Amid the spate of publicized museum heists sweeping the globe, one Los Angeles artist has flipped the script by adding his own artwork to the walls of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In a viral Instagram reel, multi-hyphenate artist David (Sabastian) Miklatski detailed the steps of creating and surreptitiously installing a drawing on one of The Met's gallery walls last Sunday, October 25.
The work in question, “The MET 2027,” is an oil pastel painting depicting a Met Gala attendee ascending the staircase flanked by shrubs and photojournalists as police in riot gear beat down protestors in a fiery scene in the foreground.
In the video, Miklatski juxtaposes clips of stars like Zendaya and Sabrina Carpenter getting photographed at the Met Gala with footage of mining conditions in the Congo, riots in Paris and Milan, homelessness in the United States, the US- and Israeli-led mutilation of Gaza, gang violence in Haiti, and Russia bombing Ukraine.
Capturing the “absurdity of it all,” Miklatski says the painting depicts “A-list celebrities prancing, while the world outside the museum gates is collapsing.”
The Met Museum declined to comment.
Regarding the guerrilla installation process, the artist said he enlisted a friend, a stroller, a portable speaker, and a free audio file from a lesbian porn video to distract museum security officers, thereby allowing him to install the painting and its wall text in the gallery without being noticed. The reel shows a trio of security officers looking at the display together, possibly puzzled by the artist's birth year being listed as 1777 in the wall text, while the work itself was dated 2026.
“Question the museums and institutions that still don't see the very thin line dividing the poverty, chaos, rage and then extreme opulence and wealth ...” the artist said into the camera from outside the museum. “By the time [the line] snaps, it'll be too late. There will be no Met Galas, there will be no anything. Because the 99%, they're mad.”
“It's not anything against that institution; I'm not against The Met or the Met Gala or anything like that,” Miklatski explained in a phone call with Hyperallergic. “It's just that, as an artist, I think it's our duty to illustrate the times and really show the nuance of what's going on. You have extreme wealth and billionaires donating to [events] like this, and then you have extreme poverty and death and war and savagery coexisting at the same time.”
Miklatski said that this is “one of the most important times for artists to say something, to do something, to react, and to make things bigger than themselves.”
The work was removed from the museum's wall on Sunday, and Miklatski said he doesn't want it back.
In recent years, many artists have bypassed bureaucracy and taken matters into their own hands to share their message with the world through institutional settings. Last year, a United Kingdom-based artist named Elias Marrow installed an unsolicited AI artwork commenting on child hunger in Wales on the walls at the National Museum Cardiff. In 2024, an unnamed technician at the Pinakothek der Moderne museum in Munich was fired from his post after secretly installing his own painting in an exhibition. The artwork was reportedly intended to comment on elitism in the art world by exposing the invisible labor behind exhibitions.