Hmmm, that's kind of a stretch. You can hypothesise about motivating factors in people's behaviour without endorsing bad behaviour. I sort of took it as read t

Hmmm, that's kind of a stretch. You can hypothesise about motivating factors in people's behaviour without endorsing bad behaviour. 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.