofner Bass stolen and wondered the exact same as you.
He had a really funny theory about this that if you visit some German castle way up in the hills of Bavaria, after dinner the host will invite you into a room where his bass is hanging over the mantlepiece. [1]
I'd be willing to bet that in cases like this painting, the thieves were probably hired by a billionaire client. So, the buyer was the one who initiated the heist in the first place.
Here's an interesting idea, although it may be far fetched. Given the original, if a thief could produce a high quality counterfeit in van gough's style, they could possibly use parchment/ink from the true original in creating it. Then they'd have a "lost van gough" which could pass some basic age analysis. This lost painting would be worth more than the original, and they could sell it on the real art market, not a black market.
Or this may just a crappy movie plot. I don't know much about art.
> I think many or most people who have that much money probably made it legally
You're already becoming so technical(ly true) here that it should be obvious that the people you're speaking of are functionally amoral. Once you approach a certain wealth ceiling, the chances that you're caught in any real way approach zero.
>Ulman had not yet heard all the stories about Simchowitz’s generosity and its fatal attraction for young, penniless artists whom he lured into Faustian bargains. He would provide them with “all those adult things” they needed and so often lacked: room, board, materials. In exchange for extraordinary support, Simchowitz asked not for his artists’ souls but for their art, a deal that many of his protégés lived to regret.
Prison time isn't generally a risk for someone with enough wealth and connections to even catch wind of the offer to purchase a stolen Van Gogh painting.
For anyone wanting to have a wonderful 90s flashback featuring the theft of high-end art, you can't do worse during shelter in place than to watch the Thomas Crown Affair: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0155267/
"So if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some very silly rich people, I don't really give a damn..."
The value (in terms of money) of art has always been confusing to me.
Art has monetary value because:
1 it is a famous, one-of-a-kind piece
2 it can be used for money laundering and/or illegal transactions
Pieces in museums are always in the #1 category. Any other piece with high monetary value is clearly in the #2 category.
This stolen van Gogh will probably end up in a private collection, but really, what's the point? Since it is now a known stolen piece it now has no value in both category #1 and #2.
I have a hard time believing that the new 'owner' had it stolen for the artistic value. Really, if he/she wanted to look at it, he/she could have just gone to the museum. (Well, not right now due to COVID19, but you get the point).
People just like owning things. Even if you didn't steal something like a street sign when in high school or college, surely you know somebody who did. They have no monetary value, just having one is proof of crime, and you could can go look at a stop sign any time you want. But there's still a thrill to having it up on your wall, and it can increase your status with your peer group.
I can't find the source, but I remember reading about how there's a lifecycle to stolen art. The thief sells it to a sketchy art dealer at a huge discount. The sketchy art dealer then sells it to a more legitimate dealer at less of a discount. Then, it either goes to a legitimate private collector or museum. The length of time between each step can span decades, but it becomes more valuable at each transition.
Give it enough time, and will anyone even know who the rightful owner is supposed to be? I have a feeling van Gogh's fame will probably outlast the Netherlands, let alone a claim of legal ownership by one museum.
I don't think many people acquire stuff on the basis it might be easily resellable to people who aren't criminals around the point the Netherlands and its national museums cease to exist.
When you have "enough" money you run out of things to purchase and start doing things for prestige among your social circle. For the right people I'm sure having a stolen van Gogh would increase that prestige.
The high end art community is about showing off and various scams with money (money laundering, loans, tax evasion, bribery, etc.) Pretty toxic stuff, but "I have so much money I don't know what to do with it all" is real and finds solutions.
Apparently high-priced items can be negotiated to be returned for ransom, this works by having the museum advertise a bounty for information and is being legitimized by a lawyer representing someone who received a tip about the whereabouts of the piece (some warehouse etc.)
I mean, I have a Renoir print up in my house. If I had $100 billion I’d probably have the original up. There is a demand for art as a consumption good.
If we were discussing the theft of several million dollars from a bank, then only considering the monetary value of the theft makes sense. Here, though, it's an incomplete picture to only consider monetary value as the reason for the theft.
What about social capital?
Picture this - the leader of a particular organized crime ring wants to cinch the impression of complete control to his associates. What better way to do that than hang a painting like this on a wall in the dining room of his estate? It demonstrates not only that he has a literal van Gogh in his house, but also shows that when he wants something, he can just take it - painting on sale or no, he'll have it in his house.
The fact that this painting was stolen on van Gogh's birthday feeds my imagination that something like this really happened.
Rich person is 60 years old. He has so much money that he'll never spend it in his lifetime. So screw investment, he'll just hang it in his office and enjoy it for 24 years.
The muted greenish brown colouring, the strange wide aspect ratio, the generally dark tone and setting: if you'd try to sell this to me as a Van Gogh painting, I would have probably laughed at you. I'm far from being an art historian, but it looks quite out of character for a Van Gogh.
One of his most famous paintings matches 2 out of 3 of your criticisms, he only went wild with colour later. I agree the style change can seem abrupt but it happened over years.
You'd think the sort of person that wanted to pay art thieves would be more interested in the prestige of a famous or characteristic work than a relatively obscure naturalistic study of a garden he painted several times. I mean, similarly, anyone interested in studying the history of art sees Picasso's naturalistic family portraits he made as a teenager and his 'blue period' as important in his development as an artist, but it's not the stuff I'd imagine is high on the list of wealthy criminals wishing to flaunt their wealth and power with famous abstract paintings worth millions in their private rooms.
Though I doubt Van Gogh's more famous works were on display at the Singer Laren museum...
If you put "Van Gogh painting" in Google images, you have to scroll quite a bit to find anything in a similar style, except for a couple hits from current news pieces.
And composition is primitive also for a Van Gogh. The figure is well placed, but the tree at the left is asking for an axe. The same artist than studied the color theory to place the right combinations of colours close. Early work, or trying to be 'realistic', I suppose.
I'm not questioning the painting's authenticity. I'm merely bewildered that someone would steal a Van Gogh that doesn't look like a Van Gogh to the untrained eye - how are you going to impress your billionaire friends with that hanging over the fireplace of your lair?
Although the thief will probably just blackmail the insurance/museum, so the style of the painting doesn't matter at all.
He wasn’t born painting sunflowers. If you look at http://art-vangogh.com/1885.html, there a lot of dark portraits (also, if I’m counting correctly, 140 paintings in a single year)
I'd make the same point for these - if you showed them to anybody on the street and asked them to name the artist, I don't think many would guess Van Gogh. They are quite different from the works he's known for.
> The thieves smashed a large glass door at the front of the museum to access the building.
So let me get this straight. A fairly sized museum that holds, possibly, millions worth of art has absolutely no 24/7 security guards at the front door. Not even a single guard.
Same reaction here. My company's unoccupied office has a glass door and I lie awake thinking about someone stealing the 10-year old PC off the receptionist's desk.
> Thieves have taken advantage of the distraction provided by the public health situation to steal a prize Vincent van Gogh painting from a museum in the Netherlands
Here is the opposite effect: The number of spam phone calls I have received has dropped from two or three most days to zero! Looks like the spammers cannot work remotely, which is really odd!
I'm surprised that, at this point, there are still originals in museums, especially for very desirable works as some replicas are hard to tell apart from the original. It can be done. If they hire professional 'replicators', this type of museum theft could be completely eradicated.
Another possibility is that maybe in this case a replica was stolen and the museum doesn't want to divulge that.
And want to add that this stolen work is almost un-sellable, everybody knows is missing and if it ever resurfaces it will be claimed back, thus nobody would want to own it. But what do I know..
Yes, this 100%. However, when you go to the museum and get to see an original and are mind blown by it, have a mystical experience but you not aware that what you looked at is indeed a perfect copy. It's all psychological. This is one reason museums don't want to disclose that they have copies on display.
> If you know it's a fake then it takes away from the mystique.
On the other hand, if you can only tell the difference between the real and the fake with a microscope, then "mystique" seems to be a simple placebo effect.
It's about time we stopped holding original-yet-mediocre works like the Mona Lisa on such a high pedestal just to create some kind of "mental high" that people are deriving from the placebo effect.
There are many reasons people like art, but I think the principle reason is (or should be) admiration of skill. It's the same reason we like watching great athletes or musicians - we can recognize the amount of time and talent required to produce the end result ("wow, I couldn't do that, even if I tried!").
It's also the same reason many people have a visceral negative reaction to "art" that seemingly requires little to no skill (4'33", Pollock, etc.) - why admire something you could easily imitate with little-to-no training?
It's great that you have this view of art, but really figuring out a single principal reason is not something you're going to succeed at because people are different. Evidently even more different than you expected.
It may be a placebo effect, but I need the lie in order for it to work. I can't get the same thing by pretending it's real. My brain has to believe it's real.
So you admit you aren't actually enjoying the art itself, but are deriving a high from "witnessing an ancient piece of history" or "beholding the same matter someone famous once touched" or something?
Yeah. I like to think about ancient people and times and I draw a connection between objects and the past. If it was dug out of the ground after existing there for thousands of years I can do that. If the thing was made in a factory from a mold like every other thing in my house, then I have a hard time enjoying it. What's so wrong with that?
I mean, what do you even mean by "enjoying the art itself"? You mean that the photons hitting my retina should have some sort of inherent enjoyment that is not processed by my brain? My brain needs context to derive that pleasure.
But, what if Jan Rudolph de Lorm, the museum director was actually moving it to a safer location and accidentally destroyed it. Jans quick-thinking jumped into play and he called up a few college historian friends and asked for some help.
Jan was able to disable the alarm so her friends could come in and smash the place up, leave evidence that it was stolen, then activated the alarm just at the right time.
Jan had become good friends with Andreas Blühm, the director of the Groninger Museum and finally convinced him to let the Singer Laren museum take it on loan. Jan was so distraught there was no way he could could let himself be seen as an incompetent museum director. He had to cover his tracks.
He convinced his old historian friends to keep quiet about the cover-up by cutting up the remains of the painting and giving them each a piece. A story to be kept in secrecy only handed down each generation.
For anyone who has time on their hands and wants a good read, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a wonderful book that tells a story set in the world of art theft.
COVID-19 is providing many opportunities for criminals. It's only a matter of time before articles come out with titles like "How identity thieves took my federal tax return AND coronabucks" given the delay in filing US tax returns this year.
I will not be surprised when they were the same Lebanese gang from Berlin who also stole the big gold coin in Berlin, and most likely the Dresden green vault jewels. It's just too easy.
I take it from that that you pronounce "Gogh" like "go". A Dutchman once explained to me that both g's are pronounced with a strongly guttural h sound, like in loch or Bach, or like the Spanish j but much stronger, like you're clearing your throat. And a short "o", like non-USA English "top" - not an "ah" sound. CHhhoChhh. Yes, pretty impossible for English-speakers, but anything would be closer than rhyming it with "go".
In general it's pretty rare for museums to get robbed because while art pieces are valuable, once stolen and reported as such, they have to be returned to the rightful owners when found. As such, they can't be resold through public channels such as art actions, and even private sales are risky
Once upon a time the Europeans even looted an entire continent and murdered many of the people that already lived there, named it America and said it was theirs now and went on to live there.
Often, the canvases are cut from the frames with boxcutters.
I understand that an art heist is a high pressure event with little spare time for niceties, but this willful damage might be the thing I find most offensive.
A moment or three of aesthetic pleasure, bragging at parties, but really most days it's just so much wallpaper. No, the true purpose of art is to be stolen. Then the chase begins, the drama, the mystery, the appreciation of the craft of skullduggery.
Eventually you track down the blighter who nabbed the splotchy-whatsit, buy him a beer and throw him back in the clink. That's where he'll meet his next crew, plan the next heist, and start the whole glorious affair over again.
So cheers to the cheeky beggars who grabbed the Gogh, let the fun begin!