Armed robbers make off with Edvard Munch paintings from the Oslo museum in 2004. Photograph: AP
Art thefts, like daring bank robberies, always go down well as news items. They're often pulled off without anybody being hurt or threatened, and the contents of anonymous bank vaults and remote private collections that suffer seem such abstract enough victims. Egged on by cinema's suave and brilliant thieves, a little part of us finds the crime more than a little romantic.
Of course, the raid reported today, which removed two Picassos from his granddaughter's Paris home did have a real victim. What drew the thieves was presumably the appetising black market potential of paintings' estimated £34m value. But over and above the damage to her personal fortune, Diana Widmaier Picasso has lost a personal memento not just of her grandpa, but also of her mother - tenderly depicted in vivid primaries as a young child clutching her toys.
Victim or not, art crime in general is of course a bad thing, a terrible thing, and we condemn it out of hand... Nonetheless, I have to confess that the fantasy of tucking away a minor masterpiece is a seductive one, and I have been seduced. Not to fence it to unscrupulous international crims, you understand, simply to tuck it away in an upstairs bedroom to commune with in private. (Somehow the fantasy of thieving on aesthetic grounds alone feels less venal, though I guess a court might not see the distinction, when I went down on my knees and tearfully explained that my crime had been committed in the name of beauty.)
As a big fan of the American modernist/proto-pop artist Stuart Davis, it always annoys me that the Tate's one painting by him - which is as far as I know the only one in a UK public collection - is never displayed. A dark little part of me is inclined to think, "well, if they're not using it..." and wonder just how a body might sneak into the vaults.
I know I'm not the only one. A friend who was a regular visitor to the Tate in the mid-80s always found himself slipping into the same reverie, as he admired the museum's Lucian Freuds, of quietly secreting the beautiful miniature portrait of Francis Bacon. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it at that point, and it looked like it could be slipped fairly comfortably into a pocket of the kind of roomy overcoat that arty types favoured in those days.
You wouldn't, of course. All of our blog community, I'm sure, have an inner Indiana Jones who would cry "that should remain in a museum!" long before we pulled on our white gloves, balaclavas and ingenious devices for disabling the security system.
But it doesn't hurt to commit the occasional imaginary felony, does it? Go on, share your dark dreams of art crime with the blog. I forgive you in advance, for I too have sinned.
