Art: A Boston Theft ReflectsThe Art World's Turmoil

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Thieves usually fence their loot for 5% of its "real" value. This robbery will yield nothing like that. The only professional thing about it was its speed. As art thieves, specialists in heisting old paintings under the best conditions for resale or ransom, last week's pair were bunglers. They cut some canvases off their support stretchers, a hasty amateur act that enables the painting to be rolled up but severely damages it by cropping and cracks the old dry paint like a potato crisp when it is rolled, thus causing big problems of restoration. (When another Vermeer, The Letter, was stolen in Brussels in 1971, the thief not only rolled it up but sat on it in the back of a taxi, ruining it.)

Apart from a Shang bronze and a little Rembrandt self-portrait etching, nothing in the haul could be resold on the open market, or even in its shadow line. With the Vermeer, resale is all but inconceivable, although famous stolen paintings do sometimes get sold: the very picture that named the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet's Impression: Rising Sun, was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris by armed robbers in 1985 and is believed to be in Japan.

Japanese law puts a two-year statute of limitations on the recovery of stolen art from citizens who can plausibly claim they did not know it was hot when they bought it. This has made Japan the natural destination of hot art from the West. But after the worldwide outcry this theft has caused, it would be hard for a Dr. No -- or a Dr. Noh -- to claim he had never known the Vermeer was stolen.

The job may have been an "insurance theft," where the criminals hope to make their money by bargaining with the museum's insurance company for a cash fraction of the value. That might sound hopeful, except that there is no insurance company to bargain with. The Gardner Museum -- like many other U.S. museums -- carries damage insurance but no theft coverage on its collection. To do so in the context of today's art prices, a spokesman explained, could cost some $3 million a year; the museum's total operating budget is only $2.8 million.

Instead, the Gardner offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the return of the paintings. This ransom money -- "reward" is a euphemism -- may work, if it does not gum up the investigation with half the flakes and crazies from Boston to Miami. But it does not dispose of the ghastly possibility that one of the greatest of Vermeer's paintings (along with other things of lesser significance) may be destroyed by the thieves as too hot to handle.

Is there a moral to this event? Only the obvious one: that we owe it to the sanctimonious, inflated racket that the art industry has become. The theft is the blue-collar side of the glittering system whereby art, through the '80s, was promoted into crass totems of excess capital. Sotheby's and Christie's tacitly recognized this last week when, after conferring with the museum board and the FBI, they volunteered the $1 million reward money for the Gardner -- a touching p.r. gesture, like a cigarette company giving money to a cancer ward.