How did an artist swap one of the British Museum’s historic coins with a fake?

It turns out the security at the British Museum isn’t as steadfast as it might appear to be. One artist has revealed how he swapped a historic British coin dating back to the 1600s for a fake in what could be the most exciting heist we’ve heard about since Ocean’s Twelve came out. 

Ilê Sartuzi, a Brazilian conceptual artist, stole an English Civil War-era coin from the British Museum for an artwork that highlights how many items in the museum are taken from other countries.

In a video that he created for his master’s degree at Goldsmith's University, Sartuzi got hold of the ancient money by taking part in a volunteer-led scheme at the museum that lets visitors handle coins. He said he asked for the Civil War-era coin because ‘it is one of the few British things in the British Museum’, Reuters reported. 

He then created a diversion while he swapped the artefact for a fake, before depositing the original coin in the museum’s collection box on his way out the door. 

The British Museum said it would alert the police of the incident, which happened in June. ‘This is a disappointing and derivative act that abuses a volunteer led service aimed at giving visitors the opportunity to handle real items and engage with history,’ a museum spokesperson told Hyperallergic, which broke the story. 

Sartuzi’s prank comes amid calls for the museum to return artefacts that were stolen and looted during Britain’s imperial reign, like the Nigerian Benin Bronzes and the Greek Elgin Marbles. 

Sartuzi said institutions like the British Museum see themselves as the ‘holders of the treasures of humanity. The problem is that these institutions are the basis of imperialist cultures that looted a lot of these objects from the global south and world’.

What do you think of the prank? Is it a stroke of genius or a disappointing mistreatment of a historical artefact? 

This London museum is spending £100,000 to make its exhibitions more diverse.

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