Reposted from the Toronto Star

It’s almost the stuff of comedy: A man wearing a dark jacket, pulled high to mask his face, slips unperturbed into an empty gallery, lifts a $45,000 Banksy print from the wall and strides almost casually out the same door he came in.

There was nothing urgent about the early-Sunday-morning theft, and why would there be? If not for the security cameras, it would have been the perfect crime, and not for any particular skill by the thief. Bright lights, an unlocked door and not another soul to be seen made “The Art of Banksy” — displaying some $35 million worth of the British street artist’s work on Toronto’s Sterling Road — about as forbidding as an all-night bus station.

Of course, bus-station standards are hardly sufficient for an art exhibition, said Steven Keller, a museum security expert based in Florida.

“Art exhibition security is somewhat unique in that instead of putting the valuable assets in a safe at night, we hang them on walls,” said Keller, whose Architect’s Security Group is the largest museum security consulting group in North America, and has worked with Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. “Therefore, the building they are displayed in has to be well protected. Every access or egress point should have been staffed or alarmed, someone leaving with a picture should have been seen, and the item they were carrying examined.”

“If they left by a fire exit door, they should have been observed by CCTV and an alarm generated,” he added. “Someone should have been close enough by to respond. Obviously, none of this happened.”

Keller, who watched the now-famous security footage online, said such out-in-the-open displays of valuable material require alarm systems that “far exceed” the needs of virtually all other kinds of facilities. His security company, he says, “provides CCTV which is monitored and not just recorded, which apparently wasn’t the case in the Toronto Banksy theft, where no one intervened when they should have.”

This is the question of the moment: How could so much valuable art be left unmanned, unobserved and, apparently, unlocked? Toronto Police Services doesn’t appear to have gotten that far with its investigation. (An officer at the communications branch said he had “no idea” what was being investigated; the lead investigator on the case is off duty until next week, the communications desk said.)

Meanwhile, LiveNation and Starvox, the event-promotion companies that brought the show to town, haven’t had much to say either — a brief statement Thursday simply noted that the artwork, a print called Trolley Hunters valued at $45,000, “went missing during setup.” They’ve declined further comment, though they confirmed through a spokesperson that 213 Sterling Rd. did have at least one security guard on duty at the time.

The theft occurred at 5 a.m. on Sunday, three days before the opening of the blockbuster exhibition. Toronto police released the surveillance footage on Thursday. And so far, the thief remains as anonymous as the artist whose work he ripped off. 

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