Artist Andrew Norman revealed that his artwork was stolen last month from the PST Art Initiative exhibition in California.
In September, the exhibition “Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World” opened at the California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of Art in Riverside. The exhibition had works from the series “ScanOPs” by Andrew Norman which were based on snippets of glitched digital scans of physical books by Google Books. The work was supposed to introspect the impact of companies like Google on literary knowledge, and its pitfalls.
However, last weekend Andrew Norman shared a post on Instagram, revealing that one of the works from the exhibition was stolen last month. The theft apparently took on September 29, roughly a week after the show opened. The Instagram post also contained footage of the theft, as captured by the museum’s CCTV. The video showed a man in a wheelchair approaching one of the works, removing it, tucking it at the back of his wheelchair, and then rolling away.
Norman announced that the theft is currently being investigated by the police. However, he also expressed his amusement at the way the theft was committed. Furthermore, Norman also pointed out the irony that the stolen artwork itself was about Google Books, which was previously accused of stealing intellectual property by digitizing books it didn’t have the rights to.
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In a separate comment asking for a hypothesis about the motive, Andrew Norman 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.”
