Vanished Smile (R A Scotti)

Imagine walking up to the Mona Lisa, removing it from the wall, and carrying it down the corridor for a private viewing. Keep it as long as you like! It seems absurd, doesn’t it? And yet that was possible a century ago. Museum policy permitted photographers to remove art from the Louvre’s galleries with no [...]

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The Irish Game (Matthew Hart)

There’s nothing like a good art heist movie. A shady collector bankrolls a technically sophisticated theft but eventually gets caught when an even more impressive armada of security forces snare him in a net. Real art heists don’t always involve collectors. Increasingly, art is a commodity for drug traffickers. The works aren’t appreciated as art [...]

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