Ulay: 'There Is a Criminal Touch to Art'
Stealing a painting as a live performance
Image: courtesy / press
In 1976 the artist Ulay walked into a Berlin museum, took Carl Spitzweg's 'The Poor Poet' — reputedly Hitler's favourite painting — and hung it in the home of a Turkish immigrant family, then phoned the museum to confess. The act was the artwork.
Titled 'There Is a Criminal Touch to Art', Ulay's performance began with a genuine theft: he lifted Spitzweg's much-loved painting from the wall of the Neue Nationalgalerie and drove it across Berlin to a working-class immigrant apartment in Kreuzberg, where he rehung it.
He then telephoned the museum director to report its location. Arrested and charged, Ulay reframed a crime as a statement about who owns culture, which bodies are welcomed into the museum, and the nationalist baggage of a painting the Nazi elite had prized. It remains a landmark of theft-as-art.