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Specific chip on my shoulder because a team of bored college kids stole rare books from my university, tasing an elderly librarian in the process. They made a movie about it and it was anything but sexy lmao

The irony is that a real archaeologist would be 1000 times more excited to find an intact ancient temple with still-functional booby traps showcasing never-before-seen engineering skills than they would be to find a golden fertility idol that any idiot with a crucible could make.

Excellent, just as the Louvre thieves want you to believe. 😉

Tbf it’s a significant online ideological position that rich assholes are the proper owners of everything in any case.

Why not instead working officially and legally as a museum to museum artifact recovery agreements by day, and heisting on rich people's secret private collections by night?

(I am also a museum enthusiast, but I could get behind that particular fictional approach)

Also let's not discount the very real chance the art in question is damaged or destroyed making the act of theft a pointless damaging act which benefits nobody

I have had the experience of watching a heist movie with someone who concluded, "But what was the POINT? What's the good in owning real art if you can't have a little "on loan from the collection of..." plaque hanging next to it at a museum?"

The painting "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue" was damaged twice, by the same person, with a knive. The first restorer got a huge amount of money to restore it. But when the artwork had to be restored the 2nd time they found out that cheap house paint was used to restore it the first time.

Nyamakop, a South African studio, made a video game in which you play a young African woman reclaiming artifacts stolen by colonizers and returning them. That sounds like fun to me! www.cbc.ca/news/enterta...

time for a clever twist

He puts them back though

To be fair he does give the art back; mostly what he does is annoy the cops, which I feel like has some margin in this day and age

Ugh yeahhhhhh

Again. Again.

Petition to make this season 3 of Your Friends and Neighbors

You should check out the TV show Leverage, then!

This is National Treasure except Nic Cage was so good he didn’t give the rich guy a chance to get it in his special collection.

there is that video game @jacky.wtf was talking about the other day where you steal african artifacts from museums and repatriate them store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/...

Perfect! Or a Matthew Bomer reboot where he steals back individual stolen works of arts from hidden illicit collections and then breaks into the museum they were stolen from and rehangs them in their old position I really think we all deserve this!

Indiana Jones and the Ugly-Ass Balloon Dog

In storage at freeports.

“Stealing? I’m returning it to the patrimony of all mankind!”

i like it

Before Ke Huy Quan gets too old to do action movies, somebody needs to write an Indy spinoff screenplay about a grown up Short Round as a phantom thief stealing everything Indy put in a museum to repatriate them to their original peoples.

Depends on the country! If you liberate something from some British guy's collection and return it to the country of origin I think they'd feel justified keeping it since it's theirs lol

Now THAT is a Thomas Crown Affair reboot I would 1,000 percent watch.

There’s a game for that!

Ever see The Thief Collector? About the couple who stole a de Kooning painting from a museum in Tucson

I want these stories and at least 5 seasons of this show.

Send them after Anish Kapoor on general principles

Yeah, the proper response to this scene is

Stretching the definition of "rich guy" but otherwise yeah this describes Indiana Jones perfectly.

Came here to say this!

This is why Leverage is the ultimate comfort watch. Serious mac & cheese tv IMO.

Indiana Jones getting the Cross of Coronado back from the Sydney Greenstreet guy in the third movie

two-stage heist movie Part I: colonial appropriation c.1960 (the ugly heist) [decades pass] Part II: grad student figures out provenance of item in friend's dad's mansion c.2010 and tricks friend's dad into Nathan Jessup-style "yes I stole it!" confession into recording device

created by a Poster, @johnrogers.bsky.social, and is serialized Robin Hood heist/con stuff it's very fun

One of the pitch quotes is “the rich and powerful take what they want, we steal it back for you” it’s a show about a team of criminals who do cons on the powerful (often thinly disguised real world bad guys) for the benefit of their victims

California Jones

There is a heist computer game where the premise is that you’re stealing back (and returning) indigenous relics and works of art.

"IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!"

Idk, I don't think Hasan likely has anything worth displaying in his house

I wonder if we could get Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo on this as a cheeky sequel to Thomas Crown Affair

What if they just steal the same stolen artwork over and over, keep selling it to new rich guys, and donate the proceeds to the museum it was originally stolen from?

You can penetrate any rich guy's security by convincing him there is a flaw that needs fixing. They hire mercenaries to consult. You can hire one of your own...

This was almost the plot of Black Panther

It helps of you remind yourself that all art is political and flreframe your understanding of art to be "propaganda" for a certain worldview, then take a look around and try to see the narrative being pushed by mainstream art (like US pro-militarism or meritocracy).

It belongs in a museum!

This is a good book. Very readable, not the fictional version of how it goes. Don’t want to give away more of the story to anyone who hasn’t read it but would argue that it is for leaving the art where the public can appreciate it. bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

also i might look for an interview with Daniel Silva because the last few have steered *hard* away from the mossad angle. interesting set of fiction, worth blowing a weekend on if folks have the time

If you can afford to hire a crack team of art thieves to steal a famous painting so you can put it on private display somewhere only you and your rich asshole friends can see it, then you can hire a talented craftsperson to make a near-perfect replica of said painting and leave the original alone.

Most stolen art doesn't end up in secret rich people galleries either. It's more often used as collateral for organized crime and either gets ransomed back within a year or two or can't really be moved and is only found decades later or never.

Sometimes stories have good endings though. apnews.com/article/roma...