A man pulled an Andrew Norman Wilson artwork from a California exhibition being staged as part of the Getty Foundation’s science-themed PST Art initiative.
The piece was in a show at the California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside. The exhibition, titled “Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World,” featured works from Wilson’s series “ScanOps,” in which the artist highlights glitches visible in certain scans of books on Google Books.
Over the weekend, Wilson posted to his Instagram footage of his work being stolen. In that video, a man in a wheelchair can be seen moving toward a wall, pulling Wilson’s work off it, placing it behind him, and then rolling away.
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The footage posted by Wilson features a timestamp that notes it was taken on September 29, about a week after the show opened.
Wilson told ARTnews in an email that there was currently a police investigation into the theft. “I’m actually quite amused by the footage because it feels like an artwork itself,” he wrote.
He highlighted the ways that the theft was ironic, pointing out that Google has itself been accused of copying books without permission. (In 2013, a lawsuit centered around just that was dismissed by a New York court because “society benefits” from having these texts made more readily available.)
Asked if he had any ideas about why the work was stolen, Wilson said, “As you know it’s difficult to resell a stolen artwork, so I imagine this man either wants it for himself or has a personal vendetta against me, the institution, or what the work represents.”
A spokesperson for the California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts did not respond to a request for comment.