Blank Museum

A man briefly disrupted the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum, splashing red paint against a wall and signing his name. He did not vandalize any artworks.

According to artist Laura Higgins Palmer, who alerted Hyperallergic to the intervention, the man threw red paint against the wall in a gallery on the third floor. Palmer said she was taking a selfie of her reflection in one of Koons’s silver bunnies when she noticed a man walking by with a black bag. When she turned around, a man was splashing paint on the wall, in what appears to be a kind of double X shape, although it could also be a human figure with arms and legs spread. The man managed to sign his name in marker underneath before being led away by security. Palmer says everyone was then evacuated from the third floor so that the wall could be repainted.

“I am a painter, same age as Koons, but my work is about painterly aesthetics, not in-your-face conceptualism,” she wrote to us over text message. “I am completely at peace with Koons, really enjoyed the show, and also can fully sympathize with the guy’s frustrations.”

Koons does have a knack for riling people up, and it seems likely that this was some kind of publicity stunt by an artist who feels overlooked. Unfortunately, it wasn’t fully successful because we can’t actually identify him from his signature. Can you?