Selfish

The Concert, 1660 by Johannes Vermeer, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (stolen 1990).

The FBI has a website which lists stolen art and gives a description of the crime. More often than not, when notorious works like the ones taken from the Gardner Museum are stolen, they are "requests" from collectors who will never try to sell or publicly display the artwork in their possession.

In 2021 Netflix released a documentary about the art heist called This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist.

Honoring Traditions

Thanksgiving by John Currin, 2003, The Tate Collection, London.

John Currin's artwork brings to mind the naturally lit rooms of Vermeer and the realistic, beautiful, yet often grotesque figures of Odd Nerdrum. What I see here are three women, obviously related, preparing a huge turkey for Thanksgiving, but the turkey is really the star. It is impossibly fat and huge, I have a hard time believing they will be able to fit it into an oven.

Happy Thanksgiving.