What Do You Do with a Stolen van Gogh? | Hacker News Reader

What Do You Do with a Stolen van Gogh?

nytimes.com

105 pointsajay-d52 comments

> Durham’s exasperation is not that of some couch potato who has seen one too many crime shows. He’s a thief who 18 years ago stole not one but two van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam’s famous Van Gogh Museum.

Then a few paragraphs later talks about how he also committed his crime with a sledgehammer and no forethought:

> “I just did it because I saw the opportunity,” Durham said. He noticed a window at the museum that he thought would be easy to smash. “I didn’t have a buyer before I did it,” he said. “I just thought I can either sell them, or if I have a problem I can negotiate with the paintings.”

See other comments in this thread for a single-sentence distillation of the only really useful information from the article.

Sell it to a Chinese billionaire. [1]

>Priceless Chinese works of art stolen in audacious robberies from galleries and museum in Britain and Europe are thought to be ending up in private collections belonging to Beijing billionaires.

>Zhao Xu, the director of Beijing Poly Auction, told China Daily: “Buying looted artwork has become high street fashion among China’s elite.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/25/chinese-art-heis...

The article reminds me of a cool vid about ex-jewelery robber breaking down heist scenes from famous movies: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CtWqv0Z3ErM

For those who watched, I just want you I never hurt anyone while committing robberies and I am not endorsing any crime

A lot of big ticket stolen art is used as collateral for other illegal transactions. Everyone knows it's worthless because you can't unload it. But it shows you are a really good criminal.

Wouldn't that be more of a proof of concept than collateral?

A resume I would say ;)

Practical experience? On a related note, when I watch Ollam talk about his pen testing (At Black Hat?) it feels like a heist documentary.

https://archive.md/zNO8z

I'm reminded of the movie American Animals, where four college students attempt to steal some of Audubon's drawings, and realize that the fencers themselves want a valuation before they're willing to buy.

You make a style transfer on a photo of 1880. Use the paint of the original van Gogh to paint the styletransfer result. Bring it to the Van Gogh museum and let them authenticate it as the real deal.

You know that paint dries right? How do you plan on rehydrating it?

And in the case of oil paintings, "dries" means "polymerizes", so rehydrating is impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil

Do you also have a source of unadulterated 130 year old rehydrating compound?

Tokenize it, make a Crypto IPO

Each token is worth 1cm^2 of the painting.

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

It seems a lot of art is used for signaling purposes, aka ostentatious consumption.

In terms of ostentatious consumption, I think the ultimate would be Kobe van Gogh steaks.

Those are Kobe Beef steaks grilled over a fire that was built using a van Gogh painting. I hear the old oils based paints when they burn in the fire impart a very distinctive flavor to the meat that just can't be duplicated anywhere else.

So they cook the meat over fire from a rare burning painting?

Yes. It is a very expensive and rare meal.

Don't some of those old dyes have heavy metal toxins in them, or is that not a concern?

I believe it's less of a concern and more of a thought exercise.

I see. Isn't Kobe Beef renowned for the ethics of it? I heard the cows get massaged. That doesn't seem nearly as ostentatious as much as art pieces.

It's for the even fat marbling. The high grade cuts cut through easily with a fork because of the fat distribution.

There's a great bbc sketch show chewing the fat. One scene involves a working class Glasgow couple who wins 15 million on the lotto. They buy a van Gogh and hang it up in thier living room because the like it. Some thieves break in and steal a lava lamp and cutlery, as well as the painting because the frame might be worth a few quid. At the end of the scene, the thieves are selling the lava lamp at a flea market and casually rip the painting up to use as packing paper for the lava lamp.

It's a funny sketch but I really do like it.

I think that Japanese drawings on thin paper which are today very valuable were used in the past (at the time they were drawn) as packing paper for porcelain.

Hang it on your wall and claim it is a counterfeit.

You commonly sell it back to the insurance company.

The best part? It happened again just a few months ago. Same MO: Van Gogh, Amsterdam, hammer smash :)

https://m.gooieneemlander.nl/cnt/dmf20200422_37766724/deuren...

Sorry for the Dutch article, couldn’t find an English one. But the gist of it is that a guy stole a painting by smashing a window with a sledgehammer during the corona lockdown in the Netherlands. And got away with it.

I’m curious to learn more about the thoughts behind the security measures of museums. Balancing accessibility with “stealability”.

Edit: Here’s an English resource and video: https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/22/video-released-van-gogh-theft-...

Play it by ear?

When this article was first posted on Hackernews the title was different. Why are the titles getting changed?

It is still a clickbait title so i don't understand why the change was done in the first place.

Hire someone to make high quality counterfeits, and sell those .

Hang it on your wall away from UV light.

Paintings are behind UV shielding glass. Source: I asked an art dealer if he is not worried about his Andy Warhol pictures.

Start your own private collection.

Hang it on your wall.

Hang it on the wall in your safe room.

You might need to spend more time in there these days.

Quick answer: They sell them at around 10% value on the black market, or use them as bargaining chips if they're arrested for other crimes.

Clickbait titles leading to long fluffy non-answer pieces can do one.

Don't forget using them as black-market currency too.

It is also used as an escrow/counterparty between the mafia members, most of the time it serves as a guarantee or deposit, it has no intrinsic economic value. In very few cases it's a go-to jail/ out of jail card.

Would this be a better title? "Art Thieves Usually Sell Stolen Art on the Black Market for ~10% of Market Value"

edit: I think I'd be more inclined to click this title than the original.

Honestly it doesn't even need to be that. In the ideal world they'd write the title in a way that makes it look like an interesting read, don't try to trick me into clicking. It doesn't neccesarily have to have the info in the title, I know they've got folks to pay and that.

A question title? I'll always try to answer it in the comments if I've got the time. I find it funny to do so, and it helps others.

Question titles are just lazy journalism, then to go on to ask for money to read the article. Haha. No.

"What do you do with a stolen van Gogh? This thief knows"

https://artdaily.com/news/124021/What-do-you-do-with-a-stole...

What's the point of posting a link to an article that a significant fraction of the public will not be able to read?

Wouldn't it be better to create a précis and post that instead?

Or better yet, we could not post articles that give fame to a thief.

Disable javascript on the site using uBlock origin to bypass the paywall.

I think archive.is still archives NYT as well but I'm not 100% confident on that.

Or you could spend the money to read it.

I'm starting to feel like the people who complain about the poor quality of media and aggressive advertising are part of the problem by refusing to pay for content when it is offered to them in an up-front way. As if the entire world is entitled to open access to journalism. Or that paying for news hasn't been how publishers operated for hundreds of years.

They don't really offer the articles under a payment model that matches my (and apparently many others' reading habits)

They need to abandon the gym membership business model where cancellation is a Kafkaesque process.

I thought it was just me that had a bizarre experience trying to 'break-up' with the gym membership.

Making snotty, leading assumptions about people complaining about bait-and-switch links is a poor way to make one's point. Perhaps you actually do subscribe to literally every site with links posted here; I'm going to guess that most regulars here don't.

I actually do not mind links I can't hit being posted here, where it shows the domain the link goes to. That's as good as a '[paywalled]' indicator.

I do really hate it elsewhere where you can't tell before hovering the link, and think they should be optionally excludable from search engine searches, or at the very least tagged as such - I'm did not search for "media subscription pages".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

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