Welcome to the revamped Pursuits Weekly newsletter, our look at the big culture stories of the week, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, dining, art, luxury and living. Sign up here to get it every Saturday in your inbox.

And now over to your host this week, Felix Salmon, who has written recently on minimalism, Basquiat, Labubus and why everybody needs to visit Ravenna at least once.

Louvre blinds(ided)

Source: Alamy

Like much of the rest of the world, we at Pursuits have been obsessed this week by the real-life heist drama that’s unfolded in Paris, complete with impossibly soigné detective. The Louvre heist sits at the irresistible intersection of opulent jewels (yes please), jewel thieves (think Catherine Zeta-Jones navigating a laser-alarm system in 1999’s Entrapment), and, of course, the City of Lights itself.

And then we sober up.

After all, one of our greatest loves here is the way in which artisans transform raw material into objects of great beauty, whether that be an elegant handbag, a perfectly-balanced restaurant dish, or—yes—an item of haute joaillerie. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and the world becomes a better place for it. The likely fate of the Louvre treasures—destruction, mutilation, dismemberment—is exactly the opposite of that, a dispiriting reminder that for all our efforts to make order out of chaos, entropy’s reign is incontestable.

Photograph: Maeva Destombes/AFP

Photographer: JB Reed/Bloomberg

It would have been bad enough had the jewels simply been removed from French patrimony to the lair of some mustache-twirling evil billionaire. But it’s vastly more likely that their ultimate fate will be much worse—they’ll end up ripped apart, the stones recut, the metal melted down, their value literally decimated. As our own James Tarmy reported upon the release of Ocean’s 8 in 2018, anybody hawking a globally-famous jewel would “be lucky to get 10¢ on the dollar.”

Bloomberg Opinion’s Lionel Laurent places the blame for the heist squarely on the soaring gold price, which, he says, has drawn “even the lower reaches of organized crime” into a “shambolic” caper wherein the Eugenie Crown, boasting more than 1,300 diamonds, was fumbled and abandoned by the hapless Louvre perps.

That’s not how American tourists in Paris see it. Tom, from Philadelphia, told the Guardian that it was “a hugely professional crime,”—“like the Thomas Crown Affair,” per his friend Pamela, surely conjuring up a mental image of Pierce Brosnan being seduced by Rene Russo in the 1999 version of the classic heist flick.

Source: Alamy

It’s easy to see why such movies embed themselves so deeply in the public imagination: high-stakes heists and erotic thrills are a perfectly delicious combination. Never forget Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in How To Steal A Million, from 1966, a pairing surpassed only by Charles Grodin and Miss Piggy in The Great Muppet Caper, which came out in 1981.

A more realistic depiction of the life of an art thief, however, might be The Mastermind, the latest movie from auteur Kelly Reichardt, starring a disheveled Josh O’Connor as a loser larcener who barely even touches his wife (Alana Haim). His attempt to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the Framingham Museum of Art does not end well for anyone involved. Here’s hoping a similar fate awaits the Louvre thieves.

By the numbers

2: The standard multiplier applied to the insured value of artworks that are lent to museum exhibitions. This, interestingly, gives the owners of lent-out masterworks a financial incentive to see them stolen.

72,735 square meters: The total area of the Louvre’s exhibition galleries. Securing almost 800,000 square feet is never going to be easy, especially when all those galleries have to be open to the public, and heists, including this one, can take place while the museum is open.

$3 billion: The amount that money launderers are estimated to spend on fine art each year. That’s a significantly larger sum than total proceeds from heists.

$4 billion: The total value of art insured in London’s specialty insurance market—a fraction of the value of the art housed at the Louvre alone. That’s just one of the reasons why the Louvre jewels were not insured.

€88 million: The official valuation for the jewels stolen in the Louvre heist. That’s just about $100 million. To put that in context, if the Louvre valued its entire collection at a conservative $100 billion, and paid an insurance premium of 0.5% per year, the annual cost of insurance would be five times greater than the losses from this heist.

Are you smarter than an art history major?

Bloomberg has an addictive new daily word game, Alphadots, which might feel familiar to art lovers who remember Arte Povera master Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994).

Today’s puzzle has been designed by the great Aimee Lucido especially for Pursuits readers, so play now!

Photo of the week

Photographer: Julien De Rosa/AFP

Jonathan Anderson’s debut as the top designer at Christian Dior took place in the same season as Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut at Balenciaga, Matthieu Blazy’s debut at Chanel, and some seven other firsts. And that’s just the beginning: Demna at Gucci, Rachel Scott at Proenza Schouler, and many more designer launches are still to come. For Bloomberg, Dana Thomas asks: Can fashion’s changing of the guard revive an ailing Industry?

For discerning baseball fans

Source: Bar Goa

Toronto is hosting half of the World Series, which means thousands of sports-mad Angelenos are going to be looking for somewhere to eat. We gotchu! For this week’s installment of our Five Top Tables franchise, we’re headed to Canada’s largest city and spotlighting some of its top dining destinations. If seeing the ballgame isn’t quite enough to justify the journey, maybe the chicken pepper fry kulcha taco at Bar Goa will seal the deal.

Source: Aga Khan Museum

While you’re in town, you should definitely also check out the Aga Khan Museum, designed by legendary Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, which boasts a 1,200-piece collection spanning 12 centuries and three continents, all from the Islamic world. This top tip, along with many others, can be found in our indispensable Toronto city guide.

The ultimate getaway vehicle

Photographer: Hannah Elliott/Bloomberg

Classic Rolls-Royces drive like a dream, floating on their signature magic carpet suspension above the worst of LA’s pockmarked streets. I often feel my mood instantly improved from the driver’s seat cruising down Bedford Drive on my way to the office, watching the Spirit of Ecstasy part the palms in front of me.

If you’ve been given to understand that “there’s nothing so expensive as a cheap Rolls-Royce,” then Hannah Elliott, who owns two of them, is here to change your mind.

You can buy a 1970 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow in Concours Condition for $32,800, on average, and, she writes, “I’ve never had a garage bill over the low four figures.”

Globetrotting

Photographer: Matt Kronsberg/Bloomberg

Shanghai: At the Captain George Flavor Museum, you can get a cup of Panama La Esmeralda Ea16 Geisha Anaerobic Natural for 268 yuan, about $38. Yes, it’s coffee. If you ask them nicely, reports Matt Kronsberg, they will present the cup on a device that includes a digital thermometer, so you can see how the brew’s temperature affects its flavor.

Dubai: Ciel Tower will become the world’s tallest hotel when it opens next month, per Omar El Chmouri. Rooms are surprisingly affordable: A 60 sq m (650 sq ft) high-floor 1-bedroom suite is available in December for less than 2,000 dirhams ($545) per night.

London: A blowout at Hershesons in Selfridges now costs £50 ($65). When Luke Hersheson started the UK’s first blowdry bar in 2006, he charged only £19.

Hartford, Connecticut: The Yangti Yoga Retreat Center has taken a “highly specialized and largely secret Tibetan Buddhist practice” that involves being in complete darkness for seven weeks, and boiled it down to a dark retreat that lasts three days. Which seems like it was more than enough for Chris Colin. (Price on application.)

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