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An anonymous tip received by this reporter has revealed that, on a weekday morning in July of this year, a seventy-year-old Wisconsin man appropriated, without the consent of the owner, a work of art left unattended in a waiting room outside the Medical Imaging department of a small-city hospital in which the appropriator’s wife was undergoing a “procedure.” The artwork was a collaborative piece, a photographic portrait by Pari Ducovic that had been altered, some might say improved, by an unidentified artist, some might say vandal, who applied a few precise pencil lines between the nose and upper lip of the fellow in the portrait. Hospital surveillance footage shows that the Wisconsin man placed into a blue backpack not only the photograph but the entire magazine in which, or on which, the portrait appeared. As of this date, some nineteen days after the disappearance of the magazine from the waiting room, local police have not publicly confirmed whether or not an investigation was requested by the owner of the magazine. However, persons familiar with the matter, including the tipster, have speculated that the appropriator may have had laudable intentions: he may have sought to spare others the anguish and disappointment of seeing a fine portrait edited in this manner, presumably without the photographer’s consent. Updates may be published here as further information becomes available.
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