This is more or less what you should expect if you go to see the Mona Lisa on a weekend in the summer.
It will take you an hour to get through the ticket line to get into the Louvre. Spend an extra euro and get your tickets at Virgin outside the entrance. It was at once maddening, and hugely refreshing, to be in such a crowd. I love the fact that 100,000 people were cramming their way into an art museum at once. There’s still hope. Even if all many of them want is a photo like this of the Mona Lisa from behind bulletproof glass and in front of a thousand people to prove they were there, it still means it has value to them. That’s good, it’s really good.
Mona Lisa from behind bulletproof glass
I did not realize that Paris was so violent. Do the Parisians really shoot at paintings?
Not yet, but they do throw acid, rocks and coffee mugs at them. (OK, the coffee mug was thrown by a Russian and a Bolivian threw the rock.)
Phineas, less than a century ago, a suffragette slashed the Rokeby Venus, and within my lifetime someone hammered away at Michelangelo’s Pieta.
Here’s what I noticed about that photo- Yankees 1, Red Sox 0.