The Pros and Cons of Stealing Fine Art | Hacker News Reader

The Pros and Cons of Stealing Fine Art

bloomberg.com

43 pointsrutenspitz28 comments

... and speaking of criminality in fine art, let's not forget forgery which is and always has been a booming business. Or, as the ribald saying goes, "During his lifetime, Savador Dali created 1500 lithographs, 3000 of which are in galleries in Monterey." Who knows how many forgeries are on record as stolen originals.

If only 1.5% of art thieves are caught and prosecuted, that suggests it's not nearly as difficult to sell stolen art as the rest of the article implies.

Wikipedia seems to think the real rate is "somewhere between 5% and 10%" - which still suggests it's a relatively low-risk crime, roughly in line with other kinds of burglary, but potentially far more lucrative.

While galleries won't usually touch art known to be stolen, it's hard to believe there are no buyers for prestige high-value stolen works among oligarchs with criminal backgrounds of their own.

They mention it briefly, but it seems more like a guess than a hard stat:

> “People assume that they’ll find criminal art collectors,” Charney says, “when in fact, we have very few historical examples—maybe a dozen to 20 who fit the bill.” Keep in mind that many hundreds of art objects are stolen every year. Those, needless to say, are bad odds.

I'm imagining it would be difficult to rationalize buying black market art in the Western World for a few reasons:

1. It's illegal to knowingly purchase or possess a stolen item

2. Many art collectors buy art to impress their guests, but that's not exactly safe to do with stolen art. So, you need to find a buyer who's OK with the legal risk and would enjoy the art primarily for their own satisfaction and who doesn't mind depriving the museum or the general public of that same privilege.

So, your target market is a wealthy person who lives outside the legal reach of the Western World, or who loves art for art's sake, is OK with ethics of stealing and is OK with being complicit in a criminal conspiracy.

My understanding is that there's a huge market for stolen art where it acts as a clearing currency between organized crime syndicates.

At that point you don't really need to show it off, you just need to come to a consensus with regards to appraisal.

If that's the case, I wonder if Bitcoin or Monero is affecting the black market for art.

Did you get that from reading "The Goldfinch"?

I used to be connected to the wholesale broker level drug market. I heard rumors in a "if you happen to come across this, no promises, but we might be able to make a deal happen" kind of way. I never saw anything like it in person though.

Have you ever written about your experiences in the wholesale drug market?

Nah. Don't really have any desire to other than the occasional post.

I would have thought that art theft looked a lot like high-end auto theft - where the cars are stolen in the high “rule of law” countries and sold in low “rule of law” countries...whereas a stolen car kept in kept in a high “rule of law” country is risky and can probabaly only be parted out...

Even high-end cars are made in series. Fine art is usually unique.

It means you can show off in your stolen Ferrari an not raise too much suspicion, because there are plenty of cars just like yours that are not stolen. However, if you show off with a unique art piece, people who know about the theft will immediately recognize it as what it is.

You will also get a lot more people pissed off. By stealing a Ferrari, essentially, the only person who is going to get pissed off is the original owner. Steal fine art and you have all the art community against you, and some of them may be influential even in your shithole country.

That’s a very fair point - and while with exception of lithographs, photography, etc. most art really is unique, but there are loads of artists whose art, while unique, would be hard to identify as a stolen to us layman - for example Monet painted ~250 paintings of water lilies alone, many of which trade hands in private sales, if for some reason I were to be at a Nigerian central banker’s home and he and a Monet water lilies was on the wall, I would have no idea if that was one of the stolen ones (or a fake for that matter)

Why is an article like this okay, but you'd never see a clickbait article for illegal activities called "pros and cons of embezzlement"? Is stealing fine art not really stealing?

The pros in the article are mostly sarcastic. It's basically a riff on "criminals are stupid". There's also a play to the romantic image of art thieves.

In the documentary Blurred Lines, some people made the point that shady practices in the fine art world (like rigged auctions, fee gouging, and general lack of transparency) are sort of justified because it's just rich people scamming other rich people out of disposable income.

While I agree that the title is less than ideal, the premise of the article seems to be that its paradoxical that people steal art given the authors premise that it would appear to be fruitless endeavor

According to the article it seems like finding a buyer is the primary difficulty by a wide margin. I wonder if there's a website on the dark web that deals in these sorts of products. It seems like it would be a good opportunity to make a buck running an onion routed knockoff of eBay. If such a thing exists it seems like this should be a buyer's market.

How do you advertise only certainly to shady people?

Clearly only 'certainly shady people' use onion services, for example intelligence services, government agencies, technology enthusiasts, drug dealers, software engineers, yakuza, and 8th graders.

I think it doesn't matter if they are shady or not.

As long as a way of transferring goods and payments can be agreed on I guess most thieves wouldn't care who their customers are?

They definitely care if their customer are cops, though.

Not necessarily: My point is as long as the handover can happen in a "safe" way and they are sure they haven't left any prints, dna or other traces, why should they care?

Checkboxes mainly.

Would never work.

People often go to extreme lengths to fake art, so due diligence becomes tough, full of effort, not to mention trust on both sides that the person is selling something real and that the person buying is going to send it back if they deem it unworthy of purchase.. even the exchanging addresses part or meeting in person is a huge risk.. plus the fact that 90+% of the potential buyers would be law enforcement looking to put you in prison.. the patrons would also have to trust that the whole thing isn't run by the authorities in the first place.. and i'm sure there are a slew of other issues that make this just totally unfeasible.

That seems like a good use for a blockchain-based reputation network (LOL)

The thing is that such a site would make the perfect honeypot, so a "legitimate" black market site would have to be competing with police run sites that don't have to worry about turning a profit, and any criminal with a clue would end up avoiding such a site anyway

Seems like there's money to be had by tracking art via the blockchain

What would that accomplish?

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