Priceless Quotes

“Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“Gardner built an organic museum, one to be appreciated as a living thing. As the museum’s official history notes, “Love of art, not knowledge about the history of art, was her aim.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“FBI supervisors nervous. The two younger suspects were star appraisers on the highest-rated program on PBS, Antiques Roadshow.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“Going undercover is a lot like sales. It’s all about understanding human nature—winning a person’s trust and then taking advantage of it. You befriend, then betray.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“UNDERCOVER WORK IS like chess. You need to master your subject and stay one or two moves ahead of your opponent.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“The sale of counterfeit Indian art is a $1-billion-a-year problem, but it’s still dwarfed by the illegal trade of Native American religious objects, particularly those featuring eagle feathers.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“In art crime, 90 percent of museum thefts are inside jobs.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“At the end of a lousy decade—Waco, Ruby Ridge, the crime lab scandal, the Boston mafia fiasco—the FBI was eager for any positive publicity.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“is illegal in the United States, for example, to sell bald and golden eagle feathers; and I spent a chunk of my career trying to stem this illegal trade. Yet whenever I visit Paris and wander through its finest antique shops along the Seine, I marvel at the American Indian treasures displayed openly for sale. I’ve seen full headdresses with eagle feathers selling for $30,000 or more.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“As I would soon learn, every arrangement at the Barnes carried meaning. The entrance theme represented the debt modern Western art owes tribal Africa.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.” A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“I mastered the most important lesson of sales: If someone likes the product, but doesn't like you, they won't buy it; if, on the other hand, they're not crazy about the product, yet they like you, well, they may buy it anyway. In business, you need to sell yourself first. It's all about impressions.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

“A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and expound upon a wide variety of art, regardless of whether I liked a particular piece.”
― Robert K. Wittman, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures