With fewer banks to rob and less money held in cash registers, those who like to do their thieving in the real world have been turning to newly loaded cryptocurrency entrepreneurs or looking for easily lifted items like top-end watches. Art exhibits now find themselves at the more rarefied end of this unpleasant business.
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This will only add to the misery of small museums, three out of five of whom say they’re worried about their future as footfall declines and costs rise. How can they fund extra security in that environment? What makes the Louvre robbery a “slap in the face” for all museums, as art detective Christopher Marinello puts it, is that if it can happen to the grand old lady of such establishments, what hope do others have? It has already been slated to receive a lavish €800 million makeover. The less exalted won’t be so lucky.
What happens next? The entire French state has been put into gear to track down the miscreants.
The tiaras, brooch, necklaces and earrings from the collection of Empress Eugénie and assorted royals may be difficult to launder even if they’re broken apart and sold in hard-to-identify pieces. Security measures will be beefed up. The art community is on red alert.
But what can it do stop the next band of chancers? Museums will need to be far more careful about crudely luring visitors with the value of their exhibits, as will collectors. Magistrates will be under pressure to hand down tough sentences to deter copycats.
And outsiders aren’t the only threat. The British Museum sacked a staff member in 2023 after about 2000 treasures were reported missing, stolen or damaged.
It’s all very different from the epoch-defining theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre a century ago, which ended up inflating its legend.
With today’s Arsene Lupins having their eye squarely on shiny metals and not da Vincis, it looks like the gold boom has made philistines of us all.
