
The art of stealing - ryanlol
https://www.nrc.nl/kunsthal-en/
======
al_ramich
Tricky business doing security in an art museum. Often the art pieces are
worth millions, yet easily accessible to the general public. Yes, there are
alarms and a security guard at the door but even a few petty thieves can with
a little planning get the opportunity to steal. Should art be better
protected? It would, however, mean less access for the general public.
Difficult to strike the right balance. Maybe there is more security that I'm
not aware of...

~~~
_petronius
Sadly one thing most art thieves don't understand is that even if a painting
is worth millions to a gallery or collector on the legitimate market, it's
black-market resale value is basically zero. (Turns out, not many people want
to buy famous paintings for enormous sums of money that they'll never be able
to show off.)

And even if there were some Bond villain waiting to get his hands on a Picasso
for his mountain lair, the smash-and-grab art thieves suddenly realize they
don't have the connections to find such people.

It would probably help if there were less insane hype about art prices in the
culture generally, but at this point the ever-increasing valuations of these
works is what keeps certain segments of the secondary market alive (and on
significantly thinner margins than most people imagine).

~~~
paulpauper
_It would probably help if there were less insane hype about art prices in the
culture generally, but at this point the ever-increasing valuations of these
works is what keeps certain segments of the secondary market alive (and on
significantly thinner margins than most people imagine)._

Seems sorta like blaming the victims. "If only art wern't so valuable, ppl
wouldn't be so tempted to steal it"

~~~
_petronius
Hmmm, that's kind of a stretch. You can hypothesise about motivating factors
in people's behaviour without endorsing bad behaviour.

I sort of took it as read that people who break into museums and steal the
collective cultural heritage of society are doing bad stuff and I disapprove
of them.

I also wanted to make the point the crazy-high valuations aren't really a
good, or useful, or socially valuable aspect of the (especially secondary) art
market, and they create a false sense of the transferability of that value.
That was mainly as a response to the idea of the tradeoffs between security
and accessibility that the parent comment was highlighting.

It would be sad if a bunch of "security" was added to art museums, and as a
culture we could let go of the idea that for something to be important it has
to also have a millions-of-currency pricetag attached to it.

None of that alters the fact that if you tell people something is worth a
life-changing amount of money, and put it within their reach, you have to
accept that somebody is gonna try to make off with it every once in a while,
especially in a society that closes off lots of more reasonable paths out of
poverty or hardship.

~~~
mannykannot
The bigger stretch is thinking you can keep the value of art a closely-guarded
secret.

------
skookumchuck
I visited an art museum recently. There were rooms with nice oil paintings,
and a couple of rooms with modern art in it.

I was convinced the guards in the modern art section were there to keep the
janitors from tossing the modern art into the trash bins.

~~~
nasredin
So sad these people are down voting you.

IMNSHO if most 5 year old can do it, it's not art.

If you insist it is art, fine, it is very shitty art. Very good confidence
trick though!

~~~
mightybyte
I sympathize with your view (although with s/5 year old/me/). However, over
the years I have come to realize that many of the things I used to think I
could have done, I actually could not have...to say nothing of your 5 year
old. It might look like a few apparently random splotches of paint could have
been put there by you, but in many cases looks are deceiving.

You might watch a grandmaster chess game and think that you could make those
moves. Or perhaps you see a solution to a traveling salesman decision problem
and think "it's easy to see there exists a path that short". But in both cases
you're mistaken. The moves you would have played wouldn't be as good as the
grandmaster's. The path you would find wouldn't be as short. And the paint
splotches you would throw on the canvas wouldn't look as compelling.

Yes, there does exist shitty "art"\--things that you or your 5 year old could
have done. But I suspect it's less common than you think.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I thought they'd actually done blinded studies that showed an inability to
distinguish between "real" art and amateur attempts?

------
Patient0
Reminds me of this Roald Dahl short story:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson%27s_Pleasure_(short_sto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parson%27s_Pleasure_\(short_story\))

------
noelwelsh
This art theft reminds me of this story of a Georgian women scavenging for
copper knocking Armenia off the Internet:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-
woman...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-
web-access)

The common thread is poor people turning euros into cents, which is to say
destroying something of great value to (attempt to) produce some small gain
for themselves. This is a completely rational thing to do when it seems you
have no better options, which is why social mobility is so important.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Social mobility? No, it's about preventing people becoming that desperate.

By definition, social mobility just lets you mix up the set of which people
who are desperate, no?

~~~
philipov
Only if you assume mobility is a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be, if we
allow people to obtain wealth from their labor instead of sucking all the
alpha into a black hole of wealth consolidation by the already-wealthy.

Positive-sum social mobility was supposed to be the point of economic growth,
but instead that growth was captured by rent-seekers, institutional investors,
and others.

~~~
AmericanChopper
Quality of life has been rising and poverty has been falling at very
consistent rates worldwide over the past few decades. By just about any metric
you could find, it's currently the best time to be a human being in the
history of humanity.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I cannot square that with a generation jobless, unable to buy their own place
or even a car in many cases. If you cherry pick what 'poverty' is, I guess so,
and surely even the least of us live better than 13th century peasants. But
better than in 1980? No.

~~~
AmericanChopper
13th century peasants didn’t live a much better life than many people did 100
years ago.

But even if you’re only talking about the US between the 80s and now, you’re
still wrong. Unemployment is half of what is was in 1980, and at the lowest
rate since the 60s. Household wealth has grown an enormous amount since the
80s, the poor are less poor and the poverty rate has dropped since the 80s
too. The only somewhat legitimate issue you can point too is that housing in
some areas is unaffordable for most people. But if your biggest complaint is
that you can’t afford to buy your own house in the most expensive cities in
the world, even though there’s lots of places where you could, and even though
poverty and unemployment is down, and household income is up, then maybe
you’re just proving my point?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Employment as a flat stat is useless. Folks with college educations are
flipping burgers. A better measure might be 'employment expected value' where
you take the sum of the product of job X earnings or some such.

Its been popular lately to claim that, because folks who used to have good-
paying factory jobs have slid down the economic ladder to labor or service,
its still good because its 'full employment'.

~~~
AmericanChopper
All of the statistics prove you wrong, so you demand that I produce a
statistic that literally doesn’t exist?

