He should have left it in the Mylar

[comicartfan]

Yahoo! News

Oops, US tycoon jabs elbow through Picasso he sold

 

Thu Oct 19, 5:26 AM ET

 

Las Vegas gaming tycoon Steve Wynn, proudly showing to friends a Picasso he had just sold for 139 million dollars, accidentally poked his elbow through the canvas, according to a witness.

 

"There was a terrible noise," wrote author Nora Ephron on the blog The Huffington Post, who saw the accident several weeks ago at Wynn's office in his hotel-casino Wynn in Las Vegas.

 

"Oh *spoon*," she quoted him as saying. "Look what I've done ... thank God it was me."

 

There on the forearm of the seated woman in Picasso's 1932 "Le Reve" (The Dream) were two three-inch (7.6-centimeter) long rips, she said.

 

The 64-year-old billionaire had acquired the painting in 1997 for 48.4 million dollars, and recently agreed to sell it to Steven Cohen, an art collector in Connecticut, for 139 million dollars, according to the magazine The New Yorker, in its October 23 issue.

 

The night before the accident, Ephron recounted, she and her husband were dining at a restaurant at The Wynn when the billionaire stopped by their table and told them of the painting's sale.

 

"Wynn was in a very good mood because, he told us, he had just sold a Picasso for 139 million dollars," she wrote.

 

"This is the most money ever paid for a painting," she quoted Wynn as saying, and noted that it topped by four million dollars the record price paid for a Klimt by cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder this year.

 

Wynn had been talking about the painting and gesturing when he poked the hole in the canvas. Afterward, Wynn said to his friends: "This has nothing to do with money. The money means nothing to me. It's that I had this painting in my care and I've damaged it."

 

Wynn notified his art dealer and asked the people in the room to keep quiet about the accident so he could deal with it.

 

Several weeks later, Ephron wrote, Wynn's wife Elaine told her they had decided to keep "Le Reve" because the accident "had been a sign" they should

[aardvark88]

To summarize, Wynn lost a $139 million record breaking sale b/c he was a doofus by poking 2 rips into the painting. He will have the canvas professionally repaired but it will be tainted for years as being restored.

[bluechip]

Does this mean Steve Wynn is going to have himself whacked?

[aardvark88]

No, to a billionaire, $149 million is how much your spouse spends on pet food for 1 year. Petty cash.