> thoroughly examined the contents of paper recycling dumpsters used by the cleaning crew.
I've seen comments elsewhere noting how German it supposedly is to examine the paper dumpsters only, and to actually be right about it.
So to nip this in the bud, let me state for the record that these are mediocre Germans at best: Oil-on-canvas does not belong in the paper recycling. They should have separated the cardboard box and properly disposed the painting as refuse.
Edit: extremely embarrassing typo corrected (see responses if you really have to know). I was going for self-deprecation, which has traditionally worked out to be less painful than this for post-war Germany. Clearly, I'm mediocre at best myself.
I’ve come to embrace Mülltrennung wholeheartedly while living here. I even left my first angry note last week to neighbours throwing glass away and not returning it to a recycling bin. I think it’s an important integration step.
Ahem! Not every glass should go into the recycling bin. Most drinking glasses would spoil the stock. So if in doubt, anything which doesn't have a recycle sign on it's label or those dot markings at the bottom for the sorting machines is wrong there. That would be "Restmüll". :-)
I should have expected an answer like this ;) yes I’m aware not all glass goes into the recycling, broken or non-recyclable glass and drinking glasses etc in Restmüll, Pfandflasche to the machine in the supermarket and the others in the recycling bin.
To achieve full Germaninality, however, you have to learn not to want it too much. It's really Zen, in a way, if Zen was still and will, rightfully, forever be trying to overcome the industrialisation of genocide.
Lol, I'm looking at this painting thinking: who ripped off whom, Dalí or this guy? Turns out: Dalí.
From wikipedia: "Dalí was also influenced by the work of Yves Tanguy, and he later allegedly told Tanguy's niece, 'I pinched everything from your uncle Yves.'" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD
It's 97 cm x 1.36 m originally and I need to get back to the MET and see it. Also copyright in circumstances like this needs to suck a surreal clock that looks, tastes, and trains an equivocating hamster exactly as a dick does.
Right, at some point "being able to rip off the people who came before you and still be interesting" is what it means to be a great artist. Steal, steal, steal -- but don't copy.
Something tells me there's more to this story. Much more:
1) the value of the painting and the careless way it was handled suggests subterfuge.
2) Where was this painting during the War? Specifically, after 1933?
3) Is it the subject of any claims?
4) Was this an instance of self-help by descendants of owners who were forced to sell cheaply given the situation in Germany, who had previously not succeeded in their claims?
5) Siemens no longer gives briefcases full of cash to secure foreign contracts. But a painting?
6) Israel is a "no questions asked" jurisdiction when it comes to banking. Scenario: a Russian buyer pays $300k in cash in Israel, the funds are immediately deposited in an Israeli bank. Hard to do that anywhere else (maybe Ciudad del Este, or Northern Cyprus). Seller wires funds out from Israel from time to time, raising no suspicion or tax inquiries.
Well, a bit of a different twist on the meaning of "found art". [0] A step up from signing your name on a toilet bowel and shoving it in an art gallery. (Though not as funny.)
Almost any Bluetooth device with a long battery life can do this. Get. Xiaomi Mi Band and the fan made app contains a function to set an alarm when you lose connection.
>An unnamed businessman forgot the canvas—an untitled and undated work by French painter Yves Tanguy—at a check-in counter when boarding a flight [...] He soon realized that the 16- by 24-inch painting, which he’d stored in a flat cardboard box, had gone missing, and upon arriving in Israel, immediately contacted German authorities.
I've travelled with valuable (to me, not in commercial terms) art in inconvenient packaging and nearly forgotten it on the baggage scanner. Airport stress is real and Düsseldorf is particularly bad (permanently understaffed for its volume, leading to long delays at checkin and insecurity control if anyone calls in sick).
In my first luxury apartment, I was paranoid to leave the door unlocked even momentarily to go to the trash shoot.
The concern wears off.
The only thing that doesn't wear off is understanding that you wont get any sympathy for the real situations you get into for the rest of your life. That’s the price of admission.
> The only thing that doesn't wear off is understanding that you wont get any sympathy for the real situations you get into for the rest of your life
If you're wealthy, why would you expect sympathy for anything other than terminal illness of yourself or your loved ones? (or similar issues you have no control over)
Because for all other issues, you can just call up a service, pay them and have the problem go away.
At some point, I tried this as an experiment. Instead of doing things myself, I tried to hire people to do it for me.
I tried a few different things, data labeling, custom sewing work, custom car modifications.
Turns out that the work was either done badly when it came to fairly common tasks or people refused to outright do it when it was custom work. I've seen the same thing when I looked at what happened when friends hired others.
Maybe there's a point where you have enough money to hire highly qualified people. But I doubt it's anywhere below $10M net worth. Below that you're just not likely to start handing out $150 per hour for what I would consider fairly standard yard or other work. At least I'm not.
Or maybe the trick is to hire a supervisor as well. So first you hire someone to do the work and then you hire someone to supervise it. Unless of course the supervisor also does a bad job. But then I can hire a supervisor for the supervisor.
Most likely I just wasn't good enough in the hiring process. So I probably should have hired someone to do the hiring for me. But what if I hired the wrong person, because I'm not good at hiring?
Now I'm sitting on piles of money and I'm still doing everything myself.
Finding good help is exceptionally difficult. It's gotten to the point where I pretty much do everything myself. What wealth I've accumulated has gone into tools, equipment, and leasing shop space. In the last decade I've found less than 5 people whom I would rely on to do what they've told me they're going to do, whether I'm paying them or not.
It's gotten to the point now where I've learned carpentry to make my own custom furniture because I can't find anyone who will do the job decently locally. I do most of my home repairs DIY, because finding a competent contractor that shows up on time, won't cut corners, lie to me, and actually finishes the job is basically impossible. I did all of the work building my race car and I do all my basic car maintenance myself. Even for a job as simple as an oil change, I can't trust common chain stores.
If anything, the "gig economy" has made this situation worse, not better. There's so many people who will put up a Facebook page and advertise themselves as doing some service, and really they're just half-assing it for a what is effectively a fat paycheck for their level of effort and care. There's SO MUCH apathy in the world, so many people that just don't give a shit about the quality of their work in anything they do in life. Finding other people that actually care about doing it /right/, is nearly impossible. Mostly because when I do find those people, they're usually also wealthy and in a different line of work. Turns out, being focused on doing things correctly the first time is valued enough to be a path to wealth, in and of itself.
My brother is a 'proper' carpenter and sadly struggles to find people like you.
People seek him out because of his skill, but then upon being told that it might be £600 for interior door to be made, or more, suddenly want him to fit a store bought one. His daily rate is low, but a lot of rich people still don't want to pay for a job to be done properly.
Quite sad to see people buying amazing historic houses and then filling them with ready made fittings, after tearing out the old hand made stuff.
I recently renovated two rooms in my house and took out the mid-grade carpet that the builders had put in and installed real hard wood flooring. I wanted proper trim in the room and I hired a trim carpenter. What I ended up with was pre-made trim from Home Depot and mitered corners. I hired someone who claimed to be a carpenter, and charged a carpenters rate, expecting, at minimum, that the corners were coped rather than mitered. I own a VERY nice sliding compound miter saw in my wood shop, and I could have very easily taken pre-made trim from the home store and mitered the corners myself, I hired someone who claimed to be an expert with the expectation of hand-coped corners, because that's a skill I don't have.
Just one of several instances where I found out that local carpenters weren't real carpenters. If you only know how to use power tools and have a pickup truck to get materials at the home store, you're not a carpenter, you're a handy-man. A carpenter should be able to work wood by hand. I aspire to gain those skills myself, and at some point I'll probably re-do the sad work that was done previously. At least they caulked and painted the caulk-line. At some point I plan to install crown moulding, but at this point I've decided I won't do it until I can make it myself.
When you say historic buildings, I suppose (hope) you don’t mean listed ones, since they’d be breaking the law? Regardless, it’s a crying shame what people have ripped out of even very ordinary Victorian and Edwardian houses. Decorative mouldings, cast iron fireplaces, original doors, geometric tiling.
He lives in Portugal, where the rules are different especially for those restoring farm houses and villas that have fallen into disrepair, but even in the UK people get rid of amazing Victorian features in houses there aren't listed.
As he likes to make things properly, he rarely takes the 'fitting' jobs - and keeps and restores anything he removes. Someone else usually wants it.
The sad fact is that a bespoke wardrobe costs good money, as do hand made window friends, but they should last for years, centuries even.
I have the exact same problem. It’s impossible to find competent labor that is willing to do what they’re told.
I want my baby’s laundry hand washed.
I want the towels to be dried in low heat.
I want to use wooden spoons on my expensive enamel pans.
Instead housekeepers routinely disobey and then lie about it. And a home chef is unrepentant about scratching my pans with metal utensils. They just don’t care. If it were their own things they would put more thought and labor into it.
I have to get on my hands and knees to scrub the floor after some recalcitrant $70/hour pair of maids refuse to do anything more than wipe the grime back and forth with a swiferjet.
Just earlier this year, I was quoted $795 to run a thermostat wire 10 feet, no drilling required.
Task Rabbit has people charging north of $80/hr for simple yard work (leaf collection, bush trimming, super standard stuff that a teenager could do).
Sure, I could gamble with a cheap contractor, but if they do something badly, it's going to cost 2x as much to redo it properly.
I honestly don't know if I'll ever reach a net worth where I'm comfortable paying people more per hour than my own job, with the possible exception of doctors.
I’ve found that hiring anyone to do anything custom one off as an individual is extremely hard as you pointed out. You are much better off knowing someone in the business who will do it for you as a favor or recommend someone to do it. So I guess it comes down to connections or relationships and if you’re a typical well off transplant in a big city connections to blue collar workers are typically very lacking.
it mostly comes down to recommendations though. you shouldn’t expect to find good help immediately. the gig economy platforms make it seem like it, but its not the case.
> Or maybe the trick is to hire a supervisor as well. So first you hire someone to do the work and then you hire someone to supervise it.
That‘s traditionally what the gentry used to to do. They had a butler managing the drivers/grooms/groundskeepers and other outdoor staff and maybe valets (reporting to the male head of the household) and if they could afford it also a housekeeper to manage cooks/maids/cleaners (reporting to the lady of the house). Plus tutor/governess as direct reports.
Thus is the power of relationships, which often goes undervalued in quantitative analysis. For a one-off job, you could pick the most skilled person in whatever trade to do it for you, with unlimited budget $X, and still be unhappy with the results. Because there is no relationship.
Whereas, if you pick someone who your friend uses regularly, by comparison, your job is no longer work $X to the tradesman but the sum total of $X plus ALL the future business from your friend, who will leave if the tradesman does you wrong.
150/hr for fairly standard yard work? Shit, I used to do 'fairly standard' yard work for a twentieth of that. Or do you mean hiring an entire team of people at that rate?
its actually worse than that, its complete apathy. its understanding that people will feel prideful about loudly expressing their complete apathy over whatever problem you have.
wealthy people have problems, you can make a lot and improve your own network by simply listening and being that service.
95% of the America is wealthy for and compared to me, also compared to the most of the world. Doesn't mean I can't be compassionate about your working class problems etc.
All the problems in my life, for you are a phone call away too.
Travelling from Germany (in EU) to Israel (outside of EU) with something worth 300k - is there any chance it’s not someone trying to hide a big transfer from the German state?
Hide it how? By forgetting it, calling the police (twice), and having your otherwise boring art purchase make the international news?
Besides, wouldn't it be the seller that's liable for taxes? And if they're trying to hide from Israeli customs then (a) good luck with that, and (b) as far as I can tell, their plan was to... just travel to Israel with the painting? What's the plot here, exactly? I'd at least get someone to paint a few replicas and import them as a set.
Or he could be betting on the customs officers not knowing Yves Tanguy. He could just claim that it’s a random cheapish painting he bought as a gift, especially since it’s unsigned and undated.
In contrast, everybody knows what a gold bullion is.
I've seen comments elsewhere noting how German it supposedly is to examine the paper dumpsters only, and to actually be right about it.
So to nip this in the bud, let me state for the record that these are mediocre Germans at best: Oil-on-canvas does not belong in the paper recycling. They should have separated the cardboard box and properly disposed the painting as refuse.
Edit: extremely embarrassing typo corrected (see responses if you really have to know). I was going for self-deprecation, which has traditionally worked out to be less painful than this for post-war Germany. Clearly, I'm mediocre at best myself.