Arts-Art Thievery

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Art theft is a profession. People train thieves to steal prized pieces of art in order to admire or sell on the black market.

art theft

On May 11, 1987 someone broke glass doors to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and removed Le Jardin, a Matisse from a wall and fled. This artwork was in the newspaper recently though because it was recovered and sent home January last year. Who might you ask was responsible for its homecoming? Guess what, law enforcement had nothing to do with it. It was the private work of a small unrecognized London based company that specializes in art investigation, aka the register.the register website

 

This company works in the “dim” lights of the black market. They track who owns what and how to recover lost talent from the past. This company has had criticism in the past that they surpassed legitimate methods to keep the company afloat and retrieving the artwork back. When dealing with a black market, which is full of shadowy business promises to direct clientele through this unregulated market, what is considered ethical? And what is crossing the line?

black_market

When I read the title to this article “Tracking stolen art, for profit, and blurring a few lines,” blurred lines the first thing I thought of was art theft movies.  The black market is an extremely secret affair so a mere 17/18-year-old girl/ boy only knows the movie version of selling organ, drugs, and sketchy art collectibles. Like in the movie Contraband where the premise is drug smuggling and in the end they end up stealing a 20 million dollar canvas that they sell on the black market for 5 million. There are also movies like Art Heist, where a painting is stolen and someone tries to track it down.  In this movie the method the recovery team uses are a little catastrophic but the idea is the same.  (http://www.allmovie.com/movie/art-heist-v318935 ) The title is pretty much exactly what the register does. Mr. Radcliff, part owner, tracks stolen art and when is able to acquire it asks the real owner for a “finders fee” which could be 5% the selling price.

The company has had financial issues staying afloat in the last couple of years. As a result to these issues they have been charging clientele more than necessary for their services and through manipulative means made people from museum registers agree to pay a fee for information on a stolen work that they do not even own. In 2003 they told Musee des Beax-Arts in France that they had intelligence about a stolen piece from the museum. When the company named their price for this information the Museum could not afford the price and called the police. The work was never recovered, along with 350,000 other missing works

So now the question is what do you think? Is this a legitimate business? Should they be federally supported with a branch in the FBI or some other investigation bureau? We said two weeks ago the arts are extremely important, is it as important to preserve the lost ones at whatever price?

the article

Taylor, Kate. “Tracking Stolen Art, for Profit, and Blurring and few Lines.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 20 Sept. 2013. Web. 22 Sept. 2013.

 

Is silence art?

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I’ve never been to a symphony before. I imagine a large auditorium and myself to be a small speck in the dark of the audience. I imagine a grand stage and the singular back of a conductor. I imagine an even grander performance with a loud echoing linger of sounds in my eras. I think that would have been how Yves Klein wanted his “Monotone-Silence Symphony” to be.

In the symphony, an orchestra and a chorus plays the D major chord and stops for 20 minutes of silence. Klein claims that the stillness, a joint effort between the performers and the spectators, as the D major echoes is his real “symphony and not the sounds during its performance.”

So the question here is, is silence art? I think it is. Roland Dahinden, the conductor of this piece, claims that in the silence, “you start to hear some melodies and some fragments of melodies, and yet nobody is playing them.” The definition of art is subjective; I define it as anything that has something to be taken from. And in the silence that Klein envisioned, it invoked a response in the audience.

The power of silence is strong because we are left to own devices. We become aware of our own heartbeats, the breath of the person sitting next to us, and the sounds in the air. We hear something, whether externally or internally, and come to realize that “silence is not a nothing,” as pointed out by Daniel Moquay, the overseer of Klein archive.

But then, if we hear things, is that really silence? Isn’t silence where not even the slightest sound is audible? So in life, are we ever really in silence if we can hear our own thoughts? Silence is art; equally, noise is art.

Kennedy, Randy. “A Sound, Then Silence (Try Not to Breathe).” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 17 Sept. 2013. Web. 20 Sept. 2013.