Latest news with #VanessaCarlon


New York Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Visitors Break Crystal Chair in Sit-and-Run at Italian Museum
The man and woman wait for the guards to leave the room before posing for their photo: squatting over a chair covered in Swarovski crystals, pretending to sit. She is taking the picture, he's posing. But the squatting takes just a few moments too long, and he accidentally sits back into the chair. He tries to hold on to the wall to keep himself up, to no avail. The fragile chair — a more sparkly version of the seat in a famous Vincent van Gogh painting — cannot hold the man's weight. The woman quickly helps him up and ushers him out of the room. These images spread around the internet this week after the Palazzo Maffei, a museum in Verona, Italy, released security footage of the two visitors who inadvertently damaged the artwork this spring. Museum officials said they had contacted the police, though they consider the mishap an accident. The local authorities have not learned the identities of the people in the video, and Ms. Carlon said the museum hoped that releasing it would encourage the accidental vandals to come forward and apologize. 'It wasn't such a brilliant thought to sit on an artwork,' Vanessa Carlon, the director of the museum, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. The bigger concern, she said, was how far people were willing to go to get a memorable photo — and in this case, how the pair fled instead of owning up to the damage. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Ammon
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Ammon
Museum's plea after couple break crystal-covered chair
Ammon News - An Italian museum has called on patrons to "respect art" after a couple was filmed breaking a chair covered in hundreds of glittering crystals. 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 say the couple fled the museum before staff noticed what happened. They 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". BBC