Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/30/nautical-naughtiness.html
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Art warehouse in sealed waterproof containers on yacht. Yacht sinks. Art is painstakingly recovered and sold at auction. MI6 agent James Bond is clued in to the fact that the art was at some point replaced with elaborate forgeries and must break up the international syndicate at the heart of this international art smuggling operation.
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Go with the yacht. What are the chances of anybody actually enforcing the law?
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A good friend of mine works on yachts.
One of them has a very peculiar painting inside:
A realistic portrait of the owner, surrounded by different buildings he owns, his latest Ferrari, his yacht, etc… And to top it all are, spread all over the “art”, soap bubbles with ladies butts in lingerie painted in them…
Priceless art.
(I am not making this up. I have the picture but I can’t post it on the internet because I don’t want the owner to be recognized or the picture to be traced back to my friend.)
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We live about a mile away from the home of Iron Mountain, a document storage and shredding company that uses the old cement mines for climate controlled storage. There is a vast underground facility nearly the size of a small village. I can only assume it is packed to the gills with just such riches. One day…
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Obligatory: If a large, ticked-off sperm whale rams and sinks your art boat, it could be that only you–a random, non-extraordinary, and self-narrating crew member–will survive to tell the tale, floating on top of a container full of art until another boat finds and rescues you.
If these containers do not float, however…
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0.01 World Problems.
The bonded freeport warehouse makes a lot more sense. In addition to the climate control, the better security and care, and the anonymity and discouragement of visits from international tax authorities (with the connivance of the community of nation-states), the warehouses serve a showroom/exchange/summit-meeting function for the billionaires who use the art primarily as a reserve currency.
Storing art on your super-yacht takes you out of that game, and is a newbie mistake when it comes to signifying wealth and power to the people who matter. If you want to impress the public with your ownership of a piece or (how quaint) share its aesthetic beauty with others, loaning it to a museum offers a lot of the same benefits as the bonded warehouse. Starting your own non-profit museum is also an option if you have Walton family money.
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Note to self: don’t keep art collection on super-yacht.
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I thought it was just gun owners who lost their collections in tragic boating accidents.
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Oh sure, that’s the cover story. 
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Yep, that’s the place. It actually was originally repurposed as storage for surplus military equipment after WWII (which rumors suggest may have included an Ark of some sort), so I have no doubt it has been used and probably still is used for all manner of secret government fuckery and a shadow government fallback position. I’m not a paranoid person, but to assume they’re not covering every last contingency is naive.
Also, Campbell’s grew mushrooms there. Wouldn’t it be just delicious if one of these were stored there:
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My first thought was they plan to live on the yacht in some secret billionaire enclave, docked somewhere on a Pacific Island perhaps, when the entire global system collapses. In that scenario the art will be less valuable than actual cans of soup.
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I assume they have top men working there. Top … men.
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“All you need to know about rich people is that there are well over 2000 billionaires in the world and not one of them is Batman.“
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Mr. Banksy, please accept our deepest apologies. We thought you wanted your artwork shredded.
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If I kept my art on a super-yacht, there’s a chance I’d be doubly arrested: count 1, art theft; count 2, trespassing.
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You would still be the embodiment of virtue compared to a typical super-yacht owner.
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However much you might find this sort of behaviour dispicable, perhaps worth considering changing the terminology to something less gruesome. The guillotine is used to chop people’s heads off. Does “guillotine watch” mean you condone this if used on the wealthy?
Not to mention, the yacht owner sounds like someone who’d have his people track you down and have your head hung on a wall next to the painting. Rich sociopaths, you know.
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