Stolen art

OK this is an art website and now I am curious to know you guys' opinion on this news I have just finished reading.


Two Italian "artists-provocateurs" are on show at the London's
Carroll/Fletcher gallery with exhibition called something like 
In Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable.






Two Italian-born
artists, 
Eva and Franco Mattes, are showing off more than 10,000 private photographs they claim to have
stolen from random people's hard drives, part of an exhibit that also features
fragments cut, torn or chipped off of iconic works by Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp
and Jeff Koons. 


The pair copied the
contents of about 100 people's hard drives, downloading pictures, videos, and
music which they arranged into a slide show. A projector installed in the
darkened front room of the white-walled gallery flashed photographs of people's
smiling friends, their grinning lovers, their lazy pets, their unmade beds,
boozy nights out, road trips, dances, landscapes, street scenes and more. Some
photos could easily have been pulled off Facebook. Others — shirtless men photographed
in the bathroom mirror, women squeezing their breasts for the camera — probably
weren't intended for public consumption.


I might agree with the concept that there is a lot of voyeurism and exhibitionism on the Internet, but.. what the heck!  


And this is not the end of it... They have also gone around museums of modern art stealing fragments of famous artworks (see photo above) such as what
Franco described as his biggest challenge — a tiny porcelain fragment chipped
off of Duchamp's "Fountain" with a Swiss army knife
. Eva Mattes said
the pair spent hours scouting out their targets, often taking before-and-after
photographs or filming themselves stealing the material.


I call it vandalizing.


And to be honest these guys risk a colossal lawsuit for violation of privacy, vandalism, theft.


They call it Net Art (really??). With all the bad things said about Damien Hirst and his work, at least the guy had his own original ideas and didn't go around prying into other people's hard disks or looting museums. 


What do you think??? Maybe we should all go and loot their exhibition? 


Text in italics from this article http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=54725&b=the%20othersurl]


 Photo credits AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth

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