I didn’t take much convincing. In movies, there is always that scene where the criminal, having said no, changes his mind and growls, “I’m in,” but I was feeling more agreeable. When an old friend approached me about one more job with a big payday, I decided to say yes before I’d finished the email. And so, for weeks, I read and watched nothing but stories about stealing art.
In time, they began to blend together, until I felt I was investigating a single elaborate crime: dozens of old friends recruiting hundreds of thieves, quintuple-crossing each other out of lush portraits, gold statuettes, Fabergé eggs both real and holographic. I encountered lots of art presented as a symbol for sex or a metaphor for immortality, but not enough art presented as worthwhile for its own sake. I met people who seemed constitutionally incapable of standing in front of a beautiful object without having a flashback. I saw champagne flutes, dinner jackets, rakishly raised eyebrows. I caught Faye Dunaway playing one thief’s lover and moonlighting as another’s therapist. I heard the words “Don’t you fart!” and wrote them down in the solemn certainty that they were destined to appear in my article.
The occasion for all this was Artifacts, a novel by Natalie Lemle, out in May, about a thirtysomething woman who gets herself into some glamorous trouble concerning an ancient Roman cup and the Calabrian mob. But the real occasion was: It’s the 21st century. Art thefts, real and fictional, are rarely less than a subject du jour. As I write this, the French police have yet to determine what happened to the jewels snatched from the Louvre last fall; there are not one but two Ocean’s movies in production; a Renoir, a Matisse, and a Cézanne have gone missing from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Parma; and Dan Brown’s research team is surely toiling away at another upper-lowbrow treasure hunt. Centuries from now, historians of our era will study footage of Vincent Cassel breakdancing through the Villa Borghese and wonder what was going on with us.
I was in it for the money, obviously, but not just. In these kinds of stories, the main characters usually have some abstract motive to distinguish them from common crooks. Mine was a question that’s been bothering me more than usual of late: How can a country that’s world famous for philistinism care so much about possessing art—care to the point where the people are willing to spend billions of dollars on beautiful objects and billions more on entertainment about stealingthem? It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars.
IF YOU ARE A fictional character and youhappen to be stealing art, odds are excellent that you’re in a heist movie. At this point, the genre is so famous, and mocked, that plumbing it for serious lessons about art and the art market may seem quixotic. Before I took this assignment, I knew How to Steal a Million (1966) was directed by William Wyler and starred Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. Nobody bothered to tell me it’s one of the triumphs of postmodern American cinema. Am I exaggerating this film’s true value? Silly question—if How to Steal a Million is about anything, it’s about how “true value” doesn’t exist. Naturally, the first scene is set at an auction.
It’s almost too perfect that in this early trendsetter—the one so many art-robbery films have robbed—people steal art not because it’s valuable but because it’s worthless. The jovial forger Charles Bonnet, played by Hugh Griffith, has been auctioning off phony masterpieces for years, but now museum officials are running a pro forma authenticity test on the little bronze CelliniVenus he’s lent them, and everything is about to be ruined. His daughter Nicole, played by Hepburn, convinces the cat burglar, Simon Dermott, played by O’Toole, to save the family’s reputation, which they do by swiping a key, hiding in a closet, and replacing the statue with a wine bottle.
Even the frauds are fraudulent here. Simon turns out not to be a real cat burglar, and even the non-forged masterpieces in this movie are bogus paintings commissioned by 20th Century Fox. “A superb Rembrandt!” Simon yells while scoping out the museum. Well … no—it looks a little like Portrait of Jacob Trip (c. 1661), assuming the Dutchman hated impasto and sawed away one of the sides. In other words, artworks in How to Steal a Million are either knockoffs or they’re knockoff knockoffs, which seems only appropriate for a Paris-set film in which nobody sounds French, starring a Belgian and an Irish-Scot who became movie stars by affecting posh British accents. Look for reality under the surface of an art heist movie and you find further layers of bullshit.
The final twist in How to Steal a Million: Bullshit sells. Simon gives the statue to the gormless American collector Davis Leland, played by Eli Wallach, in exchange for a small fortune and the promise that it never be exhibited. Value is a function of certainty, not quality, and thus, as with fairies in Peter Pan or NFTs in 2021, people’s belief that something is real makes it so.
These new, gamey art heist stories seem haunted by their glamorous predecessors. As Willem Dafoe attempts to rob a New York penthouse in Inside, you might compare him to Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean, neither of whom was ever reduced to licking the inside of a freezer for sustenance. Certain critics dismissed Vasilis Katsoupis’s Ballardian debut feature as a heavy-handed parable, but if anything, it’s terrifyingly literal: The burglar breaks into a Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s apartment, gets locked inside, and spends the next few months enduring tooth decay and a broken leg while artworks by Fontana and Clemente smirk down from the walls, reminding him they’re ageless and he’s not. The presence of a photograph of Maurizio Cattelan’s A Perfect Day (1999), from the time the artist duct-taped his gallerist to the wall for a day, adds bitter ironies to an already acrid affair, particularly if you’re familiar with the artist’s other work. If this burglar wanted millions of dollars, why did he bother breaking into a penthouse? Couldn’t he just … tape a banana to the wall and sell it for $6 million?
“Now what?”—the question most heist films avoid at all costs—is, in Inside, the only question. It’s an anti-trope of this growing anti-genre: Getting your hands on the goods is the breezy part, over in a few minutes; everything else is lingered on with the same taut attention Wyler once devoted to stealing a fake Cellini. In Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, the slacker carpenter JB Mooney lifts some nice Arthur Doves from the nonexistent Framingham Museum of Art and then spends the next hour hiding the goods in a farmhouse, lying to his family, lying to the cops, running from the cops, and trying to flee the country. The year is 1970. It is remarkably easy to leave a museum with a valuable painting but harder to avoid a bludgeoning, even if you happen to look like Josh O’Connor.
Mooney is no political agent. There are times when Reichardt makes him seem like the only young person in seventies America who wasn’t. Just because you’re apolitical doesn’t mean it’s not a corrupt world. Call this the final twist—the final double-cross, even—of these quietly furious films: The thief is no Robin Hood, but his amorality only draws attention to the sociopathy all around him. At the end of The Mastermind, we’re reminded of what the little brat has spent 110 minutes ignoring: While he’s been trying to get away with theft, Americans in uniform have been getting away with murder (that a street sign in this film’s final shot says “Watts” cannot be a coincidence).
Sooner or later, it will occur to anyone watching Inside that a dozen homeless kids could be sleeping in this empty penthouse, dining for free on the proceeds of a single Cattelan—obscenities at least as queasy as the sight of Willem Dafoe eating dog food. Contempt and desire, the same old art-heist emotions, have gotten more violently mixed than ever. In the final scene, the thief piles dozens of sculptures and paintings into a huge mound and climbs to freedom, or possibly death. He leaves behind a message for the architect who owns the place: “I’m sorry if I destroyed it, but maybe it needed to be destroyed.” Yes, maybe. But he saves a few artworks on his way out.
Read the full article by By Jackson Arn
