While visiting relatives in Media PA I took my son to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a fine museum and we had a great time looking at the exhibits. One thing that stuck me was that all the guards seemed to be mainly unarmed older men and women or young girls plus a few really skinny artsy types. If I assembled a team of 10 burly men and decided to gather up some arm fulls of selected fine art who’s to stop me and this Viking horde before we get to the entrance and make our getaway down the steps? This was Sunday and I didn’t see single armed guard anywhere.
This is strictly a hypothetical as I don’t want Philly dopers (and you know who you are) to turn me in to the popos. It just didn’t seem to be all that well guarded given the value of these priceless works.
In this electronic day and age, it’s likely the guards are there more as a deterrent to casual vandalism and to ensure the museum’s rules are obeyed, e.g., no photography or touching the displays, than for actual security. That role is most likely taken up primarily by video and other electronic surveillance. Rather than needing a large and expensive security staff, a single, central monitoring office manned by just a few people can more efficiently watch over the entire premises, at a greatly reduced cost.
Maybe not much. The Isabella Stuart Gardner museum in Boston was the victim of this in the early 1990’s to the tune of $300 million dollars worth of lost art. All it took was two thieves pretending to be police officers in the middle of the night who tied up a couple of unarmed guards and had their way with the place. They were never caught and none of the art-work has ever resurfaced.
As a former museum security guard (and harmless-looking woman) I used to tell visitors who asked this question that there is more to museum security than meets the eye. Back then, I was not permitted to elaborate. But in addition, to what Q.E.D. has correctly posted, any major museum is likely to have more firearms on the premises than you would have noticed upon casual observation, undercover security guards keeping an eye on persons exhibiting suspicious behavior, and electronics that will lock exit doors at a moment’s notice.
I assume that the self-sealing exits are what really protects the merchandise, right? I mean, if those locking mechanisms didn’t exist, is the average metropolitan museum really in a position to handle six guys with fully automatic weapons and a concrete plan of action?
Art is hard to fence too. No one steals art unless they have a deal set up to sell it.
Art has no real worth just what people assign to it. Since art is well known you can’t just steal it and sell it to another museum. You have to have a buyer, and since that buyer won’t be able to do much with it, but stick it in his house, the buyer is gonna be awfully picky about what he contracts to get stolen.
So that may also have something to do with it, in some ways art is less valuable than you’d think.
That was the scam behind the theft of the Mona Lisa. The masterminds behind the crime knew that their “clients” would never be able to talk about owning the stolen painting. So they contacted several known purchasers of stolen art, got an agreed price for how much they’d pay for the Mona Lisa, and then arranged to have it stolen.
And which of their potential buyers did they make the sale to? All of them. They ran off a bunch of forgeries and sold one to everyone who had expressed an interest. Each of who believed he was buying the original. It’s not like they were going to compare notes.
And the actual Mona Lisa? The masterminds never touched it. They knew that the likeliest way for them to be caught was by the police following the trail of the stolen painting so they never contacted the thief after he stole it - it was unnecessary as all they needed was for the painting to be stolen so they could plausibly claim to have it. The thief eventually figured out he had been abandoned so he tried to fence it himself and was arrested. When this happened and the painting was recovered, the buyers must have realized they had been duped. But they obviously couldn’t make any complaints.
I’m fairly sure that a museum whose security consisted of legions of ninjas with machine guns would have a tricky time getting art patrons through the front door.
If the masterminds were never caught, and the buyers never complained, and the thief wasn’t in on the scam part, how does anyone know that this happened?
He means it doesn’t have a standard value, as opposed to, say, a dollar or a pound of gold, which will get you something no matter where you take/exchange it. And yes, you could conceive of a society that doesn’t place a value on these things, but they don’t exist. Art, on the other hand, does not have this universal value. For example, I would not be interested in a stolen Picasso painting because I wouldn’t particularly want to put it in my house, and I wouldn’t be able to sell it to anyone else without getting arrested.
Thanks. I looked this up, and it appears the whole story is from the alleged mastermind himself, an Argentinian conman named Eduardo de Valfierno, as told to reporter Karl Decker:
Anyway, the original story by Decker was in The Saturday Evening Post, in 1932 (“Why and How the Mona Lisa Was Stolen,” Saturday Evening Post 204 no. 52:14-15, 89-92). AFAICT, this is the only evidence that the thief, a museum contractor named Vincenzo Perugia, was not acting on his own, as he claimed during his trial.
I think the point is that valuable art is not a fungible good. You can’t throw it into a pile of art at the farmers market and just expect that it will be bought through ordinary commerce at the price at which you hope to get (millions of dollars).