Thrill theft
Art heists steal the show for the thrill they afford viewers. Movies have glamorized museum robberies by showing how daring thieves overcome high-tech security setups with sophisticated equipment and precision skills to successfully steal valuable art. But in reality, art theft is executed in ordinary fashion.
In what is considered
the largest museum heist in history, 10 paintings by Degas, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Manet, plus two other works from lesser known artists, were taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on 18 March 1990 by two men who disguised themselves as cops. The two overpowered and tied up the security guards and staff before hauling off $300 million worth of artworks.
Last week, a new breed of museum thieves emerged. Ironically, they were simple looters after they easily broke into the Same gallery in Tokyo and stripped it of all works on exhibit.
The raid was a brazen act as police officers were even outside the museum. The 200 looters struck at midnight and only took less than 10 minutes to make off with paintings of contemporary artists and installations like a crumpled 10,000-yen ($93) banknote in a frame, a stack of peelable pages with printed illustrations and a large cloth printed with lines to be cut along with scissors.
The thieves even had their getaway cars ready nearby. More shocking was the fact that they were the same visitors to the museum hours before they raided it.
Within hours after the looting, several of the stolen artworks appeared on online auction sites with price tags as high as 100,000 yen.
The police, however, made no arrest after the incident. The officers who witnessed the looting were actually there to control the crowd, so no one got hurt while the act of stealing was going on.
The stunt was an experiment and all the taken pieces were part of the so-called Stealable Art Exhibition of Tota Hasegawa.
Hasegawa originally intended the event only for a small group of participants, but after word about it spread on social media, about 200 people already gathered outside the gallery to participate shortly before midnight. Public interest was so high that even after the exhibit was emptied out, would-be thieves continued arriving, forcing a nearby police station to dispatch officers for crowd control.
The organizer, who just wanted art enthusiasts and museum goers to experience the thrill of stealing from the exhibit, revealed one interesting finding: the budding thieves were “well-mannered.”
According to Hasegawa, when someone lost a bag with a wallet in it, it was passed on to a staffer and safely returned to the owner.