Truemors
AVIGNON, France (AP) —
In july 2007, a woman left a lipstick kiss on an all-white
painting by the American artist Cy Twombly. Friday, she was convicted of
"voluntarily damaging a work of art" and ordered to do 100 hours of
community service.
The court in Avignon, southern France, also ordered
Rindy Sam, a 30-year-old artist of Cambodian origin who lives in
France, to pay damages. She must hand over $1,465 to the painting's
owner, $730 to the Avignon gallery that showed it and $1.50 to the
painter. The judge said the fine was "symbolic.
During the trial, Rindy Sam argued that she
had committed an "act of love" — not vandalism. "I didn't think," she
said last month. "When I kissed it, I thought the artist would have
understood. The immaculate white canvas so attracted Rindy Sam she smudged it with her lipstick, saying later she had wanted to make it even more beautiful. She thought the artist had “left this white“ for her.
The 3x2m (9x6-foot) painting by US artist Cy Twombly is valued at more than $2m (£970,000).
The museum, Hôtel de Caumont in Avignon, is hosting an exhibition of works by Twombly entitled "Blooming, a Scattering of Blossoms and other Things ". Twombly, well-known for blurring the line between drawing and painting, shows rarely. Last abstract expressionnist painter (after the death of Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell), the artist, born in 1928, has been living in Italy for nearly half a century.
He won the Golden Lion award at the 2001 Venice Biennale.
Rindy Sam claimed to be following in a long line of so-called “art interventionists. Recently, in 2006 Pierre Pinoncelli, a 77-year-old performance artist, took a hammer to Marcel Duchamp's celebrated Fountain - a urinal exhibited in 1917 - at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He was arrested and fined.
Like Herostratus who set fire to the temple of Artemis in Ephesus in order to become famous, Rindy Sam destroyed a work of art. But unless Herostratus whose fame reaches us, the young woman might only enjoy fiveteen minutes of celebrity.
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