You know, it’s been a long time since this article ran on March 24, 2005, and I’ve stopped waiting for the knock of the Museum Police on my door. Maybe those snobs up in New York think no one in South Carolina has the wit or talent for this class of pranksterism (right, like the British are so cultured). If so, that’s a blessing, because their prejudice has protected me from suspicion.

Unwarranted suspicion, I might add, since the evidence against me — entirely coincidental, superficial, and misleading as it is — is quite striking. I was stunned when I saw the article.

In case you can’t read it, I’ll give you a taste below. Frankly, I was a bit surprised that the link still worked for me. I had saved it back when I was thinking about starting a blog. I didn’t start it for another six weeks or so, and by then I had pushed it to the background. Anyway, I hope no one will mind my reproducing the photos, the provenance of which seems doubtful in any case. If I get objections through official channels, I’ll take it down. It’s just that if you don’t seen the pictures, you miss the point of this post — to the extent that it has one. If you can call up the link, look below the bogus portrait of an 18th-century British officer with a spray-paint can, and click on the link for the slide show.

Oh, yes — the excerpt:

(O)ver the last two weeks, a shadowy British graffiti artist who calls himself Banksy has carried his own humorous artworks into four New York institutions – the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History – and attached them with some sort of adhesive to the walls, alongside other paintings and exhibits. Similar stunts at the Louvre and the Tate museum have earned the artist – who will not reveal his real name – a following in Europe, where he has had successful gallery shows and sold thousands of books of his artwork. But his graffiti has also landed him in legal trouble.
    Elyse Topalian, a spokeswoman for the Met, said that museum officials believed that a painting found there – a small, gold-framed portrait of a woman wearing a gas mask – was hung surreptitiously on March 13. Guards noticed it and removed it from a wall near other paintings in the American wing, she said. Ms. Topalian added that no damage had been done to the wall or to other artworks.
    The museum does not look kindly on such unauthorized additions to its walls. “I think it’s fair to say that it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met,” Ms. Topalian said.
    Sally Williams, a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Museum, said a painting – in this case, of a red-coated colonial-era military officer holding a spray-paint can, with antiwar graffiti in the background – was discovered and removed on March 16. The painting was hung between two others from the museum’s permanent collection in the American Identities galleries on the fifth floor. She said that the painting was now sitting in the museum’s conservation lab and that its fate was uncertain….

By the way, if you can’t get to that link, you can almost certainly get to this one — which apparently was a source for the NYT piece.

Fortunately, not many people have seen me as I looked in the winter of 1980, shortly before the caucuses, when I was up in Iowa covering the scramble among Republicans for a jumpstart on their party’s presidential nomination.

It was a crowded field, but I was mainly concerned with Sen. Howard Baker. He was my excuse for being there, since I worked for a Tennessee newspaper.

Anyway, the photo below of my meeting Sen. Baker in the Des Moines airport has not been widely circulated. To my knowledge, it has never been published in print or online.

And that’s probably a lucky thing for me.