“A woman who says she was so overcome with passion for a valuable painting on display in France, has been charged with criminal damage after kissing it. The immaculate white canvas so attracted Sam Rindy she smudged it with her lipstick, saying later she had wanted to make it even more beautiful. The 3×2m (9×6-foot) painting by US artist Cy Twombly is valued at more than $2m (£970,000). Ms Rindy, herself an artist, is due to appear in court on 16 August… ‘I left a kiss,’ she told La Provence newspaper on leaving the police station. ‘A red stain remained on the canvas… This red stain is testimony to this moment, to the power of art.’ Speaking to French news agency AFP, she said the artist had ‘left this white’ for her. The museum is hosting an exhibition of works by Twombly entitled Blooming. The artist was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928 and has been living in Italy for nearly half a century.” — BBC (UK)

(Thanks to Dani for the link.)

The BBC included a picture that looks like the red succulent lips of Cure frontman Robert Smith. Other news articles faked up a lipstick print on a white background. Weirdly, no newspaper appears to have reproduced the actual painting or its red stain. Even more weirdly, a cursory search through half a dozen French newspapers unearthed no coverage whatsoever of le scandale. But then the French are much less hysterical about an illicit kiss or two.

A curator at the Collection Lambert in Avignon lambasted Ms. Rindy for her act of uncontrollable passion. “She talks about love, but this is rape,” the curator told another paper. “She needs to understand what an artist’s intellectual property means.” The curator indicated that the artist, Cy Twombly, was “devastated” by the incident. You have to wonder about that. It’s not like she tried to tongue-fuck the Mona Lisa. Some of the paintings at this exhibit rather suggest a good lip print anyway. (Have a look at this and this.) Twombly ought to be flattered to elicit such a passionate response from someone.

To look at the matter from the vantage point of perversion, this isn’t the first time someone has been overwhelmingly turned on by an artwork. There is an ancient precedent for it in the Pygmalion myth, which describes a sculptor enamored with his own handiwork, a statue of a beautiful woman. What makes the Twombly kiss so much more interesting is that the work is not a sensual depiction of a human body. It’s not a sexy nude or an in-your-face vag. It’s an abstraction. This seems to change the kiss in some fundamental way. You’re not kissing the painting because it reminds you of a human eroticism. You’re kissing it because you want to know what it is like to kiss a blinding blizzard, a solar flare, an intense white light — or perhaps even something less tangible, like a kiss that connects with a Platonic idea, a metaphysical osculation.

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