The theft of art and tall tales from Islamic websites are not the sort of thing you would expect to hit the Crikey bunker, but Patricia Piccinini – older sister of Mrs Crikey and prominent contemporary artist – has been quite shocked by developments over the past few weeks.
In May, Patricia and her artist husband Peter Hennesey noticed a sharp uptick in the traffic through Patricia's website, which now carries a front page explanation of what is quite a disturbing hoax.
Site usage had surged from a healthy 150,000 page views in April to a record 950,000 in May. A quick look at the "top referrers" didn't just show Google and various art magazines or galleries, but also websites such as Somalia Online. A few days later they received the first email referring to the use of one of Patricia's works – a cropped image from the sculpture The Leather Landscape – in a hoax. The hoax was posted on an Arabic language website www.alnilin.com and recounted the story of how a girl was transformed into an animal after throwing a copy of the Koran on to the ground.
Picture at link....ya gotta laugh. |