The Art Thief Quotes

“Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“It isn’t action, he suspects, that usually lands a thief in prison. It’s hesitation.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“In the eyes of the law, how a thief steals is more significant than what’s taken: robbing a candy bar with a gun is worse than carrying off a Cranach painting unarmed.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital frontal cortex of the beholder.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place. He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“As an adult, he feels the same about cell phones, email, and social media. Why make it easier to be bothered by others?”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Von der Mühll devotes almost all his time to the case, trying not to be overly menacing or judgmental. “I can’t excuse that, but I can understand,” is a phrase the detective is fond of saying.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Knowing when not to take an item, however deflating, is mandatory for a thief expecting career longevity.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The painting seems to have a bubbly effect on both of them, aesthetic champagne.”
― michael finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Museums are secular churches . . . and to steal there is blasphemous.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Art may in fact have a Darwinian basis, perhaps as a way to attract a mate, though many art theorists now believe that the reason for art’s ubiquity is that humanity has overcome natural selection. Art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all. It’s the product of leisure time. Our big brains, the most complex instruments known in the universe, have been released from the vigilance of evading predators and seeking sustenance, permitting our imagination to gambol and explore, to dream while awake, to share visions of God. Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Fabrice Duval, a psychiatrist Breitwieser saw in 1999, noted that “he shows impulsivity without considering the consequences.” Coddled by a mother who caters to his whims, he “has not learned to cope with the frustrations of the real world,” Schmidt observes. In other words, he’s a brat.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Shady people have been peddling bright colors for two thousand years.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime and a Dangerous Obsession

“I never found any art thieves who really compare to Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine. Nearly everybody else did it for money, or stole a single work of art. The couple is an anomaly among art stealers, but there does exist a group of criminals for whom long-term looting in service of aesthetic desire is common. In the taxonomy of sin, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine belong with the book thieves. Most people who steal large quantities of books are fanatic collectors, and there have been enough of these thieves that psychologists have grouped them into a specialized category. They’re called bibliomaniacs. This is Breitwieser’s tribe.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The young couple has conjured a reality that surpasses most fantasies. They live inside a treasure chest.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“A meaningful collect, Muensterberger wrote, offers these outcasts "a magical escape into a remote and private world," and the collector's cycle of hunting and gathering, that primal human rhythm, is often the only activity that makes their life worth living.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Maybe, upon reappraisal, she decides that inanimate objects, even illegal ones, are acceptable mistresses. Breitwieser yearns endlessly for new art, yet since the day they met, she's just about certain, he has remained steadfastly faithful to her.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The world's greatest art thief must call his mother every night to let her know he's okay. If he doesn't, she'll worry. He tells his mother about their trip, expect for the thefts.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“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.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“When you wear your heart on your sleeve, it's exposed to the elements.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“As for the tobacco boxes, wine goblets, and household objects that Breitwieser takes—beauty in functional form—most were created shortly before the European industrial revolution of the early 1800s. Until then, every part of every item was fashioned by hand, through craft and often painstaking toil. Engines, electricity, and mass production have eased everyone’s life, but these advances, Breitwieser says, have made the world progressively uglier, and there’s no going back. Expertise was once conferred from master to apprentice, one generation to the next, ingenuity gradually accruing. Now factories pound out widgets that are cheap, identical, and disposable. The period just before machines took over, Breitwieser feels, marked the height of human civilization, of maximum beauty and skill.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Breitwieser's conscience is clear. To him, beauty is the world's only true currency, always enriching whatever its source. The person with the most beauty is therefore the richest. He has sometimes considered himself one of the wealthiest people alive.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“The problem is the group of visitors present. He slides his eyes over. They're huddled near a painting, all wearing headphones attached to audio guides. Breitwieser deems them sufficiently distracted. This is the critical instant -- one glance from one visitor and his life could effectively end -- and he does not delay. It isn't action, he suspects, that usually lands a thief in prison. It's hesitation.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Art signals our freedom. It exists because we’ve won the evolutionary war.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“Modern art leaves him cold, he says, made less to be felt than dissected.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief

“El arte simboliza libertad. Existe porque hemos ganado la guerra de la evolución.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“For Breitwieser, as with a piece of art, so too it was with Anne-Catherine, from the very beginning. When Breitwieser sees a beautiful artwork, he says that a tremor builds in his fingers, followed by buzzy, tactile vibrations that spread over his skin. It’s as if an electric circuit has been completed between him and the art, fine-tuning his senses and jolting his thoughts. The feeling culminates in”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

“His favorite art-heist movie, he later says, is The Thomas Crown Affair, with Pierce Brosnan.”
― Michael Finkel, The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession