Word: vandalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sinclair remembers a time when the area was relatively open. Security guards recall an incident decades ago when a vandal-prankster removed a brass letter from one of the celebrity plaques. Since then, sections have been either locked off or carefully monitored. Sinclair adds, "There are cameras and sound devices...
...inscrutable expression replaced by a yellow smiley face - into the Louvre. "He's kind of captured the zeitgeist," says Gareth Williams, a contemporary-art specialist at Bonhams auction house in London. "But he's done it in quite an accessible way, so it speaks to people." Even for a vandal, going mainstream has its perks: Banksy's handiwork has commanded millions of dollars at auction from acolytes like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. (See pictures from inside Guantanamo Bay's detention facilities...
...liberates the vandal to travel--you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born." --MARK TWAIN...
Twain would spend the remainder of his life railing at the savagery and presumption of imperialism abroad and racism at home. Travel had liberated his vandal, but now he wished a lot of other people had just stayed home...
...Born to a teenage single mother in Wellington, New Zealand, Sinclair was raised in impoverished circumstances and, though bright, left school at 16. After being arrested and brought to court for throwing rocks through a train-station window, he was interviewed by a juvenile counselor. Startled by the young vandal's command of Gorky, Conrad and Steinbeck, the counselor eventually referred Sinclair to a copy-boy position at Wellington's Evening Post. From there, his progress through the newspaper world of New Zealand and Australia was buccaneering: sleeping rough on Queensland's Gold Coast after turning up drunk and late...