Also, yesterday was the anniversary of the release of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on November 24, 1859.
I believe it is important to keep the physical version at a safe place for as long as possible. How long before a new wave of "flat earthers" decides the digital version is just a deep fake and it never existed?
Though I say for really important works, having a physical copy in addition to the digital one is a must. Digital data is easy to copy — and easy to lose. And bit rot is a thing.
Something else important w/r/t keeping originals: Who could have foreseen that our new imaging technology would allow us to read the otherwise-unreadable original text of palimpsests, or the insides of scrolls too brittle to unroll?
What other discoveries might be unpredictable right now? For example, some new development might tell us two things were made in the same place and time, leading to discovery by inference, or something.
Originals might prove valuable in ways not yet known.
As a research scientist, one thing that has definitely changed since the passage of FTF [0] in 2013 is the loss of a singular notebook of ideas and thoughts.
Most everything is digital now, and ideas are exchanged through dozens of media which don’t facilitate easy recording to a single physical source.
I really want to do this, i.e. document basically everything I know for the rest of my life but I genuinely can't bring myself to have the attention span to stick to it.
Maybe it's the way the computer effects one's brain (I'm relatively convinced I have ADHD to at least some degree too). At very least procrastination-orbiting around that task has meant that I have a fairly functional set of scripts for blogging in LaTeX i.e. integrating the mathematics and diagrams properly is hard.
I'd never admit it in person but I'd actually love to have an ASMR channel to non-verbally ramble about the sheer volume of pointless information I have in my head.
This isn't an ad, I'm not affiliated with the program.
I recently tried https://obsidian.md and found it really helped me overcome my laziness and take notes down. Another thing I have found that helps is to just make the note and deal with organization later. I started by making several unconnected notes, but they quickly grow into small graphs.
IMPORTANT WARNING: This is not FOSS and has a weird licensing model. You don't have to worry about this too much since it just makes markdown files which are easy to move between different note programs. If they do not open-source it, I am feeling fairly optimistic on making my own (if no one beats me to it, in which case I would just want to contribute to theirs).
There seems to be a Show HN nearly every week of a Roam-like tool that I would be surprised if there wasn't already a well supported open source clone.
disturbing that when I read "20 years ago", I first thought "wow, they stole it in 1970", then I read "The notebooks were last seen in November 2000.." then the penny suddenly dropped
If Dr. Gardner, who became director of library services in 2017, had continued with the self-serving rationalizations of her predecessors, she would have herself come to 'own' the problem, by becoming a party to the dissembling. So, I guess she instituted a thorough search, and when it failed, announced the fact.
I'm curious if there have been any tech advances in tracking valuable objects in like rare books, sketches, paintings, etc. that are currently actually used by institutions or considered a best practice.
Whether it's RFID chips, Bluetooth tags, security cameras that do "book recognition", or something else.
Heck, even something as simple as a barcode per object, shelf, cart and holding area, and you've got to scan them in and out every time it's picked up and put down (tied to your ID), and the whole system beeps with loud errors if it isn't scanned in somewhere within 30 seconds of being scanned out.
The idea that a multimillion dollar object could be "misplaced" or lost in a large collection feels appropriate to the year 1980, but by 2020 it feels positively anachronistic. (I realize this happened in 2000, so I'm wondering what prevents it today.)
Lol you’ve never stolen a book from the library before either intentionally or not? This should be pretty straightforward but the more valuable something is the more incentive there is to steal it. Meanwhile, while you can throw more money at physical security and scale it up, technology hasn’t changed much in 50 years let alone 20 - you hire enough people at considerable expense and implement good basic security systems. This costs money and stupid tech like “slap an rfid tag on it” doesn’t change anything
My question to this solution would be: do you have to modify the book in some way? Would we want to potentially ruin a book to do that? If the solution is easily removable then does it help?
We should digitize as much as possible and background check the heck out of librarians it seems to me.
Our local town library use RFID tags, eg stuck down the spine of a book.
Presumably for expensive books an anti-tamper case like supermarkets use for expensive items (acrylic box with radio-tag) would interfere with opportunistic theft. IIRC or library use such boxes for DVD movies and PC Games.
The books are already modified by the libraries adding various ownership markings. The thieves will of course remove those markings before selling the books on, which causes far more and more obvious damage than the markings themselves.
The benefit of something like RFID tags is that the thieves would need to remove the tags on-site to avoid detection, rather than at their leisure.
This is a bit reminiscent of the "This American Life" episode, wherein precious evolutionary science bird feathers make their way into fishing flies. It's a really great story. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/654/the-feather-heist
"The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson is the book that piece is about. It's a much more thrilling and fascinating read than you might expect. Absolutely worth a read/listen!
Apparently there are a lot of high net-worth individuals that take pleasure in acquiring such cultural goods to hang them in their private studies or re-sell them. The Nebra Sky Disk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk) was e.g. excavated by two "tomb raiders" who sold it on the black market, and only after the disk changed hands multiple times it was re-acquired by the federal government in a sting police operation (luckily).
It makes me sad to think about all the artifacts of e.g. the Byzantine and Babylonian cultures that were stolen during the recents wars in the middle east, most of it probably made it into the hands of wealthy collectors. At least we can hope that some of the stuff will turn up again, eventually, but since most people don't know how to properly keep these artefacts from decaying there's still a tremendous risk they will be permanently damaged.
Sounds straight out of the movies. Black market for ancient/cultural artifacts that provide no practical benefits whatsoever to someone's life. Fascinating.
provide no practical benefits whatsoever to someone's life.
I guess it provides status and bragging rights within your social circle. When you and all your friends are rich enough to be able to buy basically anything that is legally for sale, owning stuff that your neighbor cannot also just go out and buy becomes the only interesting type of purchase left to make.
... except being a tax-free investment that will likely hold value forever (because it’s effectively unique) and is often easier to secure than more typical assets (because it’s hard to resell without very specific contacts).
I mean, it's not surprising given the popularity of much less tangible cryptocoins. Cryptocoins are basically taking that idea to the extreme, going farther than removing all benefits and requiring constant burning of energy to keep them alive.
At least with a museum piece, you own a tangible piece of history. It's much more material than a digital checksum chain to some 2009 Satoshi ones and zeros.
There is actually a VERY practical benefit to holding stolen art and artifacts in certain circles.
For Criminal Organizations, drug dealers, terrorists, etc... these items can be used as collateral to secure loans or drugs on consignment, or exchanged for hostages.
They are a vital part of the black market currency exchange. This is a big part of the plot of the book "Gold Finch" if you find it interesting.
Another very easy way to look at it, if you are a drug dealer wanting to move 10 Million dollars, that's not very easy in cash even if its $100 bills. A single painting could hold the same value and take up much less physical space.
Indeed. From [1] "The two stolen works were eventually recovered in 2016, when they were used by an Italian mafia boss as collateral to get a more lenient jail sentence."
And from [2] "Artworks tend to surface either very quickly after they are stolen or else disappear into the underworld where they are traded between criminals at a fraction of their value for drugs and other illicit materials, Marinello said."
A similar behavior happens in the game ROM dumping community, owners of very rare or sometimes unique arcade boards often refuse to release ROM dumps, or do so only in a small group of individuals. They would lose nothing if they released it but I guess they take pleasure in knowing they have the exclusivity of a specific thing in the World.
> They were taken to a temporary studio, which at the time was in a temporary building in the grounds of the university library because building work was taking place.
Given how small and inconspicuous they are, is it possible they simply got thrown away in the midst of the construction? Perhaps when the temporary building was disassembled?
I seriously wonder what their security policies were and how seriously they took the chain of posession. Something that valuable probably shouldn't even be allowed out of sight.
Pretty clear from reading it that no one wanted to admit they’d been stolen on their watch, so they kept up some kind of pretence of it being lost within the library so they wouldn’t be public hounded for being responsible for its loss.
That's all in your head. It's pretty clear that the library was aware that the books were missing, and that they looked for them.
What do you want to happen when unique documents disappear? Call the cops? International press conference? I assure you that professional pride is much more important for these people than being 'hounded' by the public.
While there is a good chance that it was been stolen, it could still turn up . Things can go missing for, literally, centuries in collections that are big enough.
I strongly disagree. They lied to themselves and to the world believing the notebooks have been misplaced and not stolen. The ‘no lie’ approach is clearly a part of the problem.
They kept it quiet when they could have had the whole world on the look out. Who knows how many opportunities were missed to have them found in the meantime.
The BBC frequently uses different titles in different places (home page, section page, article itself) and also changes them - the submission's title may well have reflected one of them at the time.
Also the <title> tag is often different from the readable title in <h1> (the HN bookmarklet picks up the title tag). And that's throughout many news organizations. CNN does that all the time.
Somewhat related to this, the BBC have an annoying habit of using a photo in a thumbnail for an article, and not providing the full-size photo anywhere.
I wonder if a 'google streetview' like system could be used to find library books that have been misfiled.
A robot drives around the shelves taking photos of the books on the shelves, those are then matched to what is expected to be found in that section, obviously there will be some without names or labels on the spines - but hopefully not many. But it can atleast say there are 4 unknown books and 3 unaccounted for in a section.
Obviously that won't help in this case when delicate artifacts are in boxes.
They do this is some parking garages. Especially long term (airports) something drives around and reads all the license plates. Easier than books but same idea.
I don't know how common this is, but here in The Netherlands, such license plate reading cars are driving through the streets to fine owners with parking tickets.
That was the first questions in my mind too... of course the physical notebooks are also valuable, but the information contained within is the thing that's actually important for historians etc. Thankfully the question also occured to the BBC reporters:
> Although the notebooks have been digitised, Professor Secord says the scans can never replace the real thing.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Libraries scanning old books and applying a new copyright on them (which shouldn't be possible, scans are not a creative act) is a common issue.
Please fully read the article: Until circa 2017 the administration thought the notebooks were merely misplaced. As it's a tremendously large library that wasn't so difficult to believe, and numerous searches have been conducted over the years to locate the notebooks.
Only after a change of management they investigated the circumstances of the disappearing of the books more closely and came to the conclusion that it's more likely they were stolen.
> Initially librarians thought they might have been put back in the wrong place. "My predecessors genuinely believed they had been misfiled and they would find them," adds Dr Gardner, who became director of library services in 2017.
> There were a number of "intense" searches over the years. They all drew a blank.
So they knew they were missing, they just thought they were misplaced for 20 years.
I’m probably a cynic, but I have to wonder if this admission is somehow linked to the inevitable issues with funding because of Covid19, i.e. Cambridge might be trying to get something out of their insurers.
It might be because yesterday was the anniversary of the first publication of On the Origin of Species (first published 24 November 1859) so people looking for Darwin-related news?
It seems really odd to me to say they are "worth many millions of pounds". Are there really people out there willing to make a sacrifice of many millions just to own these notebooks? And does that mean they were on the market all along? I find that really difficult to believe. We used to say things like this are priceless.
Probably just simply the desire to illustrate importance with no actual market in mind.
But perhaps still grounded a bit on knowledge of transactions in an actual manuscript collector's scene market. That, from my point of view, may or may not exist. If it does exist it's unlikely to have transactions of that size, but it would also only transact comparatively minor manuscripts. And multiplying up minor transaction volumes to enormous valuations isn't exactly unheard of. The only difference is that the factor derived from "importance" is a bit subjective, but that's the nature of a collector's market and the claim isn't really stating anything like precision. It's not like the library could have taken up a mortgage with the manuscripts as security.
> Does that mean they were on the market all along?
No - based on the prices fetched by similarly unique documents of great historical relevance, an estimate in this range for what they would fetch, if they were offered for sale, seems very reasonable.
I guess it is the same scenario with art pieces or similar products. EG, the Leonardo Da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi was sold for $450M back in 2017, where is the justification for this pricing?
I don't know. I don't know why I'm being downvoted either. It seems really fascinating. Is it an investment? A storage of wealth? Or did someone really decide they wanted that painting in their life instead of a brand new Boeing 747, for example? It's obviously not really worth that much, so what's it all about? Inflation is mainly due to money being creamed off into the hands of rich people, but all they are getting for it is a painting? I guess once your belly is full every day and your living environment is no less than 21 degrees at all times it really just becomes a game. None of us have more than 24 hours in a single day.
> The art market is going nuts. People are spending record amounts of money of paintings like Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. But not everyone is rushing home to hang their new artwork up on their walls. A lot of buyers are storing their art in vast warehouses near airports. They're called, "freeports."
> Freeports exist between countries, a sort of no man's land, which means you can store your artwork there as long as you want, without having to pay any taxes on it.
> Where are these freeports? How do they work, and are they even legal? Today on the show, we try to find out.
Well, also an item can be a token. I gather that high-value art is used by criminals as if it were large value currency. A piece of artwork works as a $100M-note and the art aspect legitimises the value.
Leonardo Da Vinci painting Salvator Mundi was sold for $450M back in 2017, where is the justification for this pricing?
That particular painting was by all accounts bought by (or at least for) the Abu Dhabi tourism ministry as advertising and a centerpiece for their new fancy art museum.
Although other claim it might also have been purchased for Mohammed bin Salman to go in his fancy new art museum.
Either way it seems to be two governments really really wanting a fancy new painting to show off in their fancy new art museum. The most generous interpretation would be that since the Mona Lisa directly and indirectly brings millions of tourism dollars to Paris every year having a famous Da Vinci painting of their own would bring millions of tourism dollars to their city as well.
Is it only the West that has an exclusive right over art?
If they can pay for it, and its future maintenance, and there's a willing seller, then why not? It's not like all of the Louvre's pieces were commissioned by some French king, and the same goes for MOMA or any of London's museums. In fact, let's be glad they're buying it and not looting it like the West did with a large portion of their exhibits.
No one is saying they shouldn't. The main thing people are questioning is the ridiculous amount of money they spent for a painting more and more people are convinced isn't actually a Da Vinici.
Secondly the painting hasn't actually showed up in any museum yet, and in fact no one knows for sure where it actually is.
Anonymous Oil Sheiks drastically overpaying (and shattering the old art sale record by over $150 million) for a painting that probably isn't a Da Vinci only for the painting to completely disappear makes for a fun story.
Does it even matter why? They have the money, it's their concern, it's not a concern for people who aren't remotely interested in it.
I think the painting's whereabouts are pretty well known in many circles - some vault in Switzerland. As for why it hasn't come up, it was originally bought by the Saudi Crown Prince as a vanity piece, which he decided to initially loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, but then he himself wanted to create a new tourism economy in Saudi Arabia to rival that of the UAE (good luck with that), so he decided not to loan it, while they await the construction of some new museum (and new city) in North West Saudi Arabia. Kinda silly tbh, but for a while it was stored on his private yacht (which is even sillier).
As for its authenticity, I thought questions around it were settled a long time back - it is a Da Vinci original because it has some corrections (change of thumb position being the main one), which are only possible in a piece an original painter would do and not a mere copyist. But it's been heavily altered because it had to be severely repainted - even the back of it had fallen to termites and the painting had to be glued together.
If it turns out to be fake, it does make for a funny story, but it's a considerably less sum than what they are accustomed to. And even if it turned out to be fake, they could simply engage the seller (Sotheby's in this case) in vicious litigation and possibly even bankrupt it (there's a parallel case against Sotheby's for the same painting by the previous owner).
Of course it doesn't matter. It's a funny little news story about weird rich people and the weird world of high end art that pops up from time to time and that people find vaguely entertaining.
As for it's authenticity, no one is claiming it's a forgery or a copy, the question is if any of it was actually painted by the hand of Leonardo Da Vinci as opposed to perhaps one of his students or another artist working out of his studio.
University of Cambridge has a bit more on their "appeal" site (https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/DarwinAppeal)
The digitized notebooks are available:
[1] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00121/1
[2] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00122/1
Also, yesterday was the anniversary of the release of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on November 24, 1859.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species
Though I say for really important works, having a physical copy in addition to the digital one is a must. Digital data is easy to copy — and easy to lose. And bit rot is a thing.
What other discoveries might be unpredictable right now? For example, some new development might tell us two things were made in the same place and time, leading to discovery by inference, or something.
Originals might prove valuable in ways not yet known.
I don't believe anyone has ever convinced a flatearther with reason.
https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.7874/
https://www.capcollections.org.uk/news_events/foxes-in-hen-h...
www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.7874/galley/8079/download/
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03996/55
As a research scientist, one thing that has definitely changed since the passage of FTF [0] in 2013 is the loss of a singular notebook of ideas and thoughts.
Most everything is digital now, and ideas are exchanged through dozens of media which don’t facilitate easy recording to a single physical source.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_i...
Cambridge University Library is no exception
https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/digital-co...
Maybe it's the way the computer effects one's brain (I'm relatively convinced I have ADHD to at least some degree too). At very least procrastination-orbiting around that task has meant that I have a fairly functional set of scripts for blogging in LaTeX i.e. integrating the mathematics and diagrams properly is hard.
I'd never admit it in person but I'd actually love to have an ASMR channel to non-verbally ramble about the sheer volume of pointless information I have in my head.
I recently tried https://obsidian.md and found it really helped me overcome my laziness and take notes down. Another thing I have found that helps is to just make the note and deal with organization later. I started by making several unconnected notes, but they quickly grow into small graphs.
IMPORTANT WARNING: This is not FOSS and has a weird licensing model. You don't have to worry about this too much since it just makes markdown files which are easy to move between different note programs. If they do not open-source it, I am feeling fairly optimistic on making my own (if no one beats me to it, in which case I would just want to contribute to theirs).
Whether it's RFID chips, Bluetooth tags, security cameras that do "book recognition", or something else.
Heck, even something as simple as a barcode per object, shelf, cart and holding area, and you've got to scan them in and out every time it's picked up and put down (tied to your ID), and the whole system beeps with loud errors if it isn't scanned in somewhere within 30 seconds of being scanned out.
The idea that a multimillion dollar object could be "misplaced" or lost in a large collection feels appropriate to the year 1980, but by 2020 it feels positively anachronistic. (I realize this happened in 2000, so I'm wondering what prevents it today.)
But from reponses and doing a bit more research, it sounds like RFID tags have really taken off since then for tracking.
We should digitize as much as possible and background check the heck out of librarians it seems to me.
Presumably for expensive books an anti-tamper case like supermarkets use for expensive items (acrylic box with radio-tag) would interfere with opportunistic theft. IIRC or library use such boxes for DVD movies and PC Games.
The benefit of something like RFID tags is that the thieves would need to remove the tags on-site to avoid detection, rather than at their leisure.
If you want them because you care about enlightenment, wouldn't you also want them to be publicly accessible?
It makes me sad to think about all the artifacts of e.g. the Byzantine and Babylonian cultures that were stolen during the recents wars in the middle east, most of it probably made it into the hands of wealthy collectors. At least we can hope that some of the stuff will turn up again, eventually, but since most people don't know how to properly keep these artefacts from decaying there's still a tremendous risk they will be permanently damaged.
I guess it provides status and bragging rights within your social circle. When you and all your friends are rich enough to be able to buy basically anything that is legally for sale, owning stuff that your neighbor cannot also just go out and buy becomes the only interesting type of purchase left to make.
... except being a tax-free investment that will likely hold value forever (because it’s effectively unique) and is often easier to secure than more typical assets (because it’s hard to resell without very specific contacts).
That is a lot less likely when it comes to stolen artifacts.
You also may have to pay wealth tax over possessing expensive goods.
At least with a museum piece, you own a tangible piece of history. It's much more material than a digital checksum chain to some 2009 Satoshi ones and zeros.
No practical benefit but status; a lot of people, rich and poor, are chasing standing.
For Criminal Organizations, drug dealers, terrorists, etc... these items can be used as collateral to secure loans or drugs on consignment, or exchanged for hostages.
They are a vital part of the black market currency exchange. This is a big part of the plot of the book "Gold Finch" if you find it interesting.
Another very easy way to look at it, if you are a drug dealer wanting to move 10 Million dollars, that's not very easy in cash even if its $100 bills. A single painting could hold the same value and take up much less physical space.
And from [2] "Artworks tend to surface either very quickly after they are stolen or else disappear into the underworld where they are traded between criminals at a fraction of their value for drugs and other illicit materials, Marinello said."
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/11904865/van-gogh-pa...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/aug/16/rembran...
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/28/623537440/hobby-lobbys-illega...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
Obviously not.
And people have been stealing art and historical artefacts as long as we’ve had civilisation so not sure why people are surprised about it now.
Given how small and inconspicuous they are, is it possible they simply got thrown away in the midst of the construction? Perhaps when the temporary building was disassembled?
Pretty clear from reading it that no one wanted to admit they’d been stolen on their watch, so they kept up some kind of pretence of it being lost within the library so they wouldn’t be public hounded for being responsible for its loss.
What do you want to happen when unique documents disappear? Call the cops? International press conference? I assure you that professional pride is much more important for these people than being 'hounded' by the public.
While there is a good chance that it was been stolen, it could still turn up . Things can go missing for, literally, centuries in collections that are big enough.
And I think calling these ‘unique documents’ is fairly undervaluing.
It’s pretty clear the people in charge now recognise they should have been reported stolen straight away.
If you want find the full size image, it may be on one of the image archives (eg. Getty, PA images etc).
A robot drives around the shelves taking photos of the books on the shelves, those are then matched to what is expected to be found in that section, obviously there will be some without names or labels on the spines - but hopefully not many. But it can atleast say there are 4 unknown books and 3 unaccounted for in a section.
Obviously that won't help in this case when delicate artifacts are in boxes.
2020 update "Walmart ends contract with robotics company Bossa Nova" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24973360
Is it just time-limited parking infractions they're looking for, or does it do tickets for parking in the wrong zone (like resident-only parking)?
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-personal-effects-of-marie...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH_rmdeTCWY&feature=youtu.be
> Although the notebooks have been digitised, Professor Secord says the scans can never replace the real thing.
[1] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00121/1
[2] https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00122/1
Why on earth is this just getting published now? The article reads like the library just found out they were missing.
Only after a change of management they investigated the circumstances of the disappearing of the books more closely and came to the conclusion that it's more likely they were stolen.
> There were a number of "intense" searches over the years. They all drew a blank.
So they knew they were missing, they just thought they were misplaced for 20 years.
I cannot imagine how much harder it must be for such grand one.
But perhaps still grounded a bit on knowledge of transactions in an actual manuscript collector's scene market. That, from my point of view, may or may not exist. If it does exist it's unlikely to have transactions of that size, but it would also only transact comparatively minor manuscripts. And multiplying up minor transaction volumes to enormous valuations isn't exactly unheard of. The only difference is that the factor derived from "importance" is a bit subjective, but that's the nature of a collector's market and the claim isn't really stating anything like precision. It's not like the library could have taken up a mortgage with the manuscripts as security.
Bill Gates paid $30.8 million for da Vinci's Codex Leicester at Christie's in 1994.
Dave Smith sacrificed a big screen TV to acquire a new motorcycle.
Which one has more value?
No - based on the prices fetched by similarly unique documents of great historical relevance, an estimate in this range for what they would fetch, if they were offered for sale, seems very reasonable.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...
Episode 823: Planet Monet
> The art market is going nuts. People are spending record amounts of money of paintings like Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. But not everyone is rushing home to hang their new artwork up on their walls. A lot of buyers are storing their art in vast warehouses near airports. They're called, "freeports."
> Freeports exist between countries, a sort of no man's land, which means you can store your artwork there as long as you want, without having to pay any taxes on it.
> Where are these freeports? How do they work, and are they even legal? Today on the show, we try to find out.
I'd guess it's a route for laundering too.
That particular painting was by all accounts bought by (or at least for) the Abu Dhabi tourism ministry as advertising and a centerpiece for their new fancy art museum.
Although other claim it might also have been purchased for Mohammed bin Salman to go in his fancy new art museum.
Either way it seems to be two governments really really wanting a fancy new painting to show off in their fancy new art museum. The most generous interpretation would be that since the Mona Lisa directly and indirectly brings millions of tourism dollars to Paris every year having a famous Da Vinci painting of their own would bring millions of tourism dollars to their city as well.
Is it only the West that has an exclusive right over art?
If they can pay for it, and its future maintenance, and there's a willing seller, then why not? It's not like all of the Louvre's pieces were commissioned by some French king, and the same goes for MOMA or any of London's museums. In fact, let's be glad they're buying it and not looting it like the West did with a large portion of their exhibits.
No one is saying they shouldn't. The main thing people are questioning is the ridiculous amount of money they spent for a painting more and more people are convinced isn't actually a Da Vinici.
Secondly the painting hasn't actually showed up in any museum yet, and in fact no one knows for sure where it actually is.
Anonymous Oil Sheiks drastically overpaying (and shattering the old art sale record by over $150 million) for a painting that probably isn't a Da Vinci only for the painting to completely disappear makes for a fun story.
I think the painting's whereabouts are pretty well known in many circles - some vault in Switzerland. As for why it hasn't come up, it was originally bought by the Saudi Crown Prince as a vanity piece, which he decided to initially loan to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, but then he himself wanted to create a new tourism economy in Saudi Arabia to rival that of the UAE (good luck with that), so he decided not to loan it, while they await the construction of some new museum (and new city) in North West Saudi Arabia. Kinda silly tbh, but for a while it was stored on his private yacht (which is even sillier).
As for its authenticity, I thought questions around it were settled a long time back - it is a Da Vinci original because it has some corrections (change of thumb position being the main one), which are only possible in a piece an original painter would do and not a mere copyist. But it's been heavily altered because it had to be severely repainted - even the back of it had fallen to termites and the painting had to be glued together.
If it turns out to be fake, it does make for a funny story, but it's a considerably less sum than what they are accustomed to. And even if it turned out to be fake, they could simply engage the seller (Sotheby's in this case) in vicious litigation and possibly even bankrupt it (there's a parallel case against Sotheby's for the same painting by the previous owner).
Of course it doesn't matter. It's a funny little news story about weird rich people and the weird world of high end art that pops up from time to time and that people find vaguely entertaining.
As for it's authenticity, no one is claiming it's a forgery or a copy, the question is if any of it was actually painted by the hand of Leonardo Da Vinci as opposed to perhaps one of his students or another artist working out of his studio.