Tricky business doing security in an art museum. Often the art pieces are worth millions, yet easily accessible to the general public. Yes, there are alarms and a security guard at the door but even a few petty thieves can with a little planning get the opportunity to steal. Should art be better protected? It would, however, mean less access for the general public. Difficult to strike the right balance. Maybe there is more security that I'm not aware of...
Sadly one thing most art thieves don't understand is that even if a painting is worth millions to a gallery or collector on the legitimate market, it's black-market resale value is basically zero. (Turns out, not many people want to buy famous paintings for enormous sums of money that they'll never be able to show off.)
And even if there were some Bond villain waiting to get his hands on a Picasso for his mountain lair, the smash-and-grab art thieves suddenly realize they don't have the connections to find such people.
It would probably help if there were less insane hype about art prices in the culture generally, but at this point the ever-increasing valuations of these works is what keeps certain segments of the secondary market alive (and on significantly thinner margins than most people imagine).
It would probably help if there were less insane hype about art prices in the culture generally, but at this point the ever-increasing valuations of these works is what keeps certain segments of the secondary market alive (and on significantly thinner margins than most people imagine).
Seems sorta like blaming the victims. "If only art wern't so valuable, ppl wouldn't be so tempted to steal it"
Hmmm, that's kind of a stretch. You can hypothesise about motivating factors in people's behaviour without endorsing bad behaviour.
I sort of took it as read that people who break into museums and steal the collective cultural heritage of society are doing bad stuff and I disapprove of them.
I also wanted to make the point the crazy-high valuations aren't really a good, or useful, or socially valuable aspect of the (especially secondary) art market, and they create a false sense of the transferability of that value. That was mainly as a response to the idea of the tradeoffs between security and accessibility that the parent comment was highlighting.
It would be sad if a bunch of "security" was added to art museums, and as a culture we could let go of the idea that for something to be important it has to also have a millions-of-currency pricetag attached to it.
None of that alters the fact that if you tell people something is worth a life-changing amount of money, and put it within their reach, you have to accept that somebody is gonna try to make off with it every once in a while, especially in a society that closes off lots of more reasonable paths out of poverty or hardship.
In the article, it talks about one way for art thieves to get liquid with stolen art is to contact the insurance company and get paid ransom money. Insurer would rather pay 1/8th ransom than insured value.
I highly doubt an insurance company would give any money prior to recovering the art and without a solid reason to think they'll recover them, but that's just a gut feeling.
But the media only reports auction prices when they're obscenely high, like in hundred million ranges. Art thefts can get widespread coverage even when they're only worth a measly 18 million
You have a point, but if the 18 million is a reference to this case, it seems the then-current value was several times greater than they were insured for. The fact that the paintings were burned also raised its profile considerably.
It is clear, just from the article, that the museum, and the company it contracted its security to, could have done a number of things to improve the security in ways that would have no impact on the viewers' experience. Just to start with, there were major procedural errors that significantly delayed getting the alarm out. Then there was the inability to tell if individual items had been moved, and which ones... Raise the bar a bit, and it becomes highly unlikely that any group capable of pulling off a heist would be unaware that they could not sell the loot.
One lesson, imo, is the cost of outsourcing critical services, that are difficult to quantify, when comparing the cost of doing something in-house or not. Had the security guards been part of the team working at the museum (instead of a rotating team covering multiple clients), they would likely have absorbed knowledge and had an immediate reaction to the missing pieces.
The thieves were still moving around the streets with the paintings on a night without much traffic while the security guards were unsure whether a theft had occurred. Had the police begun canvassing the area immediately, they likely would have been caught or at least become suspects immediately. Instead of weeks later.
On the other hand, a small museum is unlikely to have the requisite expertise, and rolling your own security is not advised unless you are an expert. I would have thought the insurance companies might be more proactive in this area, but I also note that its exposure was much less than the current value of the art.
I agree. Also, having a security guard inside the building all night long would have deterred this group. You'd think the insurers would do some oversight on the security.
Last time I was at a modern art museum I was leaning against something that was pushed up against the wall. Turns out it was one of the exhibits. The security guard saw me, smiled, shook his head and walked over. It happened daily, he said.
Another place had literal garbage as part of the exhibits in a room. Refuse scattered around small partial scenes of rooms, with no physical divider between you and it, and really no set path through some of it.
> I was convinced the guards in the modern art section were there to keep the janitors from tossing the modern art
I saw a work of "modern art" on the television once, it was a rectangular canvas with small torn-off squares glued to it in rows and columns. Each rectangle was painted a slightly different shade of green, and each one had a (different) number on it. I thought it was crap. Then the artist explained what it meant to him:
He had been in Vietnam, and was still coping with the fact that he made it out alive when so many others, just like him and equally deserving, hadn't made it. The khaki-coloured rectangles represented the soldiers who had been killed, and the numbers highlighted the randomness of their living or being killed.
I sympathize with your view (although with s/5 year old/me/). However, over the years I have come to realize that many of the things I used to think I could have done, I actually could not have...to say nothing of your 5 year old. It might look like a few apparently random splotches of paint could have been put there by you, but in many cases looks are deceiving.
You might watch a grandmaster chess game and think that you could make those moves. Or perhaps you see a solution to a traveling salesman decision problem and think "it's easy to see there exists a path that short". But in both cases you're mistaken. The moves you would have played wouldn't be as good as the grandmaster's. The path you would find wouldn't be as short. And the paint splotches you would throw on the canvas wouldn't look as compelling.
Yes, there does exist shitty "art"--things that you or your 5 year old could have done. But I suspect it's less common than you think.
My definition of art is something that myself, a no-talent hack, could not do in a weekend. Art really ought to take some non-ordinary non-trivial skills to produce. Otherwise, there is simply nothing special about it.
It's just like nice furniture. I could saw up some lumber and nail it together, but nobody would ever look at it and throw money at me. Nice furniture takes years of learning to figure out how to make it.
Oh we're not going to get into a deep dive into Dada, intention, and idea genesis. That's WAY too much to try and cover when we can't even get people to understand that they're just Stuckists who don't know what Stuckists are.
yes, modern art is a love/hate kind of thing. However, I don't recall seeing any news about modern art being stolen recently (even though some can be worth silly money). Using your example we can conclude that art thieves could be janitors but never security guards.
The common thread is poor people turning euros into cents, which is to say destroying something of great value to (attempt to) produce some small gain for themselves. This is a completely rational thing to do when it seems you have no better options, which is why social mobility is so important.
Only if you assume mobility is a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be, if we allow people to obtain wealth from their labor instead of sucking all the alpha into a black hole of wealth consolidation by the already-wealthy.
Positive-sum social mobility was supposed to be the point of economic growth, but instead that growth was captured by rent-seekers, institutional investors, and others.
Quality of life has been rising and poverty has been falling at very consistent rates worldwide over the past few decades. By just about any metric you could find, it's currently the best time to be a human being in the history of humanity.
I cannot square that with a generation jobless, unable to buy their own place or even a car in many cases. If you cherry pick what 'poverty' is, I guess so, and surely even the least of us live better than 13th century peasants. But better than in 1980? No.
Ah, but what about China, and Nigeria? They're doing much better!
It's going to get worse, you know, the pushback from hollowed out rich world economies. Trump isn't the last populist, and he's not going to have been the worst. A more competent leader will learn from the fears Trump harnessed and be far more effective.
13th century peasants didn’t live a much better life than many people did 100 years ago.
But even if you’re only talking about the US between the 80s and now, you’re still wrong. Unemployment is half of what is was in 1980, and at the lowest rate since the 60s. Household wealth has grown an enormous amount since the 80s, the poor are less poor and the poverty rate has dropped since the 80s too. The only somewhat legitimate issue you can point too is that housing in some areas is unaffordable for most people. But if your biggest complaint is that you can’t afford to buy your own house in the most expensive cities in the world, even though there’s lots of places where you could, and even though poverty and unemployment is down, and household income is up, then maybe you’re just proving my point?
Employment as a flat stat is useless. Folks with college educations are flipping burgers. A better measure might be 'employment expected value' where you take the sum of the product of job X earnings or some such.
Its been popular lately to claim that, because folks who used to have good-paying factory jobs have slid down the economic ladder to labor or service, its still good because its 'full employment'.
> For Romania up to now it's mostly criminals who travel.
That's both offensive and unsupportable, and I've downvoted you on that basis.
This kind of bigotry against Romanians and other eastern Europeans, especially the Polish, on the basis of their perceived "criminality" or "they took our jobs"-type mentality deserves to be called out wherever it crops up, because it isn't true, it's pretty racist, and it's part of a culture of dog-whistle nationalism that is quite harmful.
There's an upsurge in burglaries in France and Romanians are often quoted by Police as responsible. European rules authorize Polish to come to work in France and go back in Poland to spend their money. I hope hacker news is a place where we can discuss about these subjects without veing accused of racism. Burglaries are a problem for France and also for Romania. I think both countries should work together to fight this kind of criminality. Polish mobility is an expected consequence of free market and all the short term problems should disappear with time.
I have met many hard working, extremely well educated Romanian programmers. They don't get mentioned in the Daily Mail though, despite their work life balance, contribution to society and polite ways.
> For Romania up to now it's mostly criminals who travel. I guess due to distance
The Romanian diaspora in Western Europe is well over a million people. The vast majority of them are people from low-prospect regions in Romania who do all manner of perfectly honorable, albeit unskilled labor for Western Europe countries. A substantial minority of them are well-educated city people who leave for abroad after university, because skilled labor in Romania pays less than what they would desire.
I don’t deny there is some small minority of criminals, but you are oblivious to all of the completely ordinary Gastarbeiter-type emigration to Western Europe.
Also, the common Western Europe conflation of ethnic Roma with ethnic Romanians with criminals has had some very unfair results for Romania the country. A lot of times those Roma you see – who, again, might not necessarily be involved in crime – are actually from Bulgaria (or the former Yugoslavia), but no one bothers to tell the difference.
> I guess due to distance
You do realize that Romania is well-connected to the rest of Europe with budget airlines now? Even before them, there is a well-developed network of buses that mainly served to carry workers back and forth from Western Europe in as little as one overnight journey.
>>When Poland got the right to work elsewhere they hugely made use of that, though always went back to Poland.
Sweeping statements like this are really unwelcome you know. As a Pole living in the UK with zero intentions of going back, not sending any money there, definitely unwilling to accept a lower wage than a British counterpart and absolutely not living in poor conditions to save money, these statements perpetuate stereotypes about us, like not so long ago Germans used to say that the only reason why Poles come to Germany was to steal cars.
I actually posted that (as a quote) to underline GPs point of "like not so long ago Germans used to say". "Jokes" like this were/are common to bash poles.
Ah. That's reasonable, but wasn't clear from context. It probably would have been had I read the thread more carefully—sorry about that. Moderation involves a lot of skimming.
The harsh tone was because when the real thing does appear, we want to signal how unacceptable it is. But I'm sorry I directed it at you and am grateful for your neutral reply.
But he was speaking of the majority of polish people who work abroad, right?
Not that all polish people are doing it. And you seem to be qualified enough, to get the "better" jobs.
But the ordinary polish people accept lower wages, when they are still higher than what they would get back home.
It is allways the question with what you compare it.
And that germans used to say, the polish steal our cars, was because there have been many car stealing gangs. And the common rassism/nationalism to generalize and to protect the home economy against the working immigrants who steal our jobs. So degrading them, makes it easier to justify actions against "them".
Very common theme.
I think it stopped with the polish, because they got much richer and are not so poor in comparison anymore - and because the nationalist unite against the even poorer people from africa etc.
> Romania is within the EU and there is free movement of people. Meaning, they can relocate here for work.
This is something that people seems to get confused about quite a lot. The legal ability to move somewhere isn't the only thing that prevents people from moving somewhere, there can be far stronger ties to a place that prevent someone leaving.
For instance, I live in the UK and I want to live in Spain or Italy (I want better weather and I like Mediterranean food). I can't really do that because my kids are in school and I don't want to disrupt their education, and my parents and parents in law live relatively close by and within the next few years will need more care, and my wife isn't as keen on the idea as I am.
Also, the residents of Flint, Michigan. The water there is polluted and it is negatively affecting their health. Even though they are legally free to leave at any point and go anywhere else in the US they don't.
When you take education, wealth, family ties and even the ability to learn a language into account there are a lot of people for whom staying put is pretty much the only option, and at that point they have to make the best of the situation around them.
> there can be far stronger ties to a place that prevent someone leaving
That seems to be something that a lot of the HN crowd seem to forget. I guess it doesn't surprise me too much, as a lot of people on this forum have relocated to SF and other tech centers for work.
I myself am an economic migrant, I left everything behind and moved to a new country where I knew nobody. However, it was fortunately easy for me, because I had managed to fuck up most of my relationships back at home, so for me to pack my life into a suitcase and move was pretty trivial. I think that a lot of people here on HN are in the same boat, they just don't realise it, or don't realise that other people aren't in the same boat.
The other thing people forget is also how expensive it is to move. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, good luck being able to save any to put towards a deposit on a new place or to even get to a new place.
And then, if you don't have a job lined up already, how are you going to live while looking for one? And if you do have a job, great... Does it pay enough to allow you to move to take it? I'd say most jobs don't offer relocation benefits.
Yeah, definitely not as easy to love as a lot of people think. It's expensive, and it's often hard to completely leave your support network and the others who depend on you.
On the individual level these people are adults, they committed crimes, and they should face the consequences. On a wider level, though, society has failed them---it's failed to give them with the skills and mindset to do useful work. Some people will always turn to crime no matter their circumstances. I would guess that Radu, the ringleader, would have, but I doubt the others would have if they had better options AND the skills and knowledge to access those options.
To me it seems they're living in a not so nice country (Romania) economy wise. So their country failed them. There should be enough work so they don't have to turn to something else.
When a few years ago Spain had a huge unemployment rate there was quite a huge amount of people moving to e.g. The Netherlands (quite noticeable). If you live long enough in another country I assume you'll tend to stay. Leaving the original country worse off. I'm wondering if Romania might have a brain drain because of it.
Netherlands currently has a low unemployment rate, so additional workers might be ok. But it might not be so ok for the countries they come from.
This is like The Great Romanian Invasion of Great Britain, a couple of years back, right? Because they can and sometimes do go looking for work in other European countries, it means that all of them go, and never come back...
What are you basing your statements on? Can you please define "mostly"? How many romanians have you met? How many polish people do you know? Do you know a sufficiently large number in order to statistically back your statement? Can you reference a competent source where we can find some proof of what you're saying?
