A crime of fashion
Blame Hollywood. While most crime seems seedy at best, there’s a certain panache attached to art heists. The sophistication of the art world translates well into glamorous crime – at least on screen. From How to Steal a Million and The Maltese Falcon to The Thomas Crown Affair, producers and audiences alike lap up the high stakes excitement of the theft of priceless art and antiques.
The silver-screen treatment – combined with breathless reportage in the media about real-life art crime – leaves us in wonderment when we hear about heists. We marvel at what we perceive to be the sheer audacity of thieves who execute meticulous raids to steal famous works of art, sometimes in plain sight; we speculate about what sort of Goldfinger-like crime lord has gleefully orchestrated the deed in order to bolster his collection of Rembrandts, Renoirs and Rubens in his underground lair.
But all this is nonsense. We do a tremendous disservice to galleries, collectors and the owners of stately houses whose family heirlooms are looted if we fail to recognise that, in real life, art crime is a whole lot grubbier. For they’re not being stolen by a crime lord with a taste for
