Art & Crime: The Fight Against Looters, Forgers, and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World

A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world.

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums.
     From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.

STEFAN KOLDEHOFF, born in 1967, is culture editor at Deutschlandfunk in Cologne, and writes for Die Zeit and art - Das Kunstmagazine among other publications. In 2008 he received the Puk journalist prize for his investigative research. In 2012, he and Tobias Timm published False Pictures, Real Money on the Beltracchi case. The book was awarded the Prix Annette Giacometti and the Otto Brenner Prize. Galiani also published his books The Pictures Are Among Us: The Nazi-Looted Art Business and the Gurlitt Case (2014) and Me and Van Gogh: Pictures, Collectors and Their Adventurous Stories (2015). TOBIAS TIMM, born in 1975 in Munich, studied urban ethnology, history, and cultural studies in Berlin and New York. He has written for Die Zeit's feature pages from Berlin on architecture, art, and crime. In 2012, he and Stefan Koldehoff published False Pictures, Real Money on the Beltracchi case. The book was awarded the Prix Annette Giacometti and the Otto Brenner Prize. TIMM and KOLDEHOFF were recently counted among the 100 most influential people in the art business by the national German magazine monopol.
PAUL DAVID YOUNG’s previous translations from German include The Art of C.G. Jung (Norton, 2018) and, with Carl Weber, Heiner Müller: After Shakespeare (PAJ, 2014).Young’s 2019 play All My Fathers, presented at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York, directedby Evan Yionoulis, was praised as "hilarious" by The New Yorker.