Man Breaks Statue in Quest for Selfie

The original “Drunken Stayr,” aka “Barberini Faun,” on view at the Glyptothek in Munich (photo via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s one thing for people to take selfies with works of art; it’s another to climb on the art in order to get a photo and break it in the process. Unfortunately, this is not an Onion headline but rather something that actually happened, at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, where a young man climbed onto a sculpture in his quest for the perfect selfie and broke off its left leg in the process. The man, whom the Corriere della Sera identifies as “presumably a foreign student” (because all young Italians presumably know better), dismembered the sculpture known as “Drunken Satyr” — although thankfully, this was just a 19th-century gesso reproduction of the famous ancient Greek statue. No word on whether the student himself was drunk at the time (he can’t even be identified because technical problems are preventing the academy from accessing the security camera images).

Academy Director Franco Marrocco is graciously treating the ordeal as an accident, but let’s take it for what we know it really is: a precautionary tale about society’s unrelenting addiction to selfies and smartphones. The decline of art at the hands of digital technology. And possibly part of weird young-person-climbing-on-art trend. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

h/t Dazed Digital