This, from the AP, via NPR:

A lone thief stole five paintings possibly worth more than half a billion dollars, including major works by Picasso and Matisse, in a brazen overnight heist at a Paris modern art museum, police and prosecutors said Thursday.

[…]

The director of the neighboring modern art museum Palais de Tokyo, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, called the thief or thieves “fools.”

“You cannot do anything with these paintings. All countries in the world are aware, and no collector is stupid enough to buy a painting that, one, he can’t show to other collectors, and two, risks sending him to prison,” he said on LCI television.

“In general, you find these paintings,” he said. “These five paintings are unsellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.”

The assumption here, of course, is that the thieves would want to sell the work. Maybe they just wanted the paintings for their living room? Maybe they just wanted to steal them, to see if they could? Such an act of daring, commodified. Shame.

What’s your fantasy heist?