Man dressed as old lady smears cream on Mona Lisa

I’ll give a shout-out to Jeu de Paume and Musée Rodin.

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I believe the real Mona Lisa is actually protected by a tombstone and about 6 ft of earth.

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Words to live by, right there.

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There’s a little museum near me in North East England that has a Goya. Not a very fancy Goya in the grand scheme of things, but still. And no one pays much attention to it, so you can Goya gawk for as long as you like (they also have a Jacquard loom for nerding at. It’s great).

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“Think of the Earth, people are destroying the Earth,” the man said in French in another video that showed him being led away by security from the Paris gallery. “Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this.”

Dude, go smash some cars if you’re that invested in your little crusade. This is on the same level as going to school board meetings to complain about terrorism in Somalia.

Yeah. After this much time, I don’t think cream is going to help her complexion. :man_shrugging:

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Man wastes perfectly good cake.

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And this is why it is under glass.

Hmmm…I have an idea.

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Let her eat cake.

The police were presumably tuckered out from spraying Scousers.

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If one MUST add a dessert course to a Da Vinci painting it seems like The Last Supper would be a more appropriate choice.

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I think you made a wise choice. Musée d’Orsay is my favorite with Musée Rodin and the Louvre tied for number two in Paris. Georges Pompidou is fun and interesting, but ranks third for me.

I’ve been to Louvre twice. It was crazy near the Mona Lisa exhibit in 1989, but there was a lull when we went back in 1996 and we were able to look at it without the masses. It was still underwhelming without the crowds.

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Seeing the Mona Lisa was one of the greatest anticlimax’s of my life. In my head all I could hear was Peggy Lee singing, “Is that all there is?”.

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The Orsay is my favorite museum in Paris. Right across the Seine from there is the much less crowded Musée L’Orangerie which has some impressive wall-sized paintings by Monet. If you’re a big fan of Monet, there’s the Musée Marmottan in the 16th, which was his home at one time, and has a huge collection of his works. (If you’re a huge fan, get on a train, then a bus to his home in Giverny in Normandy). The Louvre has its many charms, but Paris is filled with museum options.

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The Rodin is also excellent. Surprisingly uncrowded for how famous The Thinker is, and the other stuff Rodin did that nobody seems to have heard of is amazing. And more of him can be found at Musée d’Orsay, another underappreciated gem of a museum. You can stare at the enormous Gates Of Hell piece for hours and not see everything in it.

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Letting him perform and pose for the cameras as they did seems dumb. He should have been under control and kept moving.

At that point they had no idea what his intentions were and potential for violence was and some of the guards should have been watching the crowd as this kind of thing is class 101 in distracting people and security while something else happens.

I mean, it wouldn’t be such a big deal (for the public) in the first place if it hadn’t been for Vincenzo Peruggia, Eduardo Valfierno, and Yves Chaudron. :man_shrugging:

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I have to admit that it took me a moment or two to get that. :wink:

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There are all sorts of “activists” whose first and last goal, no matter what they say, is getting attention (no matter if it hurts their ostensible cause.) This one seems to be that exact type.

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Ah, the Mona Lisa, always attracting lazy performance artists to do boring shit to it to get attention. (Which is why it’s behind bulletproof glass to begin with.) Come up with some better material, folks.

It’s the least interesting thing in that room even - and it has most of the room to itself. It’s weird how a theft and some pop songs elevated one of Leonardo’s least interesting paintings to be the most famous thing in that museum. I never bothered to even try to get a look at it (even back when the crowd was a lot less insane than it is now) - not that one even can, these days, you’d get infinitely more out of a reproduction. I always found the crowd around it was more interesting than the painting itself.

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