The art of stealing
nrc.nl
nrc.nl
There is.
And even if there were some Bond villain waiting to get his hands on a Picasso for his mountain lair, the smash-and-grab art thieves suddenly realize they don't have the connections to find such people.
It would probably help if there were less insane hype about art prices in the culture generally, but at this point the ever-increasing valuations of these works is what keeps certain segments of the secondary market alive (and on significantly thinner margins than most people imagine).
Seems sorta like blaming the victims. "If only art wern't so valuable, ppl wouldn't be so tempted to steal it"
I sort of took it as read that people who break into museums and steal the collective cultural heritage of society are doing bad stuff and I disapprove of them.
I also wanted to make the point the crazy-high valuations aren't really a good, or useful, or socially valuable aspect of the (especially secondary) art market, and they create a false sense of the transferability of that value. That was mainly as a response to the idea of the tradeoffs between security and accessibility that the parent comment was highlighting.
It would be sad if a bunch of "security" was added to art museums, and as a culture we could let go of the idea that for something to be important it has to also have a millions-of-currency pricetag attached to it.
None of that alters the fact that if you tell people something is worth a life-changing amount of money, and put it within their reach, you have to accept that somebody is gonna try to make off with it every once in a while, especially in a society that closes off lots of more reasonable paths out of poverty or hardship.
Even though I suppose there's more anonymous preserving ways to transfer money now than ever, so it should help.
One theory is that it's not just due irrational hype, but also how art can be useful for money-laundering schemes.
The thieves were still moving around the streets with the paintings on a night without much traffic while the security guards were unsure whether a theft had occurred. Had the police begun canvassing the area immediately, they likely would have been caught or at least become suspects immediately. Instead of weeks later.
I was convinced the guards in the modern art section were there to keep the janitors from tossing the modern art into the trash bins.
IMNSHO if most 5 year old can do it, it's not art.
If you insist it is art, fine, it is very shitty art. Very good confidence trick though!
I mean, just look at Fountain by Duchamp. The "Skill" isn't in the production of the object involved, it's in the wit or thought of the artist.
1: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/14/famous-urinal-fountain-...
You might watch a grandmaster chess game and think that you could make those moves. Or perhaps you see a solution to a traveling salesman decision problem and think "it's easy to see there exists a path that short". But in both cases you're mistaken. The moves you would have played wouldn't be as good as the grandmaster's. The path you would find wouldn't be as short. And the paint splotches you would throw on the canvas wouldn't look as compelling.
Yes, there does exist shitty "art"--things that you or your 5 year old could have done. But I suspect it's less common than you think.
You can often hear this with statements like, "Picasso just drew cubes! Anyone can do that!"
Yes, anyone can do that.
There was a guard near it, too, watching me, making sure I didn't approach closer than a line taped on the floor.
I could almost hear the artist laughing at the gullibility of the modern art patrons.
It's just like nice furniture. I could saw up some lumber and nail it together, but nobody would ever look at it and throw money at me. Nice furniture takes years of learning to figure out how to make it.
http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/putzfrau-zerstoert-kunstwerk-...
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/galerie-sala-murat-in-bari-re...
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/weggeschrubbte-k...
So your assumption might not be so crazy after all.
Another place had literal garbage as part of the exhibits in a room. Refuse scattered around small partial scenes of rooms, with no physical divider between you and it, and really no set path through some of it.
I saw a work of "modern art" on the television once, it was a rectangular canvas with small torn-off squares glued to it in rows and columns. Each rectangle was painted a slightly different shade of green, and each one had a (different) number on it. I thought it was crap. Then the artist explained what it meant to him:
He had been in Vietnam, and was still coping with the fact that he made it out alive when so many others, just like him and equally deserving, hadn't made it. The khaki-coloured rectangles represented the soldiers who had been killed, and the numbers highlighted the randomness of their living or being killed.
I didn't think it was crap after hearing that.
The common thread is poor people turning euros into cents, which is to say destroying something of great value to (attempt to) produce some small gain for themselves. This is a completely rational thing to do when it seems you have no better options, which is why social mobility is so important.
By definition, social mobility just lets you mix up the set of which people who are desperate, no?
Positive-sum social mobility was supposed to be the point of economic growth, but instead that growth was captured by rent-seekers, institutional investors, and others.
It's going to get worse, you know, the pushback from hollowed out rich world economies. Trump isn't the last populist, and he's not going to have been the worst. A more competent leader will learn from the fears Trump harnessed and be far more effective.
But even if you’re only talking about the US between the 80s and now, you’re still wrong. Unemployment is half of what is was in 1980, and at the lowest rate since the 60s. Household wealth has grown an enormous amount since the 80s, the poor are less poor and the poverty rate has dropped since the 80s too. The only somewhat legitimate issue you can point too is that housing in some areas is unaffordable for most people. But if your biggest complaint is that you can’t afford to buy your own house in the most expensive cities in the world, even though there’s lots of places where you could, and even though poverty and unemployment is down, and household income is up, then maybe you’re just proving my point?
Its been popular lately to claim that, because folks who used to have good-paying factory jobs have slid down the economic ladder to labor or service, its still good because its 'full employment'.