Friday, April 13, 2012

Are the Rules of Stealing Art Changing?


Art news always offers wonderful confluences that stir the imagination. The wonderful news that Paul Cézanne’s The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (detail shown above), which had been stolen by armed gunmen in 2008 from a museum in Switzerland, had been recovered by police in Serbia was quickly followed by disturbing news of a new exhibition in London featuring and celebrating purloined pieces of art clipped from the artwork of modern masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg (plus modern art self-marketer Jeff Koons). Stealing a whole painting worth approximately $100 million—bad. Stealing fragments of art worth thousands, if not millions, collectively—good? As much as I can never imagine a scenario where the Cezanne theft becomes a form of art in of itself, I’m also having trouble seeing how secretively chipping away at a Duchamp and putting it on display is art. Are the rules of stealing art changing? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Are the Rules of Stealing Art Changing?"

[Image: Paul Cézanne. The Boy in the Red Waistcoat (detail), 1888.]

1 comment:

Debt Collector said...

You have done amazing work Mike Perry. I really like your painting. It is very creative.