Monet Punched: Does this makes sense to anyone?

[panzerfaust]

"Intruders, apparently drunk, broke into the Orsay Museum in Paris early on Sunday and punched a hole in a renowned work by Impressionist painter Claude Monet, Le Pont d'Argenteuil.

A surveillance camera caught a group of four to five people entering the museum ..."

I'm sorry. This just makes no sense?

Not the possibility of mindless vandalism by drunken youths, but the possibility that this happened in anyway resembling the story as it is being reported: drunk kids break in a 'back-door', set off alarm ('sometime between midnight and 0100), and flee (but have time to punch the painting) WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT.

For one thing, the Impressionists are on an upper floor, for another, the Orsay is like a vault, and for yet another, is one to believe that there were no guards inside.

Like, why not just walk in and steal the painting? Is that what security is like at the Orsay. I was just there a few months ago, and it certainly did not seem that lax.

Somehow I find myself wondering about rich, politically-connected kids who might have been let in deliberately & then got out of control.

[Warpy]

1. My money's on friends of the night guard

Museums generally have someone on the premises to make the rounds and check all doors and windows during the night, make sure the alarms are on, etc.

I'm betting it's a kid hired as a night guard and bored out of his mind and a group of friends with a couple of bottles of wine let in to pass the time.

[radfringe]

2. don't you mean

your MONET's on friends of the night guard? (owww..baroque my punny bone on that one...)

[karlrschneider]

3. Gogh away.

:P

And don't Dali



har har

[radfringe]

5. before I leave can I have some

Picassio nuts?

[northzax]

6. i figure they just needed some monet

to make their new van gogh.

[Warpy]

4. Ok, spend the rest of the day in the punalty box.

[panzerfaust]

14. This is one of the most famous museums in the world

Considering all of the famous and valuable paintings it holds, and when I think of the many guards that I saw, it is most difficile à croire that anyone could break in - and out - without getting caught.

You may be right about 'the night guard', but surely there would be more than one, and surely it would not be the rent-a-cop sort that one finds guarding shopping malls in America.

It is soooooo sad.

[Igel]

7. It might have been helped along by an all-night festival.

"The break-in occurred as Paris held its annual all-night festival, which brings thousands of people into the streets for music, exhibits and fun."

Oddly dubbed "white nights" (thus showing that French is a season behind), that probably kept everybody but any security guards on the premises a bit tied up.

One paper listed a number of museum art vandalism in the last 9 months. Could be those that want to take symbolic pokes at the official culture, or French culture. It may make sense only with more information.

[slackmaster]

8. Since when are the actions of drunks supposed to make sense?

:shrug:

[aikoaiko]

9. I never like that one either -- too cheery and optimistic.

just kidding.

[Deb]

10. No sense at all

Yes, how does one break into the Orsay!? Incredible! It makes me ill. If reproductions and pics could even begin to capture the beauty of his work it wouldn't seem such a loss. I just hope conservators can repair it. :-(

[panzerfaust]

12. Photos show a tear

... which should lend itself to restoration.

[DemoTex]

11. No discussion of Monet's work is complete without Lisel Mueller's poem:

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

[JVS]

13. Sometimes drunk people have sudden and extreme views on aesthetics that cause such things