What do you think is the biggest art scandal in the past century?

Now, that is so juicy information...

There's an article in Vanity Fair about the heist of The Mona Lisa which took place in the early 1900s, which is a book...here's the link:

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/05/mona-lisa-excerpt200905

Yeah, that's a classic caper. The interesting part here is that the thieves never intended to keep the painting. They just wanted to be able to make remarkably good, hard to detect forgeries and -- while the painting was thus known to be mssing -- to sell these forgeries to unscrupulous millionaires who would pay a fortune to own the Mona Lisa even though they couldn't display it without being in serious trouble. They did okay. Once they had their money, they returned the real Mona Lisa to the Louvre.

The venality of some people is simply unbelieveable. There are people today would pay millins of dollars for a painting they can't even admit they own, let alone display. These rae not art lovers. They call themselves investors.

On that note, about investors... in the 1980s someone named Kennedy Fraser wrote a book of essays called The Fashionable Mind, where she argues how art became fashionable in the 1980s. She used the example of how Donald Trump considered buying Van Gogh's Irises, not because of the gorgeous painting, rather because of its value.

http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-Mind-Reflections-Fashion-1970-1981/dp/039451775X