What do you think is the biggest art scandal in the past century?

Richard “Rick” Abath, the guard who opened the door to two thieves who robbed Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of masterpieces worth more than $500 million in 1990, died Friday at his Vermont home, according to his attorney.

Abath steadfastly maintained that he played no role in what remains the largest art heist in history and one of Boston’s most notorious unsolved mysteries. Yet, he remained under intense scrutiny over the decades by federal investigators who never ruled out the possibility that the thieves had help from someone with inside knowledge about security at the museum.

The guy who ate a $120,000 banana in an art museum says he was just hungry

Quote:

Installations by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan are famously provocative, but his signature work — a banana taped to a wall — fell prey to a basic impulse: the hunger it provoked in a South Korean college student.

The art in question, Comedian, is a (frequently replaced) duct-taped banana that is meant to evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin's slapstick comedy to the fruit's status as an emblem of global trade.

It spoke to Noh Huyn-soo in simpler terms, reminding him that he had skipped breakfast that morning. So as his visit to Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art stretched past noon late last week, Noh seized the yellow fruit and ate it, ignoring the alarmed cry of a museum staffer.

It took Noh around 1 minute to yank the banana and eat it. When he was done, he reattached the peel to its spot on the wall.

Good for the college student. The artist should be arrested for fraud or some kind of tax fraud or whatever.