What We Keep Misunderstanding About Art Theft

Our online reactions to art heists are affecting the way we value art as a society.

When Vincenzo Perugia stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1911, it took more than 28 hours for anyone to notice its disappearance. After his shift ended, he hid in a room, took the painting, extracted it from its frame, and walked out into the night, hoping to “rightfully return” it to Italy. The theft, which lasted two years, turned the painting into the global icon it is today.

Since then, the Mona Lisa specifically has been vandalized and/or stolen six times. While it has lived in the Louvre since its return more than a century ago, the painting attracts more notoriety than security can endure.

The theft of royal jewels from the Louvre on Oct. 19 last year became “the heist that shocked the world.” Occurring in broad daylight on a quiet Sunday morning soon after the museum opened, two men broke into the Apollo Gallery, stealing nine French Crown Jewels—many belonging to Eugenie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III and the last Empress of France. The thieves made off with more than $100 million worth of jewelry in less than seven minutes.

I’ll do you one better: another theft occurred in three minutes. The Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Italy was the target of an art heist only five months after the Louvre heist. Four thieves stole Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Poissons, Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Cherries and Henri Matisse’s Odalisque on the Terrace, worth more than $10 Million.

It is easy to say that it is all about the money. A part of that is true. Thieves do not steal without the guarantee (or perhaps, cheap thrill) of some reward. But as regular citizens, our sensationalist reaction to it in popular culture as an act of class solidarity, viewing the culprits as modern Robin Hoods, might be the ultimate reason why we still misunderstand the value of art.

Art, as we know it, is priceless. It does not possess value until it is labelled, auctioned and hung in a museum or the penthouse of the rich. The public believes that retrieving such art is more valuable for public accessibility than its glass barricade.

Christopher Marinello, lawyer, CEO and founder of Art Recovery International, explained typical motives of art thieves. Contacted by dealers, collectors, and insurance companies, he represents clear-cut cases of theft. Marinello said some thieves are plain greedy, while others want to cash out as quickly as possible. And with rising publicity, it is difficult to sell stolen art without getting caught.

“They don’t always think they may have difficulty selling something, but the higher profile the theft—the more news that it gets—makes it more difficult to sell,” he said. “When they can’t sell it, an item can go underground and be sold on the black market for a fraction of its true value. Sometimes, criminals will trade stolen artworks for guns or drugs.”

The art market has become a victim of its own success. Looting and loopholes in legislation threaten the integrity of cultural properties. Unfortunately, an illicit but legitimate market emerges and coincides with the current market. Last year, The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market reported a decline in online sales to $9.2 billion, their lowest level since 2019. 43% of dealers expect sales to improve this year by 10 percentage points.

Controversially, dealers, auctioneers and museum curators are complicit in providing false papers and certificates of provenance as a strategy to launder objects, making it difficult to identify stolen works of art. Then again, the psychological perception of art as an aesthetic artefact, rather than a historical documentation, might explain why it’s hard to define art exactly.

“There’s the classic heist we think about, but there’s also a plunder of cultural property,” said Kimia Shahi, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California. “It can take us into broader histories in which the thief is perhaps not an individual, but an imperial power.”

This kind of history animates many debates in contemporary museums. The British Museum has a webpage dedicated to “contested objects,” in which they acknowledge that some colonial-era objects are “subject to questions about, or requests for, return to other countries.”

This is sufficient for the largest depository of stolen goods: 900 pieces from the Kingdom of Benin (Nigeria), 17 sculptures removed from the Acropolis, the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, which was then stolen from the French, and over 120 limestone Buddhist sculptures from 19th-century India.

Still, there are ongoing efforts to repair and repatriate those histories. France recently passed a bill that will allow the return of artworks looted during the colonial era, further allowing a smoother process. This opens the floodgates for reinstitution, nurturing these objects in a space where one can finally declare their home.

But for all the other artefacts that remain on public display in foreign lands, technological advances in security protect them. Danielle Aarsvold, who works in marketing and sales for Art Sentry, a proprietary software company tailored to meet museum security needs, explains the fine line between welcoming guests of all levels while balancing items worth millions of dollars. Safety can be a priority without ruining people’s experiences, too.

“The technology is a camera-based protection system, allowing people to draw digital protection zones; it senses when someone enters that zone and gives an audible alert,” Aarsvold said. “People are more receptive to a digital hands-off, completely unbiased form of warning than they are with a guard, as people can feel targeted.”

Unfortunately, technology has become a double-edged sword, improving and disrupting our livelihoods. “[Thieves] are hacking into museum records, stealing, redirecting invoices to get the money,” Marinello said. “Technology can definitely help and hurt.”

Museums can sometimes think reactively rather than proactively about their security. Art Sentry held a webinar with Timothy Carpenter, the former head of the FBI Art Crime Team. He notes that museums often don’t think a theft can happen to them until it does. In doing so, they panic and focus on recovery, rather than tightening security to enhance protection.

The FBI Art Crime Team, which addresses theft, fraud, looting and trafficking, cooperates with international officials in art-related investigations. They also formed the National Stolen Art File (NSAF), an online database of stolen art and cultural property, but not all recoveries are reported.

On the contrary, there’s stolen art that has never been recovered: the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner; Raphael’s Lost Portrait of a Young Man (1513-14) was stolen from the Princess Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland by the Nazis; Picasso’s Le pigeon aux Petits Pois (1911) and five other works worth €20 Million haven't seen the light of day since 2010.

With most of these thefts shocking the public, the meaning of the work evolves. The disappearance has become part of the story. The Gardner Museum decided to document that absence by keeping the empty frames on the wall, a haunting reminder of what once was.

“The value of museums is precisely to provide public service, specifically to provide public access to things that historically would have been inaccessible to a larger public,” Shahi said. “The fact that a theft like [the Louvre] can be perceived by the public as a kind of justice or comeuppance for the history of conquest and plunder is not something to brush aside; even though it’s a false equivalency.”

If museums were more proactive—that is, interrogating their own histories while being transparent to the public about their complex nature—it might create more public trust. These spaces are institutionally elitist. They view themselves as public servants yet slightly unattainable, with expensive ticketing, narrowly curated exhibitions and a tension between art appreciation and inconspicuous political endorsement.

“Whenever these heists happen, journalists call me and go, ‘well, what was this worth?’ and I’m like, 'Who cares what it’s worth?” Marinello said. “None of us is going to be able to see this painting again. We can’t study it. We can’t learn from it. We can’t appreciate it. Generations will have lost out because of this criminal.”

The return of the Mona Lisa cemented its iconic status. The painting is arguably beautiful in its own right, but as it remains displayed in an isolated glass case, 15 feet away, it contributes to the sensation of its turbulent history. When it comes to art theft, no one—including museums, collectors, curators, and, dare I say it, viewers—realizes how much is at stake when an artwork is stolen. By doing so, we uproot it from its cultural origin and isolate it even more, fueling public distrust and further allowing improper excavation of the artefact. If we engage in criticism as an avenue towards interpretation rather than condemnation, we can open opportunities to engage proactively and therefore provide space to critique art theft with thought. Our misconception of art as a one-in-a-million value, while ultimately discrediting its creative worth, is why art theft imposes meaning without warning or respect.