More than 200 gold-colored Mozart figures have vanished from a public art installation in Salzburg, forcing organizers to end part of the exhibition early.
The theft has disrupted a major public art project marking the 270th anniversary of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth in his home city.
What do we know about the theft of the mini-Mozarts?
The Mozarteum Foundation said 210 of the 320 figures installed in the city’s Mirabell Garden had disappeared. The theft forced organizers to end the garden display early.
Organizers had kept some replacements in reserve, but not enough to offset the scale of the theft.
The manufacturer is also on summer holiday, leaving no quick way to replace them.
Several dozen figures remain on display at the Mozarteum and Mozart‘s birthplace until the end of August.
The figures had been placed in the Mirabell Garden and at several Mozart-related sites around Austria’s fourth-largest city.
The polymer figures show Mozart with his dog Pimperl, a nod to the composer’s everyday life in Salzburg.
German conceptual artist Ottmar Hörl, who is behind the display, said he wanted to show Mozart not as a monument but “as a normal human being despite his genius.”
Who might have taken the mini-Mozarts?
Hörl is known for installations made up of large numbers of identical figures depicting famous personalities.
“The worst thing for an artist is when his work dissolves,” Hörl said.
Hörl said he did not believe tourists had simply walked off with the 50-centimeter (20-inch) figures.
“This is organized theft,” he said, suggesting they were probably taken at night after the garden had closed. “I find it a bit cheeky.”
Hörl had planned to sell the figures after the exhibition for around €90 each, putting the loss at roughly €20,000.
A previous Hörl display in Bayreuth suffered a similar fate when 100 figures of composer Richard Wagner disappeared.
“That’s just the nature of public space,” Hörl said. “When you work as an artist in a public space, you mustn’t complain about what is happening there. It ranges from destruction to theft. That’s just how it is.”
Edited by: Louis Oelofse
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