Why We Can’t Get Enough Juicy Art Heist Stories

I didn’t take much convincing. In movies, there is always that scene where the criminal, having said no, changes his mind and growls, “I’m in,” but I was feeling more agreeable. When an old friend approached me about one more job with a big payday, I decided to say yes before I’d finished the email.

And so, for weeks, I read and watched nothing but stories about stealing art. In time, they began to blend together, until I felt I was investigating a single elaborate crime: dozens of old friends recruiting hundreds of thieves, quintuple-crossing each other out of lush portraits, gold statuettes, Fabergé eggs both real and holographic. I encountered lots of art presented as a symbol for sex or a metaphor for immortality, but not enough art presented as worthwhile for its own sake.

I met people who seemed constitutionally incapable of standing in front of a beautiful object without having a flashback. I saw champagne flutes, dinner jackets, rakishly raised eyebrows. I caught Faye Dunaway playing one thief’s lover and moonlighting as another’s therapist.

I heard the words “Don’t you fart!” and wrote them down in the solemn certainty that they were destined to appear in my article. The occasion for all this was Artifacts, a novel by Natalie Lemle, out in May, about a thirtysomething woman who gets herself into some glamorous trouble concerning an ancient Roman cup and the Calabrian mob.

But the real occasion was: It’s the 21st century. Art thefts, real and fictional, are rarely less than a subject du jour. As I write this, the French police have yet to determine what happened to the jewels snatched from the Louvre last fall; there are not one but two Ocean’s movies in production; a Renoir, a Matisse, and a Cézanne have gone missing from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Parma; and Dan Brown’s research team is surely toiling away at another upper-lowbrow treasure hunt.

Centuries from now, historians of our era will study footage of Vincent Cassel breakdancing through the Vil