Art Heists Are Sexy
From The Star this morning: "Three armed men in ski masks stole four paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth US$163.2 million from a Zurich museum in one of Europe's largest ever art heists, police said Monday."
My immediate thought: "Awesome!"
I suppose art historians probably shouldn't endorse art theft, especially art historians who lamented the looting of Tell Asmar only a few months back. But there's something sexy about stealing masterpieces from public galleries, and it probably has a lot to do with The Thomas Crown Affair (the 1968 version or the 1999 one, whatever you prefer). A quick perusal of wikipedia informed me that the character of Thomas Crown was based on a real person, a Belgian aristocrat named Tomas Van Der Heijden who stole seven Renoir paintings from the Louvre in 1961. I can't find any photos of him online, but I'm absolutely positive that he was a total hottie.
Maybe it's also okay because the artworks are usually recovered. When the Mona Lisa was stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911, it sat under his bed for two years before he tried to sell it and was caught. Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna were stolen in 2004 and recovered in 2006 with minimal water damage and scratches. Okay, so maybe the artworks aren't usually recovered: Jan Vermeer's The Concert was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and is still missing. Though the AGO recovered five stolen Henry Moore statues in 2005 after only a two-week absence, his Reclining Figure LH608 was stolen from Perry Green, Hertfordshire in the same year and is feared to have been melted down for scrap metal. So...that sucks. Maybe art heists aren't so sexy after all.
But they're still kind of sexy. I'd date you if you were an art thief is what I'm saying.