A printed mural on the side of Dx Arcade in Cambridge was cut down and stolen Aug. 31, police say, leading to two theories about the thieves.
The speed with which the job was done has a local art expert suspecting the crime – technically “the biggest art theft in the history of Central Square” – was a professional job, with the work soon to appear on the dark Web art market. Arcade owner Sean Hope thinks it was probably a college prank, one that doesn’t have him laughing.
“I’m pretty upset by it,” Hope said. “I really want whoever did this to be brought to justice. If I’m correct, and this is now hanging in some sorority room or some fraternity room, they just don’t recognize what that does to a small business just trying to survive.”
The Dx Arcade opened Feb. 8 at 580 Massachusetts Ave. with virtual-reality games and interactive entertainment, following a run of several months in Harvard Square.
Hope decided to launch with something special on an otherwise bland, blank space on the arcade’s Pearl Street wall – a 20-by-9-foot mural by the Boston artist Brian Life depicting the same corner with a futuristic, neon-infused sheen. “It was kind of our tribute to Central Square,” Hope said.
The mural lasted less than seven months, Hope said.
He arrived to the storefront on Labor Day to find the business’ side wall blank, with the mural obviously cut away at its anchor points. With the help of police, Hope viewed camera footage from the Target store across the street. Based on the blurry video, Hope thinks the thieves are “two college-aged students of Asian origin wearing pajama pants” who, around 4 p.m. the previous Sunday, “brought a ladder and cut the mural down and walked toward Green Street. We believe they got into a car, given the size of the ladder and the mural.”
Hope is asking police for video footage from along Green Street to try to identify the license plate, as the thieves “were intentional about the way they walked,” Hope said, avoiding looking into cameras on the street and walking away from busy Massachusetts Avenue and toward the quieter Green Street. The whole thing happened quickly. Update on Sept. 23, 2025: Video footage suggests the thieves drove away in a black Infiniti SUV with New York license plates, Hope said.
“How brazen,” Hope said.
In opening Dx Arcade in Central Square, Hope found his landlord resistant to a permanent, painted mural. Hope instead proposed a printed mural, which could even be replaced if it was defaced. He turned to Life, a graffiti artist since the 1990s who has more recently worked with digital tools such as artificial intelligence and plunged into the NFT market when those online-only art pieces were popular. Life, contacted by email, said Monday that he was aware of the theft.
Hope said the art alone cost $4,000, followed by more than $1,200 in printing and installation costs. It could go for $15,000 to $20,000 in an illegal resale, said Rus Gant, a local photographer, artist and researcher at MIT who has talked extensively with Hope and Life about the art.
That’s if “whoever took it is going to put it back into the marketplace and try to upscale the value,” Gant said. If that were the case, Gant considered Life, with his experience in NFTs and other online art issues, to be “the guy to track it down … he’s really worried about ownership and copying and stealing.”
Gant said Cambridge has seen much higher-value art heists, including coins worth between $1 million and $5 million in 1973 and an 18th century Qing Dynasty jade incense burner worth $1.5 million in 1979, both from the Fogg Art Museum – now part of the Harvard Art Museums. But “this would seem to be the physically largest single piece of art stolen by far in Cambridge,” Gant said, as well as “probably the most valuable piece of art ever stolen in Central Square.”
The mural itself wasn’t insured, and Hope said Monday that he was debating whether to file a claim as part of the store’s insurance, which could affect its premiums. Ideally, he said, the word will get out and a useful tip will come in to police that could get the mural returned.
Anyone with information is asked to call Cambridge Police at (617) 349-3300. Anonymous reports can be left at (617) 349-3359; sent by text message to 847411 (begin your text with TIP650, then type your message); or by email by visiting CambridgePolice.org/Tips.
Dx Arcade, 580 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, Cambridge
This post was updated Sept. 23, 2025, with a change to the headline to say “college prank” instead of “frat prank.”
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Of course theft is bad and it’s pretty unfortunate for the owner who clearly invested a lot into this mural, but also…the community consensus appears to be that it was an “AI slop” eyesore with many relieved it’s gone. Personally, I’m not knee-jerk against AI and have even seen some cool and creative uses of it for artistic purposes. But this is not one of them, unfortunately. Generic sci-fi aesthetics, pseudo-Asian gibberish script everywhere, mostly people randomly standing around posed like fashion models instead of an actually dynamic and cohesive scene, not to mention how everyone has their hands in their pockets or out of sight due to AI being notoriously bad at generating fingers correctly.
I guess if the mural isn’t recovered the business will probably just print another copy, but I do hope they consider a different artist next time. Or they could even mount a blank canvas and invite real graffiti art, following the example of the alley just across Mass Ave from them.