Unusual Heists

I read about a very unusual heist on Artnet recently. It was an update on a 2019 story. But I could not let it slide since it involves a golden toilet. In this case, as far as we know, no secrets were flushed down it but rather it was just absconded with. Apparently, this toilet was not just gilded but cast in solid gold by the conceptual artist, Maurizio Cattelan. Remember him more recently of Banana fame?

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2024/12/hard-to-believe.html

The work was part of an exhibition at the 18th-century Blenheim Palace in England where Winston Churchill was born.

The working Loo (known in this country as a toilet) weighed in at 98kg (216 pounds) and was attached to Blenheim’s existing plumbing. After just two days on exhibit five men broke into the Palace and ripped out the toilet which had been insured at the U.S. equivalent of six million dollars! This extraordinary event took the perpetrators just 5 minutes to enter and then leave with their booty in a Volkswagen which I presume was not a VW Bug!!

Blenheim staff brilliantly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. They left the gaping hole in the bathroom cubicle and put back the police tape so when they reopened the exhibition visitors multiplied as people came to see the scene of the crime!

This story made me think of what other unusual heists there have been. Of course, there are the very well-known thefts like that of the Mona Lisa, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream and the group of paintings from the Isabella Gardner Museum. I am intrigued by some less celebrated stories.

According to fodors.com the earliest art theft in recorded history was in 1473. Hans Memling’s, The Last Judgment. Paul Beneke, a privateer ie pirate boarded a ship bound for Florence stole the painting and headed back to his native Poland. It was displayed in the Basilica of the Assumption in Gdańsk, Though Italy kept trying to get it back, it remains in that city’s museum.

Xiao Yuan is a thief you have to admire since he, himself, is an artist. He was also a librarian at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China. He replaced 143 artworks with his own forgeries and said to have made 6 million dollars selling 125 of the works at auction. He further claimed that thefts from this museum were not unusual and that some of his paintings had been taken and substituted for inferior copies. Yes, there are thieves, as well as politicians, with extraordinary egos!

Everyone has something they think no one would, or ever could steal. We had a scrap metal sculpture that was a caricature of a dog holding a rifle. It was basically worthless, but I called it Wyatt for Wyatt Earp and put him on our portal near the front door to guard our home. Well, someone else liked it as well and it disappeared! A two-ton sculpture, however, is in a totally different category. Who can cart away a 4,000-pound piece of bronze. It turns out that in 2005 thieves stole Henry Moore’s sculpture called “Reclining Figure” from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, England, and, after cutting it up, sold this 18-million-dollar piece of sculpture for scrap metal for a whopping 2,000 dollars! Wonder what the equipment they used to cart away and chop up the sculpture cost them.

I will end with this story from the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts: In 2006, Guinness World Records awarded Rembrandt’s Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III the title of “Most Stolen Painting.” The painting earned the award, as well as the nickname “Takeaway Rembrandt,” “after being stolen four times in the last 53 years: the first time in 1966, three more thefts occurred in 1973, 1981, and 1983. The painting has been found in a luggage rack, on the back of a bicycle, and underneath a bench in a graveyard. Today, the Takeaway Rembrandt can be found hanging in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, hopefully with better security…”

Keeping Track of Your Collection

Many years ago, my wife and I met Mary Anne Goley, director of the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board from its creation in 1975 until 2006. Besides caring for and displaying works owned by the Fed, Goley decided early in her career to create exhibitions showcasing the collections of the employees. I would guess there may have been some hesitancy at first but once one or two staff members agreed there were a flood of requests to have their collections shown. She found she had to come up with a prerequisite that I have found to be a useful definition of a collection … at least 20 items in the same category or area.

Once you have 20 to 30 works in your collection, be they old masters, stamps or fountain pens you find you need to organize them and identify each item. With my fountain pen collection this has proved quite an exercise since some pens are unmarked and for some, I need a magnifying glass to read where it might be identified somewhere on the pen. Even if you have your works of art on your walls there may be some in the closet or in a bank vault. At some point you will find yourself asking … Now where did I put that object? What was the name of that artist? Oh, the museum wants that for an exhibition, and I have no idea how the artist titled it?

You need a list, possibly with classifications. In the case of our Native American collection, we started out with albums neatly put together with photos and invoices. As the collection grew, we had to create separate albums for paintings, katsinas, pottery etc.

There are a number of programs out there for doing this. I found one online with a free version with which “to get started” but the subscriptions went up to $147/month! As an art dealer I was paying $99/month for a gallery inventory program but I was certainly not making use of all the possibilities it offered.

You must determine what you actually want to get out of such a program without it being overwhelming. What information do you think you will need to retrieve over time. Now here is a warning: I learned the hard way. With the gallery program I had been using I could have been stuck with it. Why? Because if you cancel you subscription your content disappears at the same time. So theoretically your heirs would also be tied to the program. Then there is always the danger that the company that has come up with the program goes out of business. Buyer beware!

Turns out that there is a very simple answer for most collectors, if not art dealers or museums, and that is to develop a spread sheet. I am not going to tell you that it can do all a software program can do for you, but if you find you need more than the basics you can always add another category column later. The only issue is how to create a spread sheet. I had an associate who was adept at that, but I am sure many of you can accomplish this on your own, and if not, it is not difficult to find someone to set it up for you. I learned to my surprise that you can even add images. After the spread sheet has been created you only have to fill in the blanks but don’t forget to hit “save”. Then you can pick the column, such as artist or location, to get the information you need ... as long, of course, that you entered it in the first place.

By the way, should you be interested, Mary Ann Goley published a book in 2020 called, “Democracy’s Medici: The Federal Reserve and the Art of Collecting”.  I might just order that!

What is Wrong with AI Art?

Today I will probably upset all my artist friends, but I am not sure what is wrong with AI art!

What is art? I might as well ask, what is life? In other words, it is a question with infinite answers. I believe creativity comes from the imagination or maybe a simpler idea would be thought. There is no imagination without thinking and from there extrapolation of that thought.

How do we express art. I watch children draw pictures and as soon as they are able, they draw or paint objects that they see i.e. people, objects, fruits and vegetables. Then they draw what they believe is funny such as a doll riding on a cat. That is the beginning of creativity.

As I understand it AI art is created in various steps. Here is one formula:

An artist enters a prompt into an AI art generator. The generator analyzes data to find patterns and examples of what the prompt describes. The generator uses the data to create an image or video. The artist can refine the image with additional prompts.

When Christies, this month, had the “first-ever auction dedicated to artificial intelligence generated art” 5,600 artists signed an open letter asking them to cancel the sale. They wrote:

"Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license ... "These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work."

What I don’t understand is that as long as they are not making exact reproductions why this is any different than one artist learning from another. Even a copy of a known artist’s work by their student can have value. It is not unusual to find several versions of the same painting from earlier centuries. The owner of these works, often museums, fight, metaphorically speaking, over who has the original.

It seems to me that using information about works of art to create something different is still the creative process. It all reminds me of the objections to photography. Photography, in the 19th and into the 20th century was thought of as just a mechanical process that lacked the intuitive mind of a true artist. Further there was concern that when color photography was perfected it would take the place of painting.

Neither ever happened because it is what we call the “eye” of the photographer and the painter and the way they see the world that is the creative process.

In summation, to me AI is just another tool of the trade.

The Arts Under a Dictator

For most of the past 15 years I have written an Art Blog purely focused on the art world. In good conscience I have to continue to speak to the attempt to stifle artistic expression as that is what the man or men in the White House are doing their best to achieve.

An article in Hyperallergic by Ed Simon dated February 20, 2025 is titled, “Donald Trump Brings Back, “Degenerate Art”. For those who do not recall the history, Hitler held two exhibitions in 1937. The first was “The Great Art Exhibition” showing art that Hitler approved with depictions of statuesque blond nudes, idealized soldiers and landscapes. The second was “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art, an exhibition that Hitler curated to illustrate what he considered bad art. It included modern non-representational art and particularly that by German Jews. Some of those artists were Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, and Emil Nolde.

Simon’s article continues, “The president’s obsession with cultural control is evidence of a continued fascist creep not just another joke exercise in narcissism”. I for one have not been laughing. Before the press would acknowledge it, I was predicting what was coming. Not because I was prescient but because I knew the playbook… my parents had to leave Germany. My father was thrown out of University in Munich when the book burnings started in the same town in 1933. If you want to know more you will find it in histories of Germany in the 1930’s when Hitler rose to power.

Hitler had a vision of architecture for what he called “Germania”. He said in 1942 that, "Berlin will be comparable as a world capital only to Egypt, Babylon or Rome." a city full of bloated marble architecture and grandiose boulevards broader than the Champs Elysee reflected his idea that Berlin would become the center of his global Third Reich.

Model for Germania

On the first day of his second Presidency Trump signed an executive order on how Federal architecture should look. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/ Already in 2020 he had mandated that all future federal projects conform to Neoclassical architectural styles.

Exactly one week ago, the Los Angeles Times published an article on Trump and the arts. The article mentions that because of the latter’s DEI directive, there followed the cancellation of both a U.S. Marine Band performance featuring high school students of color and an exhibit featuring Black and LGBTQ+ artists at the Art Museum of the Americas. Under a dictatorship, it is not necessary to forbid actions directly but to let those in charge fear retribution. Unfortunately, it works!

Tracing the current editing of cultural history Adam Schrader wrote on Artnet on February 27, Following Trump’s January executive order announcing that the U.S. will only recognize two sexes, the National Park Service has deleted transgender and queer references on the Stonewall National Monument website. All mentions of “LGBTQ+” (seen on an archived version of the site from February 12) now read “LGB.”

Further, funding for a planned exhibition on physician-scientist Anthony Fauci at the National Museum of Health and Medicine has been canceled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). I am sure that action would reduce the National Debt by some thousands of dollars, but it will also deny people the opportunity to learn about a man who staunched the epidemic that took more lives than America lost in the Civil War and World Wars I & II combined!

Hugo Crosthwaite’s portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci

The arts bring people together, be it in a gallery or theater, to share emotions and broaden understanding. It is fundamental to our lives though we may not always realize it. That is why every dictator throughout history tries to control the culture of their society telling the people what is good and what is bad. Our president joins a line of infamous leaders in addition to the one mentioned above. This from the Human Rights Foundation, “In both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, art was simultaneously silenced and weaponized to reinforce propaganda. Both authoritarian regimes understood the threat art posed to them; their totalitarian systems were built on specific narratives, which art could question, critique, and probe. Today, these are truths authoritarian leaders in countries around the globe still know. The fight to protect art continues, and with each passing day, it becomes more necessary.”

Is the Reproduction Legitimate?

Given: A work of art is an expression of creativity and imagination which, in visual form, is usually an image or sculpture, to be appreciated primarily for its beauty and/or emotional power. Further, I think we can agree that it is better to own or view an original work of art than a reproduction and a reproduction is not a forgery unless it is presented as the original.

In last week’s Missive https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2025/02/exhibitions-for-2025.html I wrote about an exhibition of many replicas of Michelangelo’s sculptures, coming to Copenhagen based on the reasoning that the vast majority of the originals cannot travel. I would think that such a show would be a great educational tool affording the public, which would not have the opportunity to travel to all the locations, the ability to see what an important artist Michelangelo was. A museum might be able to acquire a number of Rembrandts or put together an exhibition of most of Vermeer’s known work, as the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam did a couple of years ago, but this is not possible with Michelangelo’s monumental sculptures.

If, however, a museum owns a work of art, is it legitimate for it to exhibit a replica? Noah Charney, a best-selling author of books on art and a professor of art history at a number of universities wrote an article called, “A Fake of Art” in which he explores the subject. He uses as a prime example the Albertina in Vienna with its world-renowned collection of works on paper. The “rule” is that a work on paper, particularly by the Old Masters like Albrecht Dürer, should not be on view for more than 3 months at a time. Therefore, if an exhibition lasts longer, the work of art is replaced by a replica. I ask, is it better to leave a gap of a major work of art in a show or leave a facsimile in to complete the story; if you identify it as a replica?

One of the longest running art stories is whether the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum should be returned to the Parthenon in Greece. In the current climate it seems quite possible that they will be, and one current solution in the form of reproductions is being promoted. In a December 10, 2024 article in the London News Paper, the Telegraph, a headline, “Oxford-based Roger Michel is offering to replace the original sculptures with replicas that are accurate to a fraction of a millimetre”. Roger L. Michel, Jr. is founder and executive director of the Institute for Digital Archeology (IDA). Here is a brief biography of Mr. Michel and his organization. https://digitalarchaeology.org.uk/people

Already in 2022, The New York Times published an article by Franz Lidz saying, that, “Roger Michel… believes the long-running dust-up can be resolved with the help of 3-D machining. His University of Oxford-based research consortium has developed a robot with the ability to create faithful copies of large historical objects.”

In an article for an Australian publication last June Georgia Hitch and Marc Fennell wrote “Using state-of-the-art technology in a warehouse-like workshop, digital archaeologist Roger Michel and his team are recreating the hotly contested Parthenon marbles. The idea behind it is simple — make exact 3D replicas of the marbles and donate them to the British Museum in exchange for the return of the original sculptures to Greece.” The behind the scenes story: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-17/parthenon-elgin-marbles-greece-british-museum/103969352

My wife who was formerly a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, reminded me that the Met was one of many Western institutions that formed collections of plaster casts of the world’s great sculptures and architectural elements for educational purposes. She recalls when over 40 years ago a Met colleague was sent to identify what survived in storage under the West Side Highway and many were in a decayed state. In 2004 the restored remains of that collection that had numbered over 2,000 objects were gifted to the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture (ICAA) where they are exhibited in the Cast Hall at the organization’s Manhattan headquarters. Here is a plaster cast of Lorenzo de’Medici (1526-1534), Duke of Urbino by Michelangelo.

I came across an article from the New York Times in 1997 by Lisa W. Foderaro titled “The Met Pioneered with Reproductions”. In a brief article she calls attention to the fact that even before the Met was built, they used reproductions to publicize their collection. As opposed to the longer articles I have given links to this one is very short tracing their use of reproductions. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/18/nyregion/the-met-pioneered-with-reproductions.html

The Victoria and Albert Museum still proudly displays the finest examples from its plaster cast collection in the original galleries that were designed for it in 1873. The Cast Halls, featuring a replica of Michelangelo’s David, are currently touted as a “must-see” for visitors.

I hope I have given you something to ponder and decide for yourselves how you feel about the issue, and I have not mentioned AI once!