Pulp Arthouse Non-Fiction

It seems like something out of a Tarantino flick. Instead of knocking over a bank or a store, a couple of people in masks with guns robbed a Zurich museum in broad daylight. Nearly every story claims it was a spectacular robbery. Four paintings, all on one wall, were stolen from the E.G. Buehrle Collection. While the paintings by Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh themselves were worth about $163 million, they weren't even the most valuable in the collection. They apparently loaded the paintings into a white vehicle but will have some difficulty unloading them in the open market. It seems that there's a spree going on in Switzerland right now. This latest robbery follows the recent theft of two paintings by Pablo Picasso -- at another Swiss museum which were valued at $4.5 million -- that were on loan from a German museum. The market for stolen art is estimated by the FBI at about $6 billion a year and the European agency Interpol has logged in nearly 30,000 works into it's stolen art database. The real tragedy is that these thefts deprive the world of cultural masterpieces for someone else's petty financial gain. And these works can be lost to the public for years. One can only hope that the when the works are recovered, someone will get mediaeval on the thieves.