What was Uriel Landeros thinking when he strolled into The Menil Collection and jacked up a Pablo Picasso?
That's the thing. He wasn't. That's why there's a warrant out for his arrest.
"I do know the repair, [currently] in the conservation lab, is going very well, all due to the quick action and lab on site," Vance Muse of the Menil tells Art Attack about Woman in a Red Armchair. "Menil conservation [has been] a major part of the museum since its conception and is known for expertise with modern and contemporary media."
Stenciling a sophomoric design on a Picasso is pretty dumb, but Landeros's act doesn't even rank among some of the most absurd art sabotages of all time.
5. The Mona Lisa again and again One of the reasons Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece -- albeit an overrated one -- is on such a state of lockdown is because in 1956, an aggro soul lobbed acid at the painting. There was also the 1974 incident that saw a woman in a wheelchair dousing the piece with red spray paint and the 2009 episode in which a Russian gal chucked a cup of hot tea at the work.
4. The Picasso O.G. If Landeros thought he was being original, then he wasn't hip to Tony Shafrazi, who spray-painted "KILL LIES ALL" on Picasso's Guernica at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1974. Shafrazi eventually wised up and is now a heavy-hitting art dealer in NYC.
3. A fairy tale with a flair for the X-rated An overhyped statue for sure, but not grounds for the ill treatment that the Copenhagen standby has suffered over the years. On top of multiple decapitations, vandals have bathed the fairy-tale character with pink paint, green paint and outfitted the innocent young lass with a dildo.
2. The self-proclaimed "art terrorist" In 2004, the United States Secret Service got involved after somebody dirtied the walls of the Princeton Art Museum with Fear and Consumption, a not-very-good mixed-media work that depicted then President George W. Bush of being a money-hungry pariah. The artist referred to his tomfoolery as a "mock terrorist act on the art world." Sure, dude.
1. Woman adds textures to a $30 million painting...with her butt Last December, Carmen Tisch walked into the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, and punched and scratched an oversized painting by Still. That's nothing. She also rubbed her heinie on the artwork and let loose a number one in close proximity. Tisch, who received probation after causing $10,000 worth of damages, recently claimed that she can't remember a thing because she was on a bath-salt bender.
