Stealing Art, With Pride and Shame
There are different ways to plunder art, some reprehensible, but some admired. Either way, a confession is usually appreciated. A saying sometimes attributed to William Faulkner goes: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Several others have been credited with a similar phrase — including Pablo Picasso, Steve Jobs, Igor Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot — which makes it likely, and appropriate, that the saying has been stolen many times.
Eliot expanded on the idea, Ligaya Mishan wrote in The Times, by adding that “bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
Plagiarism, however, “is argu- ably the most profound and existential accusation a writer can face,” Ms. Mishan wrote. “For a plagiarist is no longer considered a true writer, just a cribber peeking over a smarter classmate’s shoulder. Some so accused have never recovered.” And yet, many artists have. Ms. Mishan cited the theft from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony. When asked if he stole it, Brahms confessed: “Any ass can see that.”
Another kind of artistic theft elicited a confession recently in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where a library archivist and a bookstore owner have been accused of collaborating to steal rare books worth $8 million, The Times reported.
“I did it,” admitted Gregory Priore, the former archivist at the public Carnegie Library.
Mr. Priore wasn’t going down alone, though. He said that John Schulman, the owner of Caliban Book Shop, spurred him on.
“It was an amazing setup that was close to foolproof,” Travis McDade, an expert on rare book thefts, told The Times.
Mr. McDade said that most schemes like this don’t work because the thief usually is caught when he tries to sell. But in this case, Mr. Priore had access to rare items, such as a version of Isaac Newton’s “Principia,” estimated to be worth $900,000, and Mr. Schulman had access to a network of people with the resources and interest to buy them through his bookstore.
Mr. Priore said he used the money from the scam to pay tuition for his children and to stay “afloat.”
“I should have never done this,” he said. “I loved that room, my whole working life, and greed came over me.”
Another art thief has been less forthcoming after stealing a 360-kilogram sculpture of a hammer in Healdsburg, California, The Times reported.
The giant hammer, at six meters long and a little less than two meters tall, would be difficult to hide. Despite a $1,000 reward for its recovery offered by the artist who created it, Doug Unkrey, it hasn’t been seen since it was taken from the lawn of the city’s community center.
“I highly doubt it’s in someone’s personal art exhibit,” said Darryl Erkel of the Healdsburg Police Department.
A few weeks after the hammer went missing, a one-meter-long nail appeared in the empty space where the hammer had been. On the head of the nail was etched the word “BAIT.”
“The initial reaction was ‘huh?’ ” said Rhea Borja, a Healdsburg city spokeswoman. “Were we being goaded by the people who took the hammer?”
But then came a confession: A metalworker who lived in the area admitted that he had made the nail and pounded it into the ground, hoping it would help solve the crime.
Officer Erkel said, “It was supposed to attract the hammer.”