There’s a lot of depressing news these days, so maybe we should focus on something lighter, like art news. That should cheer us up, right?

Our first story today comes from L.A., where a young woman and her friend were enjoying an art gallery, when they came across an installation consisting of a grid of 60 pedestals, with each pedestal displaying some type of crown. And before you say, “This sounds like something that belongs in a history museum,” I should inform you that these were not real crowns; they were more like those crowns that your kindergartners come home with on Rosh Chodesh.

So the girl decided to take a selfie. Some people are so inspired by the things around them, they feel the need to take pictures of themselves. Even though their friend is right there with a camera.

And I guess the girl wanted the crowns in the shot too, because she decided to get down in front of one of the pedestals to take the picture. But as she was getting down, she lost her balance and bumped into the pedestal, and it fell over, and it bumped into another pedestal, which fell over, until an entire row of pedestals was on the floor. The damage was valued at $200,000, because when you create something that has no practical use, you get to charge whatever you want for it.

This was a little bit everyone’s fault. You shouldn’t be taking a selfie so close to artwork, but you also shouldn’t be setting up your art installation like a set of dominoes.

I would have thought they were bolted down somehow. Everyone knows you don’t put expensive art like that on a tiny table that can easily get knocked over. Whose fault is that? I’m not talking halachically. I know that when I set the table with glassware, I make sure it’s nowhere near the end of the table, and my glassware is valued at like $10.

Or maybe it’s the media’s fault. After all, a newspaper review of the gallery a month earlier said, “It’s a great place to take a selfie.” And it is. There’s one installation there that’s just a few hundred pitchforks dangling from the ceiling, tines down, and you get to stand underneath and pray that they’re attached to the gallery better than the pedestals were.

And before you say, “These young people and their selfies,” I should point out that last July, a 91-year-old woman in Germany ruined a piece of artwork as well. She came into an art museum as part of a senior tour group, and amidst the chaos of people asking for discounts, she came across a piece by, according to the article I read, “avant-garde artist Arthur Køpcke.” (I honestly don’t know whether to pronounce the ø. Does the line through it mean that I døn’t? Also, what’s avant-garde? Isn’t that what you yell before you start fighting with swords? (“Avant-garde!”)

Apparently, Køpcke designed a series in 1965 titled “Reading/Work Pieces,” which are a bunch of random scraps of paper glued to a bigger piece of paper. For example, there’s a drawing of a hand, a picture clipped out of a newspaper, a mock-up of a checkerboard, a slip of paper that says, “Insert words” and a partially-done crossword puzzle. The idea of his pieces is that museums don’t get to decide what is and isn’t art. Who gets to determine that? Maybe every museum is an art museum. You go to a museum where some guy stuck a bunch of bones he found into cool dinosaur shapes, that is totally art.

So this woman comes across the piece, and says, “All right,” and she reaches into her bag, takes out a pen, and fills in the rest of the crossword puzzle. Because maybe the museum doesn’t get to decide what’s art, but this woman decided, “This isn’t art. This is an unfinished crossword puzzle.”

Then she took a selfie with it.

Okay, she didn’t take a selfie. What selfies are to young people, doing crossword puzzles is to older people. Everyone’s grandmother is awesome at crossword puzzles, because they’ve been around for a while and they know all the words.

She didn’t even use a pencil. She used a ballpoint pen.

When asked about it, the woman basically said, “I’m not even sorry. It said, “Insert words.” What was I supposed to do?”

I’m frankly surprised that in a country full of Germans, no one’s OCD made them finish the puzzle sooner.

So again, everyone’s at fault here. The museum is at fault for calling this art, and for writing “Insert words,” and for not putting a disclaimer next to it that said, “Don’t actually insert words.” And the woman is at fault for not wondering why, in 50 years, no one had inserted words.

Also, they probably should have put glass over it or something.

The museum ultimately decided to fix the piece without pressing charges, and the woman responded by suing them. According to her lawyer, she now holds half the copyright to the “collaborative” artwork, and the museum destroyed her work by fixing the piece.

They should write in to the Choshen Mishpat Institute.

So what does this mean? Does this mean you can walk into any art museum with a Sharpie? It would definitely be more fun. But maybe there’s a difference between adding and defacing. Like if you go over to that picture of the couple during the Great Depression holding a pitchfork in front of a house and you give the couple moustaches, that’s defacing. But if you put an entire kugel on the tip of that pitchfork, that’s adding.

Point is, this woman is even worse than the selfie girl. I bet the selfie girl is kicking herself for not thinking of suing. And while she’s kicking herself, she’s knocking things over.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].