151–160 of 240 posts
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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I've read it's stolen to order. 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, n…
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.
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.
I could've told you, Vincent. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.
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.…
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.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.…
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 re…
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.
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I mean I have no idea what a judge would think. 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,…
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…
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:
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa...
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> 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.
What do you think art is? It's all in the head. Otherwise it's just paint on a canvas. It's not like there's some sort of objective truth to it.
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?