D2 RED DEER ADVOCATE Friday, Oct. 19, 2012
Stolen art can become a burden UNLESS THE THIEF HAS CONNECTIONS BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
STORY FROM PAGE D1
ARGO: Fiction Mendez conscripts two Hollywood veterans — makeup wizard John Chambers (John Goodman) and producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) — to help him create a sci-fi film scenario that would stand up to scrutiny by Iranian authorities. It’s deemed the “best bad idea” among a number of risky rescue plans. Goodman and Arkin have Argo’s best lines as they gleefully skewer Hollywood’s eagerness to fake sincerity and reality. Whenever they appear on the screen for their comic-relief turns, Argo turns into a cross between Wag the Dog and The Producers. Funny how this goes. Affleck takes pains to make small details believable. Much of Argo was shot on location in Istanbul, the safest Tehran lookalike. The disco-era clothes, haircuts and glasses are authentically awful, and for once the soundtrack tunes — which including songs by Led Zeppelin and Dire Straits — aren’t woefully anachronistic. Even the font used for the Argo title is era appropriate. And the film stays mainly true to the historical record in the early going. Affleck effectively recreates the 1979 capture of the U.S. Embassy by dissident students, who were angry that the Americans had granted New York asylum to the deposed Shah of Iran, hated and ailing. The six U.S. diplomats who escape through a back door find safety at the Canadian Embassy, after being turned away by other countries. But then “69 Days Later” appears on the screen, and the Hollywood play time Taylor speaks of really kicks in.
Photo by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
This photo, released by the Italian Carabinieri, shows a statue head believed to be of the mother of Roman emperor Nero — artwork that was stolen more than two decades ago from the ruins of Pompeii. The announcement on Thursday from the Carabinieri in the northern Italian city of Piacenza said a professional art trafficker had tried to sell the work but it was too well known to attract buyers. Nero’s mother, Agrippina the Younger, has been described as a ruthless, beautiful woman who in some historical accounts is said to have been killed by her own son in AD 59. Twenty years later, in AD 79, the city of Pompeii was destroyed by a volcanic eruption from nearby Mount Vesuvius. of $300 million in works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston — the largest single property theft From this point on, as a bearded and bossy Affleck takes charge — under the indulgent command of his CIA superior, well played by Bryan Cranston — Argo becomes almost total fiction. The third act is chock full of thriller clichés, including suspicious passport control officers, miracle computer file transfers (and this is 1980!) and airport tarmac chases. They all do what they’re supposed to do, just like a Big Mac sliding down your throat. The film, alas, is also full of regrettable stereotypes. Every Iranian, save the Taylors’ noble housekeeper, is depicted as swarthy, shifty and dangerous. Affleck also can’t resist a quick shot of women in hijabs eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, for an “aha!” moment of hypocritical Iranians embracing American culture. Should we expect anything else from Hollywood, which is in the business of distorting the truth to sell as escapism? Affleck has learned his lessons well. He transforms the Canadian Caper into an exciting American con job, with a Hollywood ending better than the real-life Hollywood ending, truth be damned. He’s mindful of that famous quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Argo’s legend will be taken as fact by many people, Canadians among them. But Affleck has at least changed an offensive postscript, seen at the film’s TIFF premiere, which implied that Canada and Taylor had taken false credit for the rescue. Pass the popcorn, and for anybody who still wants to quibble over the historical details, Affleck’s film has a catchphrase for you: “Argo f--- yourself!”
ever. The case is unsolved and none of the 12 paintings has been recovered. “It’s easy to steal artwork, and that’s
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PARIS — The burglars dashed out the back door with seven masterworks, then sped on screeching tires into the night. Now comes the hard part: The thieves have to unload the paintings, instantly recognizable pieces by Picasso, Matisse and Monet worth millions. If the thieves who robbed Rotterdam’s Kunsthal exhibition this week don’t have a plan, the stolen art could quickly become a burden. Paintings, sculptures and other cultural treasures can be hard to match with a buyer willing to overlook questionable provenance. Just ask the trafficker who lucklessly tried for 20 years to sell a statue head of Nero’s mother stolen from Pompeii before its recovery was announced on Thursday. But, experts say for criminals with connections, it’s a low-risk, high-reward job, especially for lesser known pieces. Art theft is the third most lucrative crime in the world, after drugs and illicit arms sales, according to Interpol and the FBI. Films glamorize it, and the punishment for those who are caught is too light to be much of a deterrent. Stolen art disappears into the underworld quickly. Much of it is never found. Paintings have been buried, stashed in storage units, given as gifts to the unwitting, traded for drugs, held for ransom, hung on the walls of criminals, and sold on eBay. Straight cash transactions appear to be rare — at least for high-profile thefts like the one in Rotterdam. Anyone legitimate enough to demand where a painting came from is going to come across it in news stories and databases of stolen artwork. “We either see artwork being recovered very quickly after the theft or decades later, very little in-between,” said Chris Marinello, executive director of the Art Loss Register, whose job it is to track stolen art after the police trail has run cold. But it’s been 22 years since the theft
why you see it happen, but it’s not easy to sell it. You steal a car, you steal a watch, there’s a market for that. You steal a Rembrandt, you steal a Picasso . It’s too recognizable,” said Geoffrey Kelly, the FBI agent leading the Gardner investigation. That means many stolen works end up getting dumped. Five works stolen from the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 2010 may be gone forever. According to one French report, the thieves couldn’t quickly resell the works and their fence panicked after a series of arrests, destroying the canvases and throwing away the remains — a Picasso, a Braque, a Modigliani, a Matisse and a Leger. In another case, Marinello said, a British woman whose boarder gave her a painting years before contacted him to determine its worth, only to learn it was stolen. She was innocent, an unwitting victim of someone who couldn’t unload his loot. And in Ireland, IRA thieves plundered the art collection of Sir Alfred Beit in the 1970s, demanding ransom and freedom for political prisoners. Their demands weren’t met and the works were found in the trunk of a car. Beit’s collection was stolen again in 1986. This time, the thief buried 11 paintings while trying to sell them. He eventually traded two for drugs and stashed one behind a couch before the collection was recovered. Then there is “The Scream,” one of two Edvard Munch masterpieces stolen from an Oslo museum in 2004 and recovered in 2006. Police have never offered details on the painting’s whereabouts for those two years, but by the time they were found, they had sustained water damage and tears. Not a sign of a theft commissioned by a connoisseur. Despite the complications of fencing stolen art, it clearly can be done, especially by thieves with connections. Estimates range from $6 billion to $9 billion in global sales — a sign of both how lucrative the market is and how little known.
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