COINTELEGRAPH | Mysterious ‘cat burglar’ pilfers CryptoKitty from digital art installation
Crypto-artist Kevin Abosch on a recent ‘crime,’ the state of digital art, and a new generation of art collectors.
On Friday, Kevin Abosch — an Irish conceptual artist who was among the first to use blockchain technology as a medium — reported that a dastardly heist had been committed in one of his on-chain installations, an Ethereum wallet-turned-artwork titled "Stealing The Contents of This Wallet Is a Crime" (2018).
In a Tweet the artist, whose work has been exhibited at The Hermitage, said that a CryptoKitty had been swiped from the freely-accessible address:
“Stealing The Contents…” is one of what Abosch calls his “social experiments challenging value systems” — a conceptual framework especially fitting for the crypto world. Part of "Stealing The Contents…” included tokens deposited to the wallet from his “I Am A Coin” (2018) piece, in which Abosch tokenized himself in a process involving the artist’s own blood to distribute 10 million tokens with the ‘IAMA’ ticker.
He described “Stealing…” as a mutual playground for explorers, and participants largely responded with goodwill and good humor: Ethereum-savvy art fans played with the blood-tokens’ occult implications — for instance moving .666 of IAMA in and out of the “Stealing…” wallet, among other hijinks.
“I think people just wanted to interact with and therefore become part of the art in a sense,” said Abosch.
These ideals are precisely what made Friday’s theft seem so cruel. Even for a space rife with scammers, charlatans, and crooks, stealing a CryptoKitty — one named in honor of his work, no less — from a freely accessible wallet seemed unusually mean-spirited.
When asked in an interview if the theft upset him, however, Abosch began to laugh.
“Actually, I stole it,” he confessed.