ARTnews critic Jackson Arn accepted an assignment to binge nothing but art-theft stories, and ended up interrogating an American paradox: how does a country famous for philistinism spend billions on beautiful objects — and billions more on entertainment about stealing them? His framing line: “It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars.”

The essay runs from How to Steal a Million (1966) to Ocean’s Twelve to Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, and the pattern in the loot is telling:

  • Heist targets skew feminine and decorative — Fabergé eggs, emerald daggers, Cartier necklaces, likenesses of women — “objects so inertly feminine they might as well be damsels in distress.” Nobody steals Bacon’s popes.
  • The one character who loves art for its own sake is the villain or the doofus: a Bond baddie decorating his lair, or Eli Wallach’s collector who just wants to know the statue is “mine.”
  • In How to Steal a Million, everything is a forgery of a forgery — and the point is that value is a function of certainty, not quality. Belief makes things real.

Arn keeps circling the genre’s blind spot — scale:

  • Russian troops took over 10,000 works from Ukraine’s Kherson region alone in 2022; the Louvre exists only because revolutionaries raided Versailles and Napoleon plundered Italy.
  • “One theft is a heist movie; 10,000 thefts is a statistic.”
  • The Moonstone reads now like a Saidian reproach to the genre: Rachel Verinder’s diamond “was stolen to begin with.” Behind every art theft there is a bigger one.
  • Theft is fabulous for the market — the Mona Lisa became the world’s most recognizable painting because its 1911 theft put reproductions in every paper. Heists are commercials.

The new anti-heist films (Inside, The Mastermind) skip the champagne: getting the goods is the breezy part, everything after is the movie. A petty thief’s amorality mirrors the sociopathy around him — “Americans in uniform have been getting away with murder,” and the final street sign reads “Watts.”

The essay’s real subject is desire and contempt for art — and for the despicable people who own it — getting more violently mixed with every caper.