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Stolen Picasso and Mondrian paintings found stashed in a ravine in Greece
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/Qx5Lz https://archive.is/Qx5Lz
- axiosgunnar 5y agoThank you
- haunter 5y agoAnd they let the Picasso painting drop on the floor lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wfmFsNec24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wfmFsNec24
- axiosgunnar 5y agoThat‘s hilarious
- happytoexplain 5y agoIt's frankly hard to imagine somebody putting a Picasso in that position. Look at the height of the painting! Look at how low the wall it's resting on is! Look at the surface it's sitting on! How is it that nobody there has their intuitive every-day-physics alarms going off??
- Nition 5y agoWhat really got me is how immediately after it fell, they put it back exactly the same.
- jbuhbjlnjbn 5y agoSometimes, you need to be honest even if harsh - the people putting a picasso painting on that space to fall off are incompetent fools who should never touch expensive art in the first place...
- heavenlyblue 5y agoHow much of your salary are you willing to sacrifice in order for police to be able to afford such competent smarts?
- subroutine 5y ago$3.50
- dylan604 5y agoIn other words, the same amount the government is willing to pay you to do your civic duty of sitting as a juror.
- chmod775 5y ago"Local man surprised police officer who makes $15.50 an hour lacks qualifications to handle $100m artwork." Who cares. It's just a piece canvas that derives its value from provenance, not condition.
- wpietri 5y agoYou've confused value and price. Its price may not be affected by deterioration. But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in. The most obvious example is "Ecce Mono", item 15 on a list of botched restorations here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fails-1591327 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fa...
- coldtea 5y ago> But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in. Who cares for its value "to people who study art"? It's also contigent on BS cultural norms. It's not even some objectively impressive artwork. Not to mention that Picasso mass produced tons of them after he got famous, for easy money...
- swader999 5y agoAnd touching it with their bare hands getting finger prints on the canvas.
- scudd 5y agoPuts it back in the exact same position too
- aledalgrande 5y agoOMG they're touching it with bare hands too to put it back in the same spot it fell from! There's an art restorer somewhere choking watching this...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stavros 5y agoThis has been a source of endless memes in Greece for the past few days. We are greatly amused and chagrined.
- klyrs 5y ago> He took the metro into town, changed clothes in a park next to the gallery and waited until the museum’s 9 p.m. closing time, before finding a balcony with unsecured doors. When he moved a door and a beep sounded, he said, he reconsidered his course of action ... "That's when I decided that annoying the security guard was the best way to do the theft, by making him believe that there was a technical problem in the alarm zones," the suspect told the police. So he opened and closed the door several times to confuse the guards. This is a great hack, applicable to probably most human security. Can it apply to computer security? Well, if you've ever been inclined to silence an alarm you can't diagnose...
- alexpetralia 5y agoThere must be some infosec term for this, but I'd imagine it's close to "signal poisoning" - turning signal into noise.
- chapium 5y agoAlarm fatigue.
- TheBill 5y agoAlert Fatigue.
- chapium 5y agoThat sounds more correct.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThe alarm that cried wolf
- bredren 5y agoReminds me of Sentry’s “ignore this until it happens x times.”
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- hirundo 5y agoI think the thief does deserve leniency. He had nothing to gain by turning himself in other than guilt relief, and a lot to lose. Much respect. Prison time still seems appropriate, but a lot less than otherwise.
- fumblebee 5y agoMaybe, hopefully. But this paragraph suggests that he thought the police were onto him before he turned himself in. > According to the news reports, the suspect said he had moved the paintings there in May after reading that the police might be onto him.
- flycaliguy 5y agoHe didn’t even return one of the items! I feel like the thief’s lawyer is very happy about this story being leaked like this.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoIt kinda depends; did he steal it for himself or was it "to order", in which case it depends on whether he can help convict the bigger fry. Was it damaged? Etc. Motivation matters a lot in a case like this, I think, and of course damages because a lot of money has been spent on police and museum investigation, possibly insurance money, restoration, etc.
- watertom 5y agoHe would have been better off framing them and hanging them on the wall, nobody would believe that that construction worker had the stolen originals on his wall. The other benefit is that he would have been able to enjoy the art.
- dylan604 5y agoMaybe he wasn't a surrealist, and more into classical instead?
- kbutler 5y agoHe did: "the suspect had kept the paintings at the home of a relative that he frequently visited to look at them," The article doesn't say if the relative knew they were stolen originals or presumed they were prints.
- Dah00n 5y agoFYI this is a week old. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/stolen-picasso-mondrian-paintings-recovered-greece-national-gallery-1234597228/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/stolen-picasso-mondria...
- adolph 5y agoThis EconTalk podcast episode is an interview with an author of a book about the "Art Loss Register," a private registry for stolen works of art. The economic aspects of provenance and trust are likely interesting to folks interested in blockchain applications. https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/ https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/
- shadilay 5y ago> The Caccia sketch was damaged during the robbery and discarded, the suspect told the police. The real crime. Works being stolen usually adds to their value.
- BurningFrog 5y agoReally? That means some of these heists are staged!
- david927 5y agoAnd many of the "returned/rediscovered" works are forgeries.
- 101008 5y agoI'd like to read more on this. Any source?
- david927 5y agoI don't remember the titles, but there are a slew of books at your local library on the topic. False Impressions by Thomas Hoving is the only one that comes to mind. What's interesting about art as a money laundering scheme is that it's win-win for everyone but taxpayers. The galleries don't fight it, the investors don't, the experts don't, the museums(!) don't. For example, there were two crucifixes made from wood by Michelangelo recently bought by (I think) the Louvre and Bargello. But Michelangelo didn't work in wood, it's not in his style, and there's no documentation that he ever did these works. The wood, indeed, dates from the 1490's -- and that's it for any "proof". There are more people making money off of this than people who want to find out the truth.
- queuebert 5y agoAre you telling me the art market is artificial!?
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- av3csr 5y agoA small follow-up on that destroyed sketch by Caccia https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1163872/the-mystery-of-the-moncalvo/ https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1163872/the-mystery-of-...
- 6502nerdface 5y agoI wonder how the recovery of stolen artworks plays out with insurance. If a museum's (or ultimate owner's) insurance company pays out for the theft, and then a decade later the works are recovered, does the museum (or owner) have to return funds to the insurance company? What if the museum is not in a financial position to do so... could they be forced, ironically, to sell the recovered art?
- doggosphere 5y agoI would imagine accepting an insurance payout might require waiving/handing off any claim of ownership of the asset?
- vlovich123 5y agoThere was an EconTalk about Art Loss Register that covered this very question [1]. The insurance company returns it as long as the original owner pays back the amount paid out with some interest. The insurance company doesn't benefit from any appreciation of the artwork though. What's unclear though is that (as described in the same podcast), the insurance company doesn't pay out the full value of the artwork. The TV show Lupin uses this as the plot device whereby a fraudster claims the artwork is stolen to get the insurance money as a kind of temporary loan. [1] https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/ https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/ @ ~minute 20 Youtube link w/ timestamp: https://youtu.be/eRbSFSZPY8s?t=1149 https://youtu.be/eRbSFSZPY8s?t=1149
- fogof 5y agoThe title is clickbait. It makes it sound like someone hiking in a ravine just happened to stumble upon these paintings. In actuality, the guy just felt guilty, so he confessed and gave them back. The subtitle says it all: > Ending a long-running mystery, a construction worker guided the police to the hiding place after admitting he had taken the works in a daring one-man raid on the National Gallery in Athens in 2012.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> The Caccia sketch was damaged during the robbery and discarded, the suspect told the police. > Mr. Kehagioglu, the lawyer, said that his client was no regular thief and that his remorse had led to the paintings’ safe return. I don’t understand the lawyer’s statement.
- aritmo 5y agoIt's 'lawyer talk'. It does not make sense, but if you are not paying attention while reading it, you would register it as something positive for the thief.
- re-al 5y agoYes.. Jack Ma got to the top doing business in China, but then proves himself to be a bad judge of the situation by making speeches against the Chinese authorities. I don't think so. I think Jack Ma is just a figurehead (like most business people) - an actor that is there to raise the profile of the brand. I don't think he owns what they say (though I'm sure he is well remunerated). All we can really say I think, is that his role came to an end, and he has stepped off the stage.