South Korean couple mistakenly vandalizes $440,000 artwork
In this March 28 photo, an artwork from the artist John Andrew Perello, also known as Jonone, is seen after it found with the brush strokes by a couple, center green color, in Seoul, South Korea.
SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean exhibition company is trying to persuade an acclaimed American graffiti artist not to restore a $440,000 painting after it was accidentally vandalized by a couple who mistook it for participatory art.
The artist, John Andrew Perello, also known as Jonone, has expressed a desire for his painting to be restored in a way that won’t financially burden the couple, who don’t face criminal charges, Jiyoon Son, a manager from Seoul-based Content Creators of Culture, said Friday.
While the exhibition was insured for damages, there’s no way the insurance company wouldn’t allocate at least some of the costs to the couple as long as Jonone wants his piece restored, Son said.
“We are trying to persuade the artist to consider not restoring his work. We have showed him the reactions from social media, which are favorable to his work but also sympathetic to the couple,” Son said.
She said it would take several weeks and about 10 million won ($9,000) to restore the painting, which remains on display at a shopping mall in Seoul.
The couple told Son’s company they thought spectators were meant to participate in Jonone’s artwork, “Untitled,” a huge wall painting that was set up with paint cans and brushes scattered around it. The piece wasn’t framed due to its large size.
President Joe Biden released a $1.5 trillion wish list for the federal budget on Friday, asking for an 8.4% increase in agency operating budgets with substantial gains for Democratic priorities like education, health care, housing and environmental protection.
The request by the White House budget office spells out Biden’s top priorities as Congress weighs its spending plans for next year. It’s the first financial outline of Democrats’ broader ambitions since the expiration of a 2011 law that capped congressional spending.
At stake is roughly one-third of the huge federal budget that is passed by Congress each year, funding the military, domestic Cabinet department operations, foreign policy and homeland security. The rest of the budget involves so-called mandatory programs that are locked in and basically run on autopilot, chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This so-called discretionary spending passes each year on a bipartisan basis through Capitol Hill’s timetested appropriations process. The Biden request provides a significantly smaller 1.6% increase to the $700 billionplus Pentagon budget than it provides to domestic accounts. Homeland security accounts would basically be frozen, reflecting opposition among Democratic
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