Here’s a friendly tip from me to you: Don’t sit on the art. It doesn’t matter where you are or what the art looks like or how hilarious the picture is going to be, don’t put your butt anywhere near it. Even if it’s literally a chair, don’t. A pair of tourists learned this the hard way in Italy, after one of them sat on a piece of art, immediately broke it, and then ran away without telling anyone. All of that was captured on-camera, and the museum has now issued a warning to its patrons.
Palazzo Maffei, in Verona, shared footage of an incident from April in which a man is goofing around with Nicola Bolla’s sculpture Van Gogh Chair. The tourists were having an awesome time pretending to sit in the piece, which is a chair covered in Swarovski crystals. They were getting some very cool and amazing photos until one of them put a little too much weight on the chair, prompting it to immediately collapse. “We want to turn this episode into an occasion to reflect and raise awareness: Art must be admired, experienced, but above all respected,” the museum wrote in an Instagram caption.
You really do have to watch the video of this happening, and I implore you to turn the sound on to hear how the museum has scored the CCTV footage.
That music! The drama! Dio mio!
“Sometimes we lose our brains to take a picture and we don’t think about the consequences,” museum director Vanessa Carlon told the BBC. “Of course, it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us — that isn’t an accident. This is a nightmare for any museum.”
Thankfully, the chair has been restored and is back on display. Since there was no lasting damage done, we can all agree that this is so funny. Sure, it’s no good for the museum, but this guy has to live the rest of his life occasionally being jolted by the memory of the time he broke the sparkly art chair while on vacation. That is the real nightmare.