A new exhibit at the Tate Modern is based on the artist’s experiences with a fragment broken off one of the Pyramids in Egypt that he later returned. What is more interesting though is the comments from the British Museum on the issues raised by this – despite the fact that many of the artefacts in their collection were originally acquired in similar circumstances by untrained excavators without proper permits.

From:
Daily Telegraph

Tate show reveals artist’s pyramid theft
British artist Andy Holden is to reveal how he stole a piece of the Egypt pyramids in a new exhibition at the Tate Britain in London.
Roya Nikkhah, Arts Correspondent
Published: 9:00AM GMT 10 Jan 2010

The artist’s guilty secret began with a seemingly innocent trip to Egypt.

Accompanying his father, who was there on business, Andy, then 12, was taken to the Great Pyramid of Giza: the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still surviving – relatively intact – and the oldest and largest of the pyramids at the Giza Necropolis.

“When we arrived at the pyramids, unthinkingly I broke off a lump of stone from the side of the Great Pyramid in Giza,” said Mr Holden. “I got home and put it on a shelf in my room alongside a collection of other souvenirs I had as a kid, but when my parents found out, they were furious and it ended up becoming this terrible guilt object.
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