I've blogged about this before, but GT has a nice piece up about 'elegant bribery', ie the use of artwork to facilitate corruption in China.
Here's how it works: Just before the auctioneer slams his mallet and shouts "sold," a bidder raises the stakes by upping his bid on a calligraphy scroll or painting that is not nearly worth the money. Another bidder raises the stakes again until the price has been jacked through the roof.
It turns out both bidders are in cahoots and their objective is to make the outrageous price they pay seem legitimate. That's because they had earlier given the supposed work of art to the seller, who is a government official.
The other method is to lowball the sale of a genuinely valuable item to an official who can then sell it on for the appropriate markup whenever convenient. The two variants complement each other, since the first practice tends to push the market higher across the board; therefore the seller of a genuine article doesn't have to worry about vagiaries of artistic taste. Neat. Of course, the data here is that the state of China's art market is a wider indicator of levels of corruption in society.
The cops occasionally stage exhibitions of art confiscated from busted officials. Given that some of these develop genuine coinosseurship, this makes China's cops into significant curators and exhibitors.
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