What Canada’s largest art heist reveals about the art world’s shady side
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
He also has an extensive practice that involves cybersquatting on domains and redirecting searches from these artists to his own work. He also trolls for photography online and steals the images from these artists and sells it under their name and pockets the money without paying them.
Eventually, a group of artists found out and ostracized him from the local community. He finally shut down his gallery last week, but I’ve been told this went on for 15 years. Artists need better protection under the law (and new laws to protect them if needed), and more enforcement mechanisms to uphold the law.
Poorly made art gets redefined as a "thought experiment" or "social commentary" all the time by a small closed circle of art snoobs. Think NFTs.
Even forgeries turn into "real" art pieces if enough ppl in that circle can be convinced.
Please no. In the name of protecting artists, copyright law is strangling our culture. Misrepresenting art as being made by someone is already illegal as fraud. We do not need need “style” copyrights for arts. Mimicry and copying and modifying various styles from different artists is an integral part of the arts.
And depending on how mimicing, already covered by copyright law as a "derrivitave work".
> When, in 2015, police raided the properties of Ronald Belciano, a Philadelphia drug lord, they found paintings by Renoir, Picasso, and Salvador Dalí, most of them held in a nearby storage locker. The man, it would seem, had little interest in actually looking at the works he’d acquired.
To go to that trouble and then not to bother enjoying your Renoir and Dali paintings... that hurts my heart.
For a lot of people who transact in art, actually looking at the art is not at all the point of the exercise. Speculation on the art is the whole point. These things are effectively fanciful, convoluted, tax-dodging securities instruments, with only the most cursory nod to the appreciation of art.
Which, y'know, is awfully reminiscent of something else in recent memory...
One of my most interesting memories when visiting Geneva as a tourist a few years back was travelling in a public transport bus near the city's freeport, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) in the world. I was asking myself while on that public bus about how many masterpieces might be stored in the anonymous depot-like building I was seeing through the bus's window. A special kind of Louvre or Kunsthistorisches Museum, if you will.
Basically, either you wish to enjoy the artwork alone, then you have to pay taxes, or you wish to hide it from taxes, then you have to share it with the general public.
This is true, societies could choose to be less free. Alternatively, societies could choose to be more free.
I would rather my society be more free than it currently is, rather than less free.
In this phrase, “someone” are only million/billionaires (1%) and “something” is avoid taxes on a niche, speculation on art.
Not sure how that is much of a freedom to be honest.
Billions (TV show) depicts how these freeports work as well, exactly like you’ve explained. Absolutely disgusting that these loopholes exist…
Note: I find that when examples like these are used, you always get comments saying “Anyone can use a freeport” and “They have perfectly legal usecases”.
One fun thing about The Broad (pronounced "Brode") in Los Angeles is that you can peek into the storage and restoration area where the staff is often moving pieces of the collection around for cleaning and so on.
The movie Tenet has some fun with the freeport idea:
Edit: BTW I recommend reading Priceless [0] by Robert K. Wittman [1]
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Priceless-Undercover-Rescue-Worlds-Tr...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/the-hidden-side-of-the-...
Hype for store of value is pretty close to market manipulation and should be treated similarly.
It won't, but it probably should.
After all, Hunter Biden's paintings netted up to ~$500,000 a piece and I can only imagine how good the return on investment was.
Let me buy this painting @ $500k and then donate it with a value of $1m, net $500k tax rebate.
So much of it is just shady shit using Art as a store of value.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=202...
(There's a great deal of art and artifacts in museums and galleries around the world that have been donated "in lieu of taxation")
It also talks about how prices for art can be driven by a cycle of especially wealthy people being willing to pay large amounts of money for art.
> Because each donated work of art has a subjective value that is assessed by an appraiser and then after a period can be put back into the art market by the museum, art can be caught in a cycle of continuous increasing value, moving between private ownership and museums. When you take into consideration the exclusivity of the market and socio-economic factors that make the market highly responsive to high social standing and influence, which encourages selling art to the most high standing individuals and close business associates, we can see several financial and social results. First, we see that charitable deductions taken from art donations disproportionally benefit the wealthy while providing a benefit of subjective value to the receiving organization.
And that fact that people can donate their art to their own private museums (on their own property), with public access available at certain times of the year, by appointment.