A filmmaker and former MIT professor has been arrested after he allegedly robbed a Manhattan bank on New Year's Eve—and recorded it as part of an art project. Joseph Gibbons, 61, has been charged with robbery after allegedly stealing $1,002 from a Capital One branch at Bowery and Grand Street near Chinatown.
A fellow inmate told the Post that Gibbons bragged about doing the heist for art: "He was doing research for a film," former cell-mate Kaylan Sherrard said. "It’s not a crime; it’s artwork… He’s an intellectual."
Gibbons was allegedly carrying a small pink and silver video camera with him when he walked into the bank just after 2 p.m. on Dec. 31st; he passed a note to the teller reading, "THIS IS A ROBBERY. LARGE BILLS. NO DYE PACKS/NO GPS."
Police are investigating whether Gibbons was responsible for a similar heist at a bank in Providence in November; during that incident, the middle-aged robber stole $3,000 from a Citizens Bank, then told the teller, "Thank you, this is for the church."
Gibbons, who was a lecturer at MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology from 2002-2010 (according to his now-deleted MIT faculty page), previously told art magazine Big Red and Shiny he "cultivated" a drug addiction to make a film about drug addiction:
I was involved with all this as research. The romantic idea of the artist getting involved in these kinds of activities as a kind of research, gaining experience. But that was a big inspiration on me; the symbolist French poet, Rimbaud’s dictum that the poet should consume all poisons and go into the unknown, the depths of degradation to bring back his findings, that I read when I was a teenager and it made a big imprint on me.
