Word: thefts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...morning after the theft, there were outbursts of fantasy about a supergang of ultraprofessionals, specialists in pinching masterpieces for some Dr. No in a remote art bunker outside Osaka, Bogota or Geneva. Even the museum's director, Anne Hawley, suggested that the robbers had been following a "hit list" given them by a mastermind collector. But it seems unlikely. Apart from a Greek plutocrat who tried, and failed, to commission some heavies to lift a Raphael from a museum in Budapest in 1983, no trace of this glamorous fiction has ever been found in real life. This was more like...
...puts a two-year statute of limitations on the recovery of stolen art from citizens who can plausibly claim they did not know it was hot when they bought it. This has made Japan the natural destination of hot art from the West. But after the worldwide outcry this theft has caused, it would be hard for a Dr. No -- or a Dr. Noh -- to claim he had never known the Vermeer was stolen...
...have been an "insurance theft," where the criminals hope to make their money by bargaining with the museum's insurance company for a cash fraction of the value. That might sound hopeful, except that there is no insurance company to bargain with. The Gardner Museum -- like many other U.S. museums -- carries damage insurance but no theft coverage on its collection. To do so in the context of today's art prices, a spokesman explained, could cost some $3 million a year; the museum's total operating budget is only $2.8 million...
...there a moral to this event? Only the obvious one: that we owe it to the sanctimonious, inflated racket that the art industry has become. The theft is the blue-collar side of the glittering system whereby art, through the '80s, was promoted into crass totems of excess capital. Sotheby's and Christie's tacitly recognized this last week when, after conferring with the museum board and the FBI, they volunteered the $1 million reward money for the Gardner -- a touching p.r. gesture, like a cigarette company giving money to a cancer ward...
...think [theft] is huge in terms of numbers," Dowler said. "What we have is anecdotes about particular items. For example, we know we lost some items on the occult...