What Were They Going To Do With 6,000 Pounds Of Stolen Sculptures?
please find these criminals just so I can find out what their plan was
We’re jumping straight into it this week. From an article in the Los Angeles Times:
Police believe that on June 14 or 15 at least one thief made off with both “Icarus Within” and “Quantum Mechanics: Homme” — sculptures valued at a combined $2.1 million — from a warehouse in Anaheim Hills. Other artwork and valuables inside the warehouse that would have been easier to move were untouched.
Okay, here’s where things get interesting: the two sculptures in question are massive, just huge hunks of bronze and stainless steel that weigh in at over 6,000 pounds combined, and are outrageously unwieldy to move due to their size and shape. Which brings up all sorts of questions, including but not limited to:
How?
Why?
Howwwwww?
Whyyyyyyy?
I am joking somewhere very close to zero percent when I say that thinking about this has occupied hours of my time over the last few days. The biggest problem I’m having is that the how and why seem so at odds with each other, especially when you consider that both statues were recovered just a week later, sitting in a trailer in someone’s driveway. It’s that last sentence of the blockquote that’s throwing me. “Other artwork and valuables inside the warehouse that would have been easier to move were untouched.” I can’t square any of it.
Like, the Times talked to an art recovery expert — great job, submitting my resume — who is convinced they were just gonna melt down the metal for a couple thousand bucks. But… wouldn’t there be easier and lower-profile ways to acquire metal than by stealing famous works of million-dollar art? And why not just yoink some other valuables while you’re in there? Or just change plans when you realize you can grab whatever jewels you can shove into the trunk of a Toyota Camry and net close to the same payout? Fascinating on multiple levels.
Which brings us to a second option, put forth by the artist himself, Daniel Winn, who, according to the article, was deeply distraught about it all.
Winn said the level of sophistication in the theft led him to suspect he was targeted and that his pieces might be on the black market.
He turned over a list of individuals who had recently inquired about his sculptures to police, he said.
A few notes here:
Imagine being on the list and having detectives show up at your house to ask if you stole 6,000 worth of sculptures
It would be the best day of my life
I would just start asking them all the questions I’m asking in this blog
They would hate it
What do you even do with one-of-a-kind contraband statues weighing 2,000 and 4,000 pounds?
You can’t display them
You’d just have to… store them in a secret room where only you can look at them?
Imagine being so obsessed with a giant metal statue that you commission a team of thieves to steal it from a warehouse so you can hide it away for your enjoyment
Imagine how mad you’d be if the idiots you hired left them in a trailer in the driveway
I would heave my crystal tumbler of expensive scotch straight into my fireplace just to see the flames grow and stare into them to channel my rage
“Crystal Tumbler” sounds like the name of a female member of the heist crew
Anyway, as I’ve said, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Probably too much. I have other things I’m supposed to be doing. The best explanation I’ve come up with so far is ransom. Like, they were going to hold them and send a note to whoever paid a combined $2.1 million for these suckers that said “Give us $250,000 or you can say goodbye to your precious metals.” That’s the only way I can make it make sense, at least logically. I know the art recovery expert — maybe Crystal Tumbler works for this guy, actually — is convinced they were just dumbs guys who were going to melt it all down, and he probably knows more than I do about this, but this quote from the sergeant investigating the case brings up another point…
“We’ve had our share of high-end homes that were burglarized, but this type of crime, involving forklifts, trucks, crews and the sheer size of the sculptures is something I can’t remember us having before,” Sutter said.
If this was all done for a few thousand bucks of melted bronze and steel… why not just sell the truck and forklift? I bet stealing and selling forklifts is way easier than this. Get them melted down if you can’t sell them. I would pay money just to see a forklift get melted, actually. They could do that and sell tickets. You see what I mean? You see what this is doing to me? It’s a problem. I need someone to find these criminals at once. I don’t care about punishing them. I just need to know what they were up to.
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STUFF I CLICKED ON
— Brian Phillips wrote about The Bear and the ways it went stale in its third season (the fourth drops this week and I’m… not yet feeling urgency to dive in)
— Carly Lane talked to the Queen of HBO, Carrie Coon
— Pete Volk interviewed Jason Mantzoukas about Taskmaster
— I love mess so of course I read Jeff Passan’s breakdown of how Rafael Devers and the Red Sox broke up
— please educate yourselves about the dew point
— I saw the trailer for the new season of Always Sunny and thought “hmm maybe I should write about how this show has grown and lasted for two decades and might be one of the great television comedies of all time” and then the next morning freaking Sepinwall had a huge deeply-researched piece on it live at Rolling Stone
— Seth Rogen, like me, wants Vin Diesel in season two of The Studio
— Walton Goggins doing a smutty audiobook for Jimmy John’s (???)
— posted over 20 years ago and still relevant
— “Minnesota’s Hormel sues Wisconsin’s Johnsonville alleging stolen sausage secrets”
— I am so glad other people agree that ESPN was unwatchable during the NBA Finals, largely because it became The Stephen A. Smith Show when it should have been focusing on a really great series
— spent a lot of time Googling Calamity Jane
— my beloved Phillies are in first place and pulled off this incredible double-slide play where the umpire had to call both players safe in such quick succession that it looked like he was doing the breaststroke
Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and look into this statue thing for me.
Maybe just as simple as warehouse workers with easy access to the site and equipment to move large stuff around the site and know how to scrap metal but not how to fence stolen art and jewelry?
With titles like “Icarus Within” and “Quantum Mechanics: Homme” the biggest problem was not the mass, weight and size of the artwork.
The biggest problem would be finding a way to avoid being sucked into the black hole of pretentiousness inherent in the artists choice of titles.
But seriously the artist might possibly and allegedly have engineered a hoax to draw attention to both himself and the art. Art without publicity attached to it is worthless.
Art collecting dust in a museum warehouse is even worse. The artist might possibly and allegedly have been seething to find out the museum curators were not that interested in the difficulty of bringing the artworks out of storage and installing them in a sculpture garden or inside the museum. Nothing motivates artists quite like the fragility of their egos and the desire to see their stuff on display in a prominent place.