Feldman's Faves: January 22, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

This January feels like the busiest start to the year I can ever remember.  Thanks to everyone for your hard and smart work so far this year.

I also need to congratulate JC on the announcement of his monster deal. A massive deal with incredible complexity that got done in record time. AMAZING!

Also, I can’t believe the words “wide right” will be haunting my dreams for another 30 years.   If you know what I mean, you know…..

Finally, please join me in wishing Emily G a very happy birthday (which is tomorrow).

This week’s theme is art: the good, the bad and the very ugly.

THE ART THIEF: A TRUE STORY OF LOVE, CRIME AND A DANGEROUS OBSESSION  By: Michael Finkel –  This book falls into the category of you can’t make this s@#t up…..Stéphane Breitwieser, the “protagonist” of this story is exactly the same age as me. He is not a corporate lawyer in Toronto, but instead was one of the world’s most successful (at least until he was caught  -  a few times) and famous art thieves the world has ever seen.  In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel tells the crazy story of how Breitwieser and his one-time girlfriend travelled all over Europe stealing hundreds of works of art and then hiding them in his mother’s attic, where they both lived – since they didn’t really have any day jobs (but had over $1 billion worth of art that he just wanted to “enjoy”).  The story is nuts as is the way he went about stealing, hiding and then destroying this art (or at least his mother did once she knew about it).  Effectively flushing over $1B down the river. As one reviewer notes “At first, Stéphane Breitwieser, the subject of Michael Finkel’s “The Art Thief,” appears to be having an enviable amount of fun. Twenty-five years old and living with his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, in a small set of upstairs rooms in his mother’s home in a “hardscrabble” manufacturing suburb in eastern France, Breitwieser is unburdened by such quotidian concerns as a job, making rent or planning for the future. He fancies himself a purer sort of soul, so devoted to beauty he must, in Finkel’s words, “gorge on it.” Over the course of a dizzying 200 pages that are also an effective advertisement for Swiss Army knives (Breitwieser’s only tool), he removes artwork after artwork from museums — a.k.a. “prisons for art” — and becomes “perhaps the most successful and prolific art thief who has ever lived.” He piled all $2 billion worth of artifacts he amassed over eight years into that same attic in his mother Mireille Stengel’s “nondescript” stucco house.  Finkel includes satisfying evidence of this astounding loot in a color insert that shows a crammed jumble of “ethereal” ivory carvings, shining silver goblets, unctuous oil paintings and more. All this Breitwieser secreted away in the couple’s lair not to be fenced for money, but for the pair alone to enjoy waking up to in the morning: like George Petel’s 1627 sculpture “Adam and Eve” on the bedside table, next to a 19th-century blown-glass vase and a blue and gold tobacco box “commissioned by Napoleon himself.”  Finkel’s account, based largely on interviews with Breitwieser, is of a romantic hero who disdains practical details as much as security ones, and who is “crushed” when Stengel deigns to buy Ikea furniture. “I am like the opposite of everyone,” he declares, finding “his problem … incurably existential: He was born in the wrong century.” That Finkel aligns the reader’s sympathies with the point of view of the criminal makes for a heady rush of freudenfreude.  The romanticized portrait of a complicated male subject is a formula Finkel has found success with before: His best-selling previous book, “The Stranger in the Woods,” about the Maine hermit Christopher Thomas Knight, was similarly expanded from an article in GQ. Yet despite this book’s slim size, Finkel’s efforts to fill its pages eventually strain, padding them with generic musings on why people make art and head-scratching lines like, “Yellow is the hue least harmonious to a banana.” His reliance on tropes gives the book a paint-by-numbers feel: the bad boy; the cautious ingénue girlfriend who longs for a more normal life; the mother who “coddled” her son too much and claims she never once wandered up the stairs to confront what he was actually up to. By the end, we’re left with signs that what we’ve been offered is only a rough sketch, not the more complicated truth. Finkel portrays Breitwieser as a pure aesthete motivated solely by aesthetic passion, but later he’s also arrested for simple shoplifting. Finkel writes that “the world’s beauty, to Breitwieser, peaks with Anne-Catherine and their art collection,” but in a shocking turn the author brushes past, Kleinklaus says under oath that Breitwieser hit her after learning she’d hid an abortion. “He scared me,” she tells a courtroom; to a detective, she says, “I was just an object to him.” Finally, did Stengel really never suspect what her son was up to in her home? Was her frenzied “attic purge” — during which she hurled silver pieces into a canal and burned paintings in a forest — really the “ultimate expression of maternal love” Breitwieser interprets it to be? (She herself tells the police, “I wanted to hurt my son, to punish him.”) It is by far the most shocking act in the book, but — as with the characters of Stengel and Kleinklaus — Finkel leaves it frustratingly opaque. He renders every complication and contradiction in broad strokes, rushing ahead to a swift and unsatisfying conclusion, as though too taken in by his own romantic telling to disrupt it. Great art, Breitwieser knows, surprises. “The Art Thief” — a popcorn flick of a book that will nonetheless keep readers riveted — does not.”  This was a case of crime really not paying. Maybe being a corporate lawyer would have been a better path for him after all.  Here is a good review from The Washington Post –https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/07/21/michael-finkel-art-thief-review/

WorkLife with Adam Grant - Your brain on art with Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen –  There has been such an emphasis on STEM and the need for our young people to focus on math and sciences in order to be employable, contributors to society and economically well off. That is of course true and was definitely true when it felt that Western countries were falling behind their global counterparts. Lost in this focus, however, was “the other side of the brain” and its importance to the individual , the community and the world at large.  The discussion in this PODCAST centres around how the arts and the creativity associated with them has enormous benefits to the individual brain and to the way the world is viewed and run.  Spoiler alert – the arts are important for a well and healthy society.  Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “If you think of the arts as entertainment or luxury, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross might ask you to reconsider. The authors of the New York Times bestseller “Your Brain on Art” argue that engaging with music, craft projects, and museums can transform our lives in unexpected ways. Susan, Ivy, and Adam delve into the fascinating science of neuroaesthetics, and explore how art can unlock creativity, enhance well-being, and enrich communities.”: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/worklife-with-adam-grant/id1346314086?i=1000638235681

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon