Dutch museum says van Gogh painting stolen in overnight raid
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
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!
... until it's stolen again and the cycle repeats. Sure, it might take a few generations, but it will come around again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anyone's in London after the lock-down is over then it's well worth a few hours.
No cheers to the art thieves - go do something useful with your lives.
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.
Art is actually a wealth store so that the rich can trade money between themselves without tracking.
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.
https://mobile.twitter.com/eastwes/status/674628837481820160...
[1] Sadly, fictional.
Who finances something like this?
I have to imagine the robbers knew they had a buyer before they executed the theft.
I mean... you can't just steal a Van Gogh and then, only after, start ask around for who's in the market for a painting, right?
You can't exactly post it on Craigslist or OfferUp.
Imagine something like this had a buyer before it even started, right?
Theft: almost as good for the reputation of art as the death of the artist.
It might be the theft which made it generally known and iconic even among people who don't care about art.
To this, and to the greater question touched upon by others in this thread - what is art for? - I recommend a film titled The Art of the Steal.
(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.)
art theft also makes for good journalism (about the same theft, heist story) https://www.nrc.nl/kunsthal-en/
and its still profitable, for people who are good at it. https://www.gq.com/story/secrets-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-...
war is a little different, but leads to similar results https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/04/degenerate-art-corne...
finally, not so much direct theft, but Art World Satan (his own self curated image) Stefan Simchowitz is interesting in his own right, buying up all of someones paintings before they are famous, and flipping them, once he hypes them up enough as the next big thing. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-art-worlds-p... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/is-silicon-valley-de... https://hyperallergic.com/452852/the-notorious-stefan-simcho... https://hyperallergic.com/172910/stefan-simchowitz-isnt-as-c... https://www.lamag.com/longform/man-art-gallery-owners-love-h... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-12/hot-new-a... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-06/art-flipp... https://www.vulture.com/2014/03/saltz-on-the-great-and-power...
>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.
one more about the girl whos legs got destroyed in the grayhound accident https://outline.com/LgJMGd
Has that ever happened? I'd assume this would be super controversial.
I think the book was the art of the heist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museu...
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gardner-heist-suspect-rele...
Didn’t work.
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."
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hustle_episodes#Series...
Hustle, S08E02: "Picasso Finger Painting"
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...
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.
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...
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.
well, I technically don't disagree with them there..
> ... and by then, time has laundered their provenance.
This is poetry. <3
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?
> 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.
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.
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:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-30/amazon-wo...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dmeka/whole-foods-employ...
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.
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.
A Vice article about him: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ex5qj4/how-i-became-one-o...
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.
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.
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.
Prints already exist, but nobody is paying big bucks for one.
Not quite the same thing as an accurate clone
- https://gizmodo.com/heres-how-to-get-your-own-picasso-for-un...
- https://www.digitalmeetsculture.net/article/van-gogh-museum-... (probably a bit higher in quality and price, but I can’t find a link for it)
- https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/business/van-gogh-museum-edi... (probably even better, but likely also very pricey)
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/sopranos-actor-discovers-1...
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.
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.
Of course I hadn't! :)
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.
"I love my haystacks."
Great movie.
Plenty. Think Drug Cartel Bosses. Over half-a-dozen in Mexico, Columbia and Venezuela alone. Nett worth in Billions.
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.
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.
Or this may just a crappy movie plot. I don't know much about art.
Why? It's perfect. Cartels/mobsters love extravagant things, art is convenient for money laundering, and they already DGAF about the law.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/3-drug-kingpins-art-adored...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It really is an excellent movie.
And so, so 90s.
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).
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.
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.
Though I doubt Van Gogh's more famous works were on display at the Singer Laren museum...
It was only after moving to France that he developed his iconic style.
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.
Come on.
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!
Hit it Rockapella! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1EIUP8tvbE
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..
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.
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.
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?
https://www.singerlaren.nl/en/nieuws/460/burglary_at_singer_...
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.
But Jan forgot one thing.......
So it could be said that the Van Gogh... Van Went... away... <g>
Depending on your English dialect, people tend to take the gh either from though making it "van go", or the gh from cough, making it "van gof".
Now, for extra points, try the local liquor chain "Gall & Gall" :)
(Not a native Dutch speaker, just lived here for a few years now and spent quite some time trying to get my head and throat around the g sound.)