Kota Ezawa

The Crime of Art

The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964). Ezawa uses his signature cartoon-like style to remix and reenact these crime scenes, leaving only the artworks as “real” objects (as they are depicted in the films), rather than illustrating them. Reversing fiction and reality in an unexpected way, this gesture invites the viewer to question the reliability of the visual footage. 

Ezawa describes his artistic oeuvre as “a form of image theft” and focuses on appropriation and mediation of images through his works. Borrowing scenes from Hollywood films, The Crime of Art is in line with the tendency of the artist to copy and to manipulate imagery that belongs to popular culture. By focusing on stolen art, Ezawa rethinks the conceptual underpinnings of his work in relation to the dilemma of theft and ownership. These become urgent questions at a time when the manipulation of digital images is a part of our daily lives, blurring the line between real and fake. Through this work, the artist also questions the fragile nature of the museums that “own” objects with major cultural significance—whether looted, exchanged, bought, or donated from other cultures and geographies—many of these objects carry with them problematic histories.