Van Gone!

Seriously? Can you believe that anyone would-huh? What am I on about? I'm on about this. It's a story about how some thieves smashed the front window of the Singer Laren Museum in Amsterdam last night and stole The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884. I mean, what's wrong with people that they would-no, it's a Van Gogh painting, they didn't steal a garden. I didn't know what it was either, but I don't know much about art. You may recall however that I've recently started having very strong opinions about art.

Pictured: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884 from
 the artist's early period, characterized by long paintings with long titles.

Pictured: fortunately all those kids
went on to be professional players.

(source: sarcasm)

Well, not educated opinions, I went to public grade school where the official policy was essentially "Pfft, art's gay. We've got plenty of money for sports though!" I mean would it have killed them to-huh? No, I'm not still bitter about this, who said I was? What were we talking about? Right, art. Again, not an expert, but it bothers me that people buy up important works of art and then stick them in their bathrooms or whatever so no one but themselves and presumably anyone they let use the bathroom can enjoy them. Like when Oprah sold that Klimt painting to some rando. I think I'm an art communist.

Dutch people always look happy,
but trust me, he's pissed.

Anyway, at least with art hoarding we know where something is. Again, usually a rich person's bathroom. But for all we know this Van Gogh is in a garage or in someone's trunk of maybe it's even been destroyed. Last night's theft left Jan Rudolph, the director of the Singer Laren, shocked and unbelievably pissed off:

"I am shocked and unbelievably pissed off..."

-Jan Rudolph, director of

the Singer Lar-what? Did 

you think I was kidding?

Glass: why do we make things
out of it? It's famously breakable.

What's worse is that the painting didn't even belong to the Singer-Laren, but was on loan from another museum, thus ripping off two museums. And in addition to the loss to both the art world and to Jan Rudolph's natural Dutch calm, this theft was also an example of some shitheels taking advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic. The museum had been closed for weeks and while the museum says that while their security was adequate, the painting was in the main lobby and protected by, you know, glass. 

Which, upon reflection seems less than adequate, but then I'm not a museum director. Incidentally, would I make a good museum director? I mean, I think the first thing I'd do is take the super-valuable, irreplaceable works of art out of the lobby and put them somewhere less glass-surrounded. 

The broken door has since been replaced by a plywood one, so no one's
getting in there now. Unless they pull hard. Or break a different glass door...