What doyouthink?
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240 pages, Hardcover
First published June 22, 2023
When Breitwieser is not in bed, he dotes like a butler on the works in his rooms, monitoring temperature and humidity, light and dust. His pieces are kept in better condition, he says, than they were in museums. Lumping him in with the savages is cruel and unfair. Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.
Anne-Catherine would never consider stealing without Breitwieser present. Her eyes are usually difficult to read. She seldom touches a piece before it leaves the museum. He’ll use her purse maybe one theft in ten. She is not exactly a thief, but she’s notnota thief either. She’s more like a magician’s assistant, hovering in the background during a trick, making sure the overly curious are gently diverted. She also reins in, when necessary, her boyfriend’s exuberance, and occasionally aids him.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or maybe not. In 2011, Semir Zeki, a professor of neuroscience at University College London, used MRI scanners to track neural activity in the brain, deciphering the power of attraction. He discovered the exact place, he announced, from which all aesthetic reactions flow — a pea-sized lobe located behind the eyes. Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital-frontal cortex of the beholder.
Directors of small-budget museums don’t like to talk about security, but these institutions, rather than allocating funds for the latest protection measures, such as tracking devices as thin as threads that can be sewn into canvases, instead almost always opt to acquire more art. New works, not better security, draw crowds.
The story of art, Breitwieser says, is a story of stealing. Egyptian papyri from the early written age decry the menace of tomb raiders. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, in 586 BC, hauled off from Jerusalem the Ark of the Covenant. The Persians plundered the Babylonians, the Greeks raided the Persians, the Romans robbed the Greeks. The Vandals binged on the riches of Rome…Each pilfered work represents another reason he steals, Breitwieser says, and everyone in the art world is a thief in some way. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he expects others will. Some grab works by wiring cash to a dealer; he acquires pieces with a Swiss Army knife. At the very least, he’s a formidable rogue in the art world’s eternal den of iniquity. And perhaps when all is said and done, this is his dream, he will be written into the story of art as a hero.