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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

I fully approve of art theft. There should be honor among thieves of course. You shouldn't damage art. But if a painting isn't stolen now and then, well it wasn't worth painting in the first place. Really, what is art for but to enliven the doldrums of the rich?

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!

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Or the painting gets sold to someone shady overseas for a private collection and it's never seen again. It's not like in movies, there's no romance or drama to it. Stolen art doesn't benefit the common good.

> and it's never seen again

... until it's stolen again and the cycle repeats. Sure, it might take a few generations, but it will come around again.

Governments should finance teams of thieves to steal those back from private collections and place them back to public museums.

Who says they don't? China's likely smart enough to figure this out: https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-chinese-art-heist

They seem to have stolen my idea too.

I can’t decide if I want to be on that team, or just play the character in the inevitable movie.

There is also no need to put "or" in your first sentence.

Stolen art opens up the market for forgeries.

Dick's version of the Man in the High Castle has a good meditation on forgeries.

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.

The value of art is not just the ‘celebrity’ of an artist like he were an actor pimping out a cash-in film. Making a cultural contribution to the arts is a part of carrying your civilisation forward. The artist is valuable because they were the nexus point for many values and inspirations that speak highly to the culture that produced them. Cavemen don’t make the Mona Lisa or michaenglo’s David. These works (among many) stand as monuments to a time and place that produced a peak of artistic, scientific, technological and cultural success. Owning and safeguarding those art pieces connects you to the products of the success of that passed civilisation, you carry the memory and product of many people and imply a bright future for the sons and daughters of that culture by holding up their successes above the ravages of war and nature.

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.

Disagree. I think GP is correct: most of the market value of paintings is in provenance of the physical object.

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.

If your criteria for appreciating art is merely looking at the image, the market is already "crashed". Google images has reproductions of nearly all paintings and art pieces ready to go. That hasn't happened.

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.

From someone's point of view, it was stolen from overseas!

A bit of a tangent, however mentioning 'private collection' reminds me of a 'private collection' that is today open to the public, a place that sat on my doorstep for years but I was unaware of. Free entry of course, like all museums, is relatively unknown in terms of galleries (certainly off the typical tourist trail), and well worth a few hours: Wallace Collection [1] [2].

If anyone's in London after the lock-down is over then it's well worth a few hours.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Collection

[2] http://www.wallacecollection.org/

But we're talking about a painting that was sitting in a museum, stored and cared for in ideal conditions and available to the general public. Sounds like it already fulfilled its purpose, without needing to be stolen and traded around by thieves.

It would be easier and safer for them to trade a certificate that represents the theft of the painting.

I'm bullish on stolen van Gogh shares, personally

I'll bundle these together into a security. Oh and we can sell options contracts on them too!

That seems cool in a movie, just like the mafia seems cool in movies. In real life it's just bad. When millions of dollars are at stake for a criminal gang, people are going to end up dying.

No cheers to the art thieves - go do something useful with your lives.

If you haven't seen the TV show _White Collar_, you might enjoy it.

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.

I adore that people are taking this comment so seriously.

I suspect most people are upvoting because they found it funny (that's why I did). We could all do with a bit of unexpected humor now and then.

I'm not saying you're right, but, humorously, the fame of the Mona Lisa is rooted in the fact that it was stolen at some point. Before that, it was an obscure and unimportant piece that most people had never heard of.

Theft: almost as good for the reputation of art as the death of the artist.

https://www.historicmysteries.com/theft-of-the-mona-lisa/

Leonardo da Vinci was considered one of the greatest geniuses of history long before the painting was stolen from the Louvre, so Mona Lisa was not "an obscure and unimportant piece". After all, there was a reason it was stolen in the first place.

It might be the theft which made it generally known and iconic even among people who don't care about art.

I guess the previous poster meant obscure and unimportant _relative_ to Leonardo's production.

I agree but for different reasons. It reminds us that art isn’t permanent. Also, we need some attrition to make way for new art. Don’t get me wrong, most new art is hilariously terrible, but a tiny amount of it isn’t.

Ah yes cheers to the cheeky beggars...and if they had been caught in the act? What then? Surely they'd have given up their foolish ruse and not injured any local constables for tis' just a game?

Your comment brought a much needed smile to my face. Thank you.

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.

Art is part of a story. Sometimes adding some action livens it up a bit and attracts a new audience. Other times the story was better to begin with, and the action distracts (and detracts) from it.

This was a smash and grab, no style...

Simple and efficient, but no style? Please, it was stolen on Van Gogh's birthday.

All fine art sales should come with a Wu-Tang clause[1] as part of the paperwork.

https://mobile.twitter.com/eastwes/status/674628837481820160...

[1] Sadly, fictional.

Lol. Hilarious.

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?

> Really, what is art for but to enliven the doldrums of the rich?

Art is actually a wealth store so that the rich can trade money between themselves without tracking.

Another example is David Walsh, the founder of MONA in Hobart.

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.

Banksy! is that you?

Or it molds away in a damp basement. Stolen art is usually damaged. There is no honor among thieves.

This is probably the most heartwarming comment I've read on the web in ages!

If you're not already a fan, might I suggest anything by P.G. Wodehouse. ;)

Unfortunately, by the time you catch him, the money has vanished into off-shore banks and the painting has moved from one mega-yacht to the next as collateral for trafficking arms, drugs, or flesh.

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