Legalised robbery for a bit of fun

Tokyo – The Tokyo art exhibition opened to enthusiastic visitors, but many of those circulating weren’t just there to soak in some culture – they were casing the joint for a midnight raid.

Hours after the gallery closed for the night, a crowd had gathered, ready to pounce on the artworks.

Police officers only intervened for crowd control, because all the pieces at the Stealable Art Exhibition were up for grabs.

The event was intended as “an experiment”, to alter the relationship between artists and visitors, organiser Tota Hasegawa said.

It was originally conceived as a low-key event that might attract some covert thievery, but word spread so fast on social media that a crowd of nearly 200 people packed the streets near the gallery, hoping for a chance to grab a prize.

Would-be robbers were told they could raid the gallery from midnight, but the crowd was so big that the theft started half an hour earlier, and the exhibition was emptied in less than 10 minutes.

Yusuke Hasada, 26, was a rare winner, gripping a crumpled 10 000 yen (about R1 500) banknote in a frame, which was part of the My Money installation by Gabin Ito.

He arrived an hour before midnight only to see a crowd had already formed. Since there was no apparent queue, he manoeuvred himself into a spot right in front of the gallery.

“The moment the staff said they should open early due to the big crowd, people rushed in from behind me. I was in the front, and I almost fell over,” he said. “It was scary.”

Several of the artworks appeared on online auction sites within hours with price tags as high as 100 000 yen (R15 000).

Even after the exhibition was emptied out, would-be thieves continued arriving, forcing a nearby police station to dispatch officers for crowd control.

“You are blocking traffic!” officers shouted.

Hasegawa later met with police – perhaps not used to such large-scale larceny in Japan, with its ultra-low crime rate.

He said the budding thieves might have been there to stage robberies, but when “someone lost a bag with a wallet in it, it was passed onto a staffer and safely returned to the owner”.