Joseph Gibbons, who lectured at MIT from 2002-2010, gets busted for the New Year’s Eve robbery of a Manhattan bank while he was wanted for the November robbery of a bank in Providence, Rhode Island
A former MIT professor who lectured in the prestigious university’s Art, Culture and Technology program from 2002-2010, was arrested Friday for the $1,000 New Year’s Eve robbery of a Capital One bank in Manhattan. Joseph Gibbons, 61, now a filmmaker, used a camcorder to film the robbery. He was already wanted for the November robbery of a bank in Providence, Rhode Island.
According to court records, he handed a teller at the Capital One bank a note asking for a donation to be made to his church. In the Rhode Island robbery, he took $3,000 and told the Citizens Bank teller, “Thank you, this is for the church.”
While waiting in court to be arraigned, Gibbons told another prisoner that he committed the robberies as research for a film he planned to make. Kaylan Sherrard, the other prisoner, told authorities, “He was doing research for a film. It’s not a crime, it’s artwork. He’s an intellectual.”
A bio from MIT stated that Gibbons's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. It also noted that his 2002 film 'Confessions of a Sociopath' was judged to be among the Best Films of the Year by Artforum magazine.
Gibbons once told Big Red and Shiny art magazine that, as research for some of his short films, he tried to cultivate a drug habit. “I was involved in all this research. The romantic idea of the artist getting involved in these kinds of activities as a kind of research, gaining experience.”
This nutty professor either failed to take the Robbery 101 course, or if he did, the intellectual idiot must have flunked out.
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