Art gallery bookkeeping operations seem like pretty mundane things: Rich old lady A buys eccentric artist B's loopy masterpiece, and life goes on.

But then there's wunderkind Hunter Biden, art sensation extraordinaire, whose blow-pipe paintings, straight out the gate, can fetch upwards of $500,000 a pop, according to news reports.

Sure, his work draws attention, but probably not the kind he wants, as when authentic artist Rod Webber sprayed D-A-D-D-Y on the interior gallery wall in some real art in 2021.

More humiliating still, Hunter's paintings don't seem to be worth stealing to the world's art thieves. There's no news out there about anyone stealing a Hunter Biden oeuvre.

However the bookkeeping behind the paintings is seems to have value -- to someone.

According to the New York Post:

Staff at a Soho art gallery representing Hunter Biden’s paintings called police Thursday to investigate a possible computer hack of its financial records, The Post has learned.

A source close to the Georges Berges Gallery, which has mounted shows of President Biden’s son’s art since 2021, said staff members fear that financial transactions have been hacked, after a client alerted them to a phony invoice requesting payment to an account not controlled by dealer Georges Berges.

The possible hack comes days after staff discovered that the gallery’s phone number had been “compromised” by a number that had been traced to Turkey, the source told The Post.

The gallery has been part of a Republican-led probe of President Biden and his family’s financial dealings, and the source said staff feared that financial and personal information related to the president’s son could be compromised.

So someone out there, some hacker maybe in Turkey, has decided that the value in the paintings is actually in the accountants' ledger, not the paintings, and has since moved to steal them.

It's an obvious tip of the hat to what many observers have been saying about Hunter Biden, who's drawing cash like an art world whiz kid -- that the whole art game with Biden junior looks more like a means of funneling money to House Biden in one of its family money operations than it does to any great art being produced that would otherwise make Hunter the toast of the art world. Critics, after all, the ones with heft, have pretty well dismissed it. Art critic Jerry Saltz, who didn't know much of anything about Hunter Biden when he evaluated his paintings, described the work as "generic post zombie formalism illustration" and Hunter himself obviously was a "big baby." Fox News host Larry Kudlow, whose wife is a respected artist, called the Biden works "crap"

Why again, would anyone want to hack the financial records of the art gallery displaying Hunter Biden's paintings -- unless perhaps the hacker, who might have been a foreign government, might have wanted to know who was buying the paintings, which the gallery, and the Biden White House, have steadfastly refused to release. The White House says it's to prevent conflicts of interest, but the hacker seemed to think there was some value in knowing exactly who was paying for the paintings and by how much. If someone unauthorized knows those things, as a result of hacking into the gallery records, then the potential use of the non-transparent sales could be used to blackmail the Bidens, creating a national security problem. There are all kinds of things that could in theory be revealed in the sales -- from campaign finance violations disguised as art purchases, to foreign governments funneling big cash for the paintings as leverage in order to exert influence on the White House. We don't know, because only the gallery and the hacker know.

What we do know is that the Kremlin's press on Twitter in the past week or so has stepped up its operations to expose Hunter Biden's debauchery. Would the art gallery sales hackings contribute to that campaign? The reader can decide on that one.

Meanwhile, if this was the simple art sales operation they say it is, it should be no problem to release the names of all the clients who bought the paintings and how much they paid, in order to render that information useless to the hacker who has it.

Somehow that's not going to happen so far as we know. Why did the hacker want this information? And what did he take to what purpose?

Image:  Screen shot from Fox News video, via YouTube