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Art & Crime: The fight against looters, forgers, and fraudsters in the high-stakes art world
Current price:
$35.00
Publication Date: January 25th, 2022
Publisher:
Seven Stories Press
ISBN:
9781644211199
Pages:
304
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days
Description
A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world.
The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums.
From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.
Praise for Art & Crime: The fight against looters, forgers, and fraudsters in the high-stakes art world
"In Art & Crime, German journalists Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm detail the doings of a rogue’s gallery of art scammers, rascals and outright thieves. The action ranges from European watering holes to the New York townhouse of Imelda Marcos to the free port warehouses of Geneva and Singapore, where works of art, legally obtained and otherwise, can be discreetly traded."—The Washington Post
"The tales they tell in Art and Crime are hair-raising. Some are well known and go back decades; others are more recent and involve prominent international figures. "—Financial Times
"In this engrossing account, Koldehoff and Timm (False Pictures, Real Money) survey the link between art and crime, starting with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and including such recent sensational cases as the 2017 theft of a 220-lb. Canadian gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum. The authors make the case that in today’s unregulated art world, many crimes are committed for laundering drug money or hiding stolen assets. (To this day, the FBI suspects the Mafia was behind the unsolved 1990 robbery of 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.) While most readers know about the art stolen by the Nazis during WWII, it will be news to many that forgeries of Hitler’s own paintings, most of them fake according to one expert, remain a lucrative business. One chapter, “The Fakes President,” describes how President Trump siphoned funds from his charitable fund to buy art, including a portrait of himself. The authors also cover how, when Trump had the Bonwit Teller building demolished to build Trump Tower, he reneged on his promise to preserve the building’s Art Deco friezes and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which was technically not a crime. Assured prose bolsters these fascinating tales. True crime fans and aficionados of culture will appreciate this dive into the dark side of the art world. (Dec.)"
—Publishers Weekly
"The theft of the Mona Lisa and Hitler's collection of looted art: both figure in this tome byjournalists Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm. The book mulls the art world's obsession with crime, stopping along the way to peel back the mystery surrounding a charitable fund from which Donald Trump allegedly diverted money in order to buy paintings."
—ArtNews
"There are so many exciting stories in this book that read like any crime thriller by Agatha Christie."
—WDR 5
"An incredible book...It's as exciting to read as any thriller and is yet so carefully researched that none of it can be attributed to the imagination of Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm" —Laura Helena Wurth, Der Freitag
“A clearly organised, sharply written and engaging addition to the genre of art-market crime compendiums.”
—Ben Lewis, The Art Newspaper