A sublime and ridiculous topic, art theft in media. Apparently it’s not against the law to donate fake works of art to museums.
A Luxembourg court has ruled that Jeff Dieschburg, the artist accused of copying Singaporean photographer Jingna Zhang's work, committed plagiarism. Zhang had accused Dieschburg of plagiarism in June, posting a side-by-side comparison of her original photo, which was taken from her cover shoot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam in 2017, and his painting on Instagram. www.asiaiplaw.com/...
Art Theft remains interesting as a form of hoarding whose function is something that needs to be presented yet at the moment it’s revealed, its theft becomes also announced. There are ‘unsolved thefts where the culprits are suspected but not proven like the theft from the Gardner Museum, and the legion of famous art thefts. It does have a romantic trope for media about some very basic attack on the concept of property as well as some absence of violence even if the story of the lost Caravaggio painting is about the mafia.
Theft from a Baroque oratory remains unsolved after 55 years, sparking countless conspiracy theories
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Annunciazione Terzo Paradiso
The Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto has unveiled his homage to Caravaggio’s Nativity masterpiece at the Sicilian oratory where the 17th-century work was cut from its frame and stolen more than 50 years ago.
At midnight on Christmas Eve, Arte Povera pioneer Pistoletto unveiled his interpretation of Caravaggio’s painting Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis of Assisi (1600) at the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily.
On 18 October 1969, thieves cut the Caravaggio canvas from its frame with a razor, rolled it up and fled. The passage of time and the endless versions of events offered by informers and pseudo-detectives have taken over the inquiries, while the actual fate of the Nativity remains shrouded in mystery.
Pistoletto’s work in the oratory, a signature mirror piece, shows the angel depicted in the original Caravaggio painting; in the new version however, angel’s scroll has been replaced by the symbol of the Third Paradise which comes from the sign of mathematical infinity. The mirror creates an image within an image by reflecting the depiction of The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence on the opposite wall of the oratory by Giacomo Serpotta.
www.theartnewspaper.com/…
Caravaggio Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis of Assisi (1600)
Shortly after being established earlier this year in 2015 May, the Sky Arts hub commissioned a meticulous high-tech reproduction of the painting and at the same time started production on a documentary titled “Operation Caravaggio – Mystery of the Lost Caravaggio.”
The docu is about the various hypothesis behind the theft, the origins of the masterpiece painted by Caravaggio in 1609 after he fled to Sicily after killing another artist in a duel, and also how the certified copy was made by Factum Arte, a Madrid-based company known for making hi-tech facsimiles of major artworks including the tomb of Tutankhamun.
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NOTABLE ART SWINDLERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The Scam: This notorious Frenchman stole at least 239 works from 172 museums throughout Europe between 1995 to 2001. Consistency was his skill: Supposedly he robbed an artwork every 15 days or so, often with the help of his former girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss, who would stand as lookout as he removed paintings from their frames. What makes Breitwieser so intriguing is that his thieving lacked any financial necessity. Instead, he saw himself as something of a connoisseur, with a taste especially for 16th- and 17th-century works. His most expensive pinched painting was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sybille, Princess of Cleves, which was estimated to be valued at £5-£5.6 million.
Stéphane Breitwieser
How He Got Caught: He couldn’t quit while he was ahead. In November of 2001, Breitwieser filched a 16th-century bugle, of which only three are known to exist, from the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne, but a guard spotted him before he escaped. Seemingly insatiable, Breitwieser returned to the museum just two days later. A journalist named Erich Eisner happened to be walking his dog by the museum and, when he noticed a man who seemed out of place, surveying the museum, he alerted the very same guard who had spied Breitwieser a few days before. He was arrested in Switzerland, but it took authorities several weeks to get a search warrant for his home in France and in that time the thief’s spooked mother apparently destroyed a number of works, for which she was ultimately served just over 2 years in prison.
Where He Is Now: Breitweiser would wind up spending two years in prison Switzerland before being extradited to France, where in 2005 he would be sentenced to an additional three years by a court in Strasbourg. After he was released he wrote an autobiography of his exploits called Confessions of an Art Thief. But even that publishing success couldn’t satisfy his thirst for theft and in 2011, police discovered 30 stolen works in his home, landing him in prison for three more years. And just this past February he was arrested once again, this time in relation to a 19th-century paperweight he tried to sell on eBay.
news.artnet.com/...
the endless problem of plagiarism
