Friday, February 11, 2022

All Eyes on Me

 

In 2016, LoS reported about the well-meaning Spanish woman who tried to restore an old painting of Jesus and it ended up looking like a monkey.  Ecce Homo, meet Ecce Mono!

Now, in what has been called a "lapse of sanity" a security guard in a Russian museum has made news for "improving" Soviet artist Anna Leporskaya's modernist "Three Figures" by crudely drawing eyes on the faceless figures.  Maybe he was afraid the painting, Ouija board-like, would call up Slender Man? 

("In most stories his face is white and featureless, but occasionally his face appears differently to anyone who sees it....")

The painting is valued at 1 million USD and restoration at 3400 USD.  That's a lot of security guard hours.  And a lapse of sanity to boot.  

Or an homage to Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q..  Or maybe just an irresistible will to whimsy, a return to childhood.  Tell me you've never given a supermodel a blackened tooth or an eye-patch.... never put a Hitler mustache on a Rotarian! 

Maybe a security guard being paid crap wages was making a statement about the irony of a Soviet artist's painting being worth so much.  And knowing that repairing it would cost more than a few month's salary. 

I'm an art lover. When paintings are vandalized I'm scandalized. But for some reason this made me giggle.

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