Tag: art

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Accidents art

Tourist damages 18th century painting in Florence during a selfie gone wrong

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2017 photo. Not actual tourist or painting, same museum


Last week we discussed the ridiculous, entirely-preventable accident of a piece of fine art — a Swarovski bedazzled chair named “Van Gogh” — being broken in an Italian museum… when patrons sat on it. It was a couple (as yet not publicly identified), who were taking turns snapping selfies of them hovering over the piece, when the man lost his footing and touched butt to seat, at which point the frame collapsed and the couple fled. This happened in April, but the Verona museum, Palazzo Maffei, only commented on the incident recently. The whole episode was such an absurd, profoundly dumb occurrence, that we knew we weren’t gonna hear another story like— Wait, what’s that? A tourist at the Uffizi in Florence just damaged an 18th century portrait of a Medici when he leaned in to take a selfie? You guys, we couldn’t even make it a full fortnight before another Italian museum had to beseech the public to back away from the priceless art! Once again I am compelled to exclaim, che pazzo!

Restrictions will be placed on visitors taking selfies at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence after a tourist damaged an 18th-century portrait while posing for a photograph, the gallery’s director confirmed today.

In a video posted on the Daily Mail website, the man is seen capturing a picture of himself mimicking the pose of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, in a 1712 portrait by Anton Domenico Gabbiani.

The man stumbles backward, falling against the portrait and leaving a hole near the prince’s right boot. The tourist reportedly tripped on a platform intended to keep visitors at an appropriate distance from the paintings.

Simone Verde, the director of Uffizi Galleries said in a statement: “The problem of visitors coming to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media is rampant: we will set very precise limits, preventing behaviour that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage. The tourist, who was immediately identified, will be prosecuted.”

The painting, which is included in the exhibition Florence and Europe: Arts of the 18th Century at the Uffizi, has since been removed for repair. The exhibition runs until 28 November but, according to an online statement, will remain closed until 2 July.

The incident follows another recent tourist mishap at the Palazzo Maffei in Verona, during which a visitor damaged a crystal-studded work called Van Gogh’s Chair (2006-07) by the artist Nicola Bolla. On CCTV footage a man can be seen sitting on the chair and posing for a photograph before the seat buckles under his weight. The museum says that the incident, which took place in April, was reported to the police.

[From The Art Newspaper]

Mamma mia, what is wrong with people?! And I mean that on two fronts: one, the vacuous absence of etiquette (or plain old good sense), and two, why are people tripping so easily? Do we need to bring Charm School back for both manners and balance? Apologies for the vehemence, but I feel that as a species, we’re on the brink of losing our museum privileges! Also, a valuable tidbit that I remind myself every time I travel: no one cares that much about your vacation selfies. With the exception of your mother, but I don’t think she’d be much pleased to learn her child cracked an Italian painting at a famed Florentine museum.

And now for my full confession: with each of these “tourist runs amok in an Italian museum” stories, my first response was to check in with the whereabouts of my best friend. I love him to death, and he is an art lover! But I’ve also had the experience of visiting the Met with him, where he’d rush by the walls of pieces, proclaiming, “Overrated! Overrated! Overrated!” as he saw fit, and managed to set off the alarm for leaning too close to an exhibit of musical instruments. The worst offense, though, was the time he was detained by security guards for sneezing on a Monet. I wasn’t there to witness it, but received a slew of frantic texts from him reporting live on the scene. Luckily, I can confirm that he was not the culprit in either of these Italian misadventures! Regretfully, I have the sneaking suspicion that someday, he will be.

Agli Uffizi un visitatore perde l’equilibrio mentre si fa un selfie e danneggia un dipinto. La scena immortalata in un video. #ANSA pic.twitter.com/uoWVPuarRJ

— Agenzia ANSA (@Agenzia_Ansa) June 21, 2025

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Photos credit: Getty and via Wikipedia/Public Domain

Categories
Accidents art

Italian museum issues plea after couple sat on a crystal-covered chair and broke it

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Nicola Bolla is an Italian artist whose signature style appears to be bedazzling objects with Swarovski crystals. And when I say “bedazzle,” I mean completely covering the item in question. He did this to a toilet, I sh-t you not. So one of his sparkly sculptures was on display in Palazzo Maffei, a museum in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. The title of the piece was “Van Gogh,” and it was a bedazzled chair. What’s in a name? Apparently, it’s an homage to van Gogh’s painting of a chair. (Please, like we don’t know Vincent was a rhinestone queen.) The chair artwork was on a pedestal, but not otherwise protected from viewers, other than a placard that said “Do Not Touch.” And guess what? Someone touched. It was actually two visitors, and by “touched,” I mean they took turns SITTING on the chair. And as it turns out, by “chair,” I mean a structure Bolla built himself that’s mostly held together with foil. Although this happened in April, Palazzo Maffei has only just released the video, to which I say, grazie mille.

Footage released by the Palazzo Maffei, in Verona, shows a man and woman taking pictures of each other while pretending to sit on the so-called “Van Gogh” chair.

The man then appears to slip and fall onto the chair, crushing it underneath him.

Officials have since notified police about the pair, who have not been identified.

“Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture, and we don’t think about the consequences,” says museum director Vanessa Carlon.

“Of course it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us — that isn’t an accident,” she adds. “This is a nightmare for any museum”.

The BBC understands this incident happened in April. Palazzo Maffei released the footage on 12 June.

The chair was built by Italian artist Nicola Bolla and is bejewelled with Swarovski crystals made from polished, machine-cut glass. It is named after Vincent van Gogh as a tribute to the Dutch artist’s painting of a simple chair.

Bolla’s piece is somewhat priceless, in that the museum declined to provide an estimate of its value when asked by the BBC.

Carlotta Menegazzo, an art historian based at the Palazzo Maffei, says that — while it looks sturdy — its frame is mostly hollow and kept together with foil.

“On the chair was a note warning people not to touch, and of course it is placed on a pedestal, so it’s quite clear it’s not a real chair,” says Ms Menegazzo.

Two legs and the main seat were broken, but Ms Menegazzo says “a great job” has been done to restore the piece and it is now back in place.

The Palazzo Maffei opened in 2020 and has 650 pieces on display, including paintings by Picasso and ancient Egyptian art.

Ms Carlon says the majority of visitors are considerate, and she hopes this release of CCTV footage won’t become a “negative episode”.

Instead, she wants to highlight that “anyone should enter art places, or museums or churches, wherever art is displayed, in a more respectful way”.

“Art must be respected and loved because it is very fragile,” she adds.

[From BBC News]

Che pazzo! All of it! Every aspect of this story is insane to me, yes starting with the fact that covering a chair in Swarovski crystals is considered museum-worthy. I know art is subjective, but come on. Ancient Egyptian works. Picassos. Bedazzled chair. Then there’s the title, “Van Gogh,” — it’s just an attention grab, right? But putting those points aside, my incredulity next turns to the artwork chair not being properly protected, including by humans. The museum really had no one on the floor guarding the exhibits? Shouldn’t someone have heard the chair collapsing? If a bejewelled chair falls in the gallery, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? But of course the craziest part of all this, is the couple taking turns sitting on the damn chair! I agree with the museum director that the only thing worse than breaking it was their scurrying off instead of fessing up. So even though I do not have the highest opinion of this particular artform (as with many pieces these days), please folks, let’s be decent and not touch what isn’t ours. Other than that, all I can say is that I hope Bolla’s Swarovski-clad toilet goes on a date sometime with Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet. Also, this line was wry perfection: “Bolla’s piece is somewhat priceless, in that the museum declined to provide an estimate of its value when asked by the BBC.”

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photos and videos via Instagram and Twitter/Palazzo Maffei

Categories
art Crime Jim Morrison

Jim Morrison’s stolen gravesite bust found after 37 years

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Doors frontman Jim Morrison died in Paris at the much too young age of 27 in 1971. It was a tragic yet all too familiar case of a rocker’s hedonistic lifestyle leading to his demise. Upon Morrison’s passing in Paris, he was laid to rest in the city’s famed Père-Lachaise cemetery, where fans have made pilgrimage to pay their respects ever since. One such fan, Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin, took things a step further: in 1981 he carved a white marble bust of Morrison that sat atop his headstone… until thieves absconded with it seven years later in 1988! Sacré bleu! I don’t know how someone(s) just walks off with 280-odd pounds of iconic marble, but then again I don’t know how people stole that 216-pound golden toilet or those 22 tons of posh cheese; these wily European criminals have their ways. So, the bust has been missing all this time, until French authorities made a surprise announcement on Monday: after 37 years, the Morrison bust was found! On a completely unrelated fraud investigation, lol!

Conceived as a tribute to Morrison, the sculpture was carved after his death by the Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin. It was placed at his grave at Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery in 1981, 10 years after the singer died in the French capital at the age of 27.

While the exact circumstances of Morrison’s death remain shrouded in mystery, most early accounts say the singer died of cardiac arrest in his bathtub.

From its perch on top of Morrison’s headstone, the statue welcomed the throngs of visitors who came to snap photos, lay flowers and — before the hiring of a guard to watch the site — smoke pot and party with one of Père-Lachaise’s most famous residents.

Seven years after the bust was placed at the site, it disappeared. Rumours swirled over what might have happened: some spoke of two fans who had managed to cart off the bust, reportedly weighing 128kg, on a moped in the middle of the night; others repeated the seemingly baseless claim that authorities had hidden the sculpture in order to protect it.

In 1994, after years had gone by without any sign of the sculpture, two Americans were arrested for attempting to erect their own bronze version of the bust at Morrison’s grave site.

Todd Mitchell, who said he had travelled from Utah and spent thousands of dollars of his own retirement fund to resurrect the bust, said the security guard was initially confused when he came across him and his nephew scrambling to bolt the bust to Morrison’s headstone in the dark. “He just looked dumbfounded … Most people are destroying stuff in that cemetery,” Mitchell told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1994.

On Monday, as fans of Morrison celebrated what police described on social media as an “unusual discovery”, there was little news on whether the bust would be returned to the singer’s tomb. Benoît Gallot, the curator of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, told Le Figaro: “The police haven’t contacted us, so I don’t know whether the bust will be returned to us.”

[From The Guardian]

If, like me, you were wondering why on earth that poor man from Utah was arrested for bringing a replacement sculpture, the answer is he (and his nephew) weren’t really arrested for trying to replace the bust, but more for the fact that they were drilling holes in the headstone to install the new piece. Still, I feel like there’s a quirky movie to be made of Mr. Todd Mitchell’s $1,700 misadventure. But getting back to the real sculpture… I’d like to highlight the full title of the police crew that recovered this lost treasure. Officially, they are: “The Financial and Anti-Corruption Brigade of the Directorate of Judicial Police of the Prefecture of Police, under the authority of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office.” How do they get all that on les uniformes? And for anyone wondering how they verified it was the original piece, its authenticity was confirmed by the particular graffiti adorning it, as well as its missing nose, two features that were there at the time it was stolen. (The nose was rumored to have been sliced off by souvenir hunters. Ouch.) I hope the police do return the bust to its rightful home atop Morrison’s headstone in Père-Lachaise cemetery. Come on, la police. The time to hesitate is through, no time to wallow in the mire.

After nearly 40 years, a bust of Jim Morrison stolen from his gravesite at the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris has been found

More: https://t.co/sZutVlpEXk pic.twitter.com/gR8DuN7BPV

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 20, 2025

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photos credit: Fabio Mazzarella/Agenzia Sintesi/Avalon, hermes images/Avalon, Getty and via Twitter

Categories
art politics

Trump administration guts the NEA as hundreds of grants are canceled

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Ever since the Trump administration decimated the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) last month, I’ve been bracing for news of the same fate befalling its sister agency. That gloomy moment has arrived. In its 60-year history, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has given out $5.5 billion in grant money, making it the nation’s largest arts funder. But last Friday, Trump’s cronies began canceling hundreds of previously-awarded grants from the NEA, sending out late night emails to grant recipients informing them that their funds were being revoked. That’s like a school providing a teacher with money to buy supplies for the classroom, letting the teacher buy everything, then saying “Actually, we’re taking that money back so that your own resources pay for enriching the community.” The language in the cancelation emails pretty uniformly read: “The NEA has updated priorities to make President Dipsh-t happy, your project no longer aligns with those priorities, money bye bye.” (I may have paraphrased.) And the new priorities are, quite frankly, baffling:

“The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” the email, several copies of which have been shared with NPR, stated in part. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.” The email includes a line saying the recipient can appeal the decision within seven days.

The email states President Trump’s priorities as being: “Projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”

The NEA did not respond to requests for comment. But arts groups have been vocal about the cuts on social media, in online newsletters and in emails to NPR.

“The work will go on, but right now I’m pretty discouraged,” wrote Rob Lentz, executive director at Open Studio Project, on LinkedIn. Lentz said his organization’s two-year grant supporting art for elementary school students has been canceled. “The nonprofit sector is under siege by our own government, and arts organizations are especially vulnerable. When chaos and cruelty are the order of the day, all I can ask for is solidarity and resistance.”

Studio Two Three, a community arts space in Richmond, Va., shared information about a canceled $30,000 grant. “Absolutely furious,” wrote Kate Fowler, the organization’s director of community partnerships and development, on Instagram: “A grant we spent hours (days?) writing, submitted on time, were selected and approved for by a group of our national peers and received our acceptance letter for, was randomly revoked today. It is WILD that this administration is retroactively pulling funding.”

…Beyond the wave of cuts, the National Endowment for the Arts is among a group of “small agency eliminations” proposed by the Trump administration’s 2026 Discretionary Budget Request, alongside the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. “The Budget includes the elimination of, or the elimination of Federal funding for, the following small agencies — consistent with the President’s efforts to decrease the size of the Federal Government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities. Past Trump administration budgets have also supported these eliminations. Remaining funds account for costs of orderly shutdowns,” the budget request states.

[From NPR]

The first priority listed is supporting HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions?!? From the guy who says all the ills of the world are from DEI? From the guy who’s indiscriminately rounding up latino men with tattoos to illegally send to a prison in another country!?! And then to go on and list things like “assist in disaster recovery” and “make America healthy again.” Are they trying to have NEA-funded projects pick up the slack for all the agencies this administration has already kneecapped? What is Trump playing at here? Or is the clown clowning us, because his endgame is to shut down the NEA entirely anyway? FWIW, the NEA is estimated to account for 0.003% of the total federal budget. Big savings, “UGE!”

Even though I said I was expecting this move, it was still a sucker punch when it happened. A good friend of mine started a nonprofit music organization 10 years ago; they’re dedicated to investing in completely original IP (no adaptations or revivals) from emerging composers. I write all the grants for them, and yeah, we knew it was bad when May began and we still hadn’t heard about the last application we submitted… in July of last year for fiscal year 2025. I was about to start prepping for the next app when all this erupted. My friend says he considers himself lucky since we never got a response at all, so it’s not like we’re being told now to return any money. Silver linings, when the bar is in hell.

Photo note by CB: These photos are of some of the NEA highlighted human and civil rights awards grant recipients including Kansas City-based advocacy group Showing Up for Racial Justice, Nawahiokalani Public Charter School and The Missisippi Minority Farmer’s Alliance

Categories
art Barack Obama donald trump

The White House swapped Obama’s portrait with a bad ‘painting’ of Trump

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Here’s a bit of tradition I didn’t know about art in the White House: the two most recent presidential portraits are typically displayed in the Grand Foyer. Up until Friday, the two portraits hanging in that designated spot were of Obama and Bush; Biden’s official portrait is not yet complete, and I believe they’re still sourcing all the orange oil paint for Trump’s. Unsurprisingly, the current president doesn’t feel beholden to courteous customs. As 45, the orange menace replaced portraits of Clinton and Bush with (very much not recent presidents) William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Now as 47, Trump has upped the ick factor by replacing Obama’s portrait with, I sh-t you not, a painting of Trump’s July 2024 assassination attempt. Aside from being generally appalled, Obama-era White House photographer Pete Souza noted that the new “artwork” gets a lot of foot traffic from public White House tours.

The White House swapped the official portrait of former President Barack Obama for a painting based on a photograph of the sitting President Donald Trump, after the July 2024 assassination attempt.

The portraits were swapped on Friday, April 11, per CNN. The new painting of Trump, 78, shows him raising his fist after a bullet grazed his ear at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July 2024, in an apparent assassination attempt. The swap was announced via the White House’s official social media account.

The replacement breaks the White House tradition, as it is customary to include the two most recent presidential portraits in the Grand Foyer, near the entrance of the executive mansion, so state guests and visitors can view them in a prominent location.

Since Trump and Joe Biden’s portraits are not yet complete, the two most recent presidential portraits on display were that of Obama, 63, and his predecessor, President George W. Bush.

Obama’s portrait is now hung across the Grand Foyer, where Bush’s had been hanging. Bush’s portrait was prematurely bumped out of the Grand Foyer and relocated to a different location next to the portrait of his late father, former President George H.W. Bush, per CNN.

…The move is reminiscent of Trump’s actions in his previous term, when he similarly replaced portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Bush in the Grand Foyer. Instead, he opted to showcase former Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

…The artist behind the new painting of Trump has yet to be confirmed, though it is not his official White House portrait, which is normally ceremonially revealed in the years after leaving office. The new painting is based on photographs of the assassination attempt by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci and New York Times photographer Doug Mills.

[From People]

“The artist behind the new painting of Trump has yet to be confirmed…” The words “artist” and “painting” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Also, $10 that some office minions simply sent a press photo to one of those online sites that paintify an image for you. All to appease a lunatic with a huge ego and baby, er, fists. Well, another line crossed off Trump’s I Wanna Be A Dictator list: erecting tributes to yourself. And of course this isn’t the only bit of redecorating that DonDon has done — eagle-eyed fans of the Oval Office Swedish Ivy plant noticed in early February that the 60-year-old iconic greenery was missing from the fireplace mantle (and replaced with what else, a suite of gold objet d’art). Which led to another bit of White House history I didn’t know: the Swedish Ivy (which is actually more like mint than ivy, and from South Africa, not Sweden, but what’s in a name?!) was a gift from an Irish ambassador to JFK in 1961, where it has been displayed on the Oval’s mantle ever since. Since it grows so well, it’s been a practice for decades for little clippings to be given to staff, visitors, and more. I shudder to think where it is now. MAGA: Make America Green-less Again.

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Categories
art food

Crypto bro Justin Sun ate the $6.2 million banana in a press conference

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When last we checked in on the fine art world, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold at auction for $6.2 million. If that doesn’t make sense, let me clarify: the sale broke down to $5.2 million for the bid, plus $1M for Sotheby’s fees, and technically all that only went towards a certificate of authenticity giving the winner the right to purchase his own banana and duct tape to affix to a wall precisely according to artist Maurizio Cattelan’s specifications in order to call it a genuine Comedian, the name of the piece (and still my favorite detail). So that is what winning bidder Justin Sun did last Friday in Hong Kong. Sun, a 34-year-old millionaire (sigh) who heads a cryptocurrency platform called Tron, had his work of art installed… only so a press conference could document his removing, peeling, and eating the food/art on camera. I don’t think Sun has realized yet that the joke’s on him, but then again, I’m not the millionaire (double sigh). NPR reported on the artful ingestion:

“Many friends have asked me about the taste of the banana,” Sun wrote in a post on X alongside a video of him eating the multimillion-dollar Maurizio Cattelan piece called Comedian.

“To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one. I could discern a hint of what Big Mike bananas from 100 years ago might have tasted like,” said Sun, the founder of the cryptocurrency platform Tron.

Big Mike bananas — a common translation of the flavorful Gros Michel banana variety — were once ubiquitous and have now become virtually impossible to find.

Sun wrote that as thanks to Shah Alam — the 74-year-old Bangladeshi fruit stand employee who originally sold the banana for just 25 cents — he would purchase 100,000 bananas to be distributed for free to Alam’s customers.

Speaking to the New York Times, however, Alam noted a number of logistical issues with Sun’s proposal.

The profit on bananas is relatively low, Alam told the paper — only about $6,000 on a purchase of 100,000 bananas. And Alam is an employee of the fruit stand, not its owner.

His salary of $12/hour during his 12-hour workday, which affords him a shared basement apartment in the Bronx, would not be affected by a bulk novelty sale.

This is not Sun’s first venture into multimillion-dollar bids. In 2019, he won a $4.8 million bid to have lunch with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. In 2021, he put up $28 million to be among the first passengers on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, though that trip was ultimately canceled.

[From NPR]

It’s fitting that a crypto bro pulling a stunt with a phallic-coded object boasted that the ($0.25) banana tasted not like an ordinary banana but bigly better, like the legendary Big Mike’s variety… that was mostly wiped out by disease in the 1960s, so well-before Sun’s birth. But the story really goes from comedy to tragedy with all the commentary from the fruit vendor, Shah Alam. When the NY Times let him know that one of his $0.25 bananas went on to sell for $6.2 million, Alam asked of the bidders, “Do they not know what a banana is?” Salient point. But I absolutely love the way Alam eviscerates Sun’s half-peeled gesture of buying $25,000 worth of bananas, by systematically highlighting the fiscal errors in Sun’s “plan.” Yet Alam is not the millionaire here (triple sigh). No, instead it’s Sun who’s the millionaire, despite having (arguably) overpaid for a banana, duct tape, and certificate of authenticity by approximately $6,199,999.75. All this despite the fact that last year the SEC charged Tron for fraud and other violations. I doubt Sun will face much trouble, though, as he’s reportedly the largest investor in a crypto scheme backed by Trump. But I do wonder if, with all this publicity, Disney will now go after Sun claiming a trademark on the name “Tron.” In which case, I hope Sun has some bananas stored for a rainy day.

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Categories
art Tim Burton

Tim Burton doesn’t look online: ‘it doesn’t make me feel good’

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Tim Burton has had a retrospective museum exhibit touring for 10 years. It includes everything from drawings, paintings, character sketches, recreations of his studio, and some work from frequent film collaborators, like costume designer Colleen Atwood. There are about 600 items in total. The exhibit has gone to 14 cities in 11 countries (it was in Turin, Italy last year when he was forced to take a hiatus filming Beetlejuice Beetlejuice because of the actors strike), and is now making its last stop in his hometown of 20 years, London. The World of Tim Burton is now open at the Design Museum, features 90 new objects, and will run for six months. Tim took some time off from filming the second season of Wednesday to visit and promote the final show opening. He talked to BBC News about what makes him depressed (the Internet), what makes him happy (clouds and dinosaur models), and the humane emotions of monsters:

The internet makes him short circuit: “If I look at the internet, I found that I got quite depressed,” the 66-year-old said. “It scared me because I started to go down a dark hole. So I try to avoid it, because it doesn’t make me feel good.” … Reflecting on his use of the internet, Burton said: “I get depressed very quickly, maybe more quickly than other people. But it doesn’t take me much to start to click and start to short circuit.”

Head in the clouds: The film-maker said keeping busy and doing simple things such as looking at clouds helps him feel better. As does his collection of ten giant dinosaur models that he keeps in his backyard including a 20ft T-Rex. Burton pulls out his mobile phone and proudly shows us a picture of a 50-foot Brontosaurus. He buys the ones you find at amusement parks, adding that actor Nicolas Cage has “real ones”.

He likes monsters because they’re emotional: “It was very clear from King Kong to Frankenstein to Creature from the Black Lagoon that all the monsters were the most emotional. The humans were the ones that scared me,” he said. “They were the angry villagers in Frankenstein — like the internet — these nameless faces [Burton makes monster roaring noises] and the monster always had the most emotion and most feeling even though they’re looked upon as a certain way. “Every monster usually has some kind of pathos and some kind of humanity” that the humans lacked he added.

Hollywood is Alice in Wonderland: He admits to feeling invigorated with recent successes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Netflix series Wednesday, of which he directed four episodes. “The Hollywood journey is an Alice in Wonderland kind of journey. You go up, you go down, you go sideways. That’s the way it is,” he said. “What I realize now, maybe because I’m older as well, is OK I’m just gonna do what I want. And if you want to do it, fine. If not, then you don’t have to go on this journey with me”.

Don’t ‘esque’ him! However when discussing his success, Burton tells us that he rejects the term “Burtonesque” even though it’s widely used in popular culture to describe his oeuvre. “I never liked that,” he says firmly. “I don’t want to become a thing. It’s taken me my whole life to try to be something like resembling human”.

[From BBC News]

Oh, Tim. He’s just an emotional monster trying to process his feelings through art! I don’t know how to convince kids to get off the Internet and stare at clouds instead, but it’s a very endearing image to picture mid-60’s Tim stepping outside to calm down by looking up. But really, I’m gonna need a lot more information about this model dinosaur business. He has 10 giant dinos in his city backyard?! Is he living in one of the vacant palaces? Bitches from London, is it typical to have enough outdoor space to house a dozen 20 to 50 foot tall structures? And look, as a childless dog lady, it’s been awhile since I’ve visited an amusement park. But I do not recall big dinosaurs being a part of the scenery.

Anyway, I wish I were in London to see the show. I’m a big fan of his 2D artwork, especially his sketches and watercolors. The show runs until April 21, and then it’s all over. I’m still holding out hope that the stolen Beetlejuice sculpture will finally be recovered, and join the exhibit for the last few months.

Photos credit: Lucy Harvey / Avalon