“These crime stories came to us. There were fake paintings hanging in galleries or being sold in auctions. There were robberies and looting. Somebody has to write about these stories about the dark side of the art world…”  Tobias Timm tells us on today’s show. Tobias and his colleague Stefan Koldehoff are art journalists who found themselves experts in the world of art crime because Stefan says “once you start with it, you can’t let it go again.”

Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are the authors of a new book called Art & Crime: The Fight Against Looters, Forgers and Fraudsters in the High-Stakes Art World, released in a translated copy this year from Seven Stories Press. 

Stefan Koldehoff is culture editor at Deutschlandfunk radio and writer for Die Zeit, the German newspaper of record. In 2008 he received the Puk journalist prize for his investigative research.

Tobias Timm is a writer for Die Zeit’s feature pages from Berlin on architecture, art, and crime. The two are co-authors of a previous book, released in 2012, called False Pictures, Real Money.

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