LA Artist Installed His Own Painting on a Met Gallery Wall

On Sunday, October 25, Los Angeles artist David (Sabastian) Miklatski secretly hung his own painting on a gallery wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and the museum removed it one week later, on Sunday, November 1.

Miklatski documented the whole operation in a viral Instagram reel posted under his handle @davidsabastiananti. The work, an oil pastel titled "The MET 2027," shows a Met Gala attendee ascending the museum's famous staircase, flanked by shrubs and photojournalists, while police in riot gear beat protesters in a fiery scene in the foreground.

The Met declined to comment.

How did he pull it off?

The mechanism, as the artist tells it, was low-tech. He enlisted a friend, a stroller, a portable speaker, and a free audio file from a lesbian porn video to distract the museum's security officers. While they were occupied, he installed the painting along with its own wall label.

The reel shows a trio of security officers studying the display together — possibly puzzled by a detail Miklatski planted in the wall text. It lists his birth year as 1777, while the painting itself is dated 2026.

The juxtaposition is the point. In the video, Miklatski cuts between clips of stars like Zendaya and Sabrina Carpenter being photographed at the Met Gala and footage of mining conditions in the Congo, riots in Paris and Milan, homelessness in the United States, the US- and Israeli-led destruction of Gaza, gang violence in Haiti, and Russia bombing Ukraine.

Capturing what he calls the "absurdity of it all," Miklatski says the painting depicts "A-list celebrities prancing, while the world outside the museum gates is collapsing."

What is the artist actually saying?

Speaking into the camera from outside the museum, Miklatski framed the piece as a warning. "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 ..." he said. "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."

He stressed that the target isn't the institution itself. "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 called this "one of the most important times for artists to say something, to do something, to react, and to make things bigger than themselves."

What does this change for unsanctioned art?

Probably nothing structurally — the painting came down within a week — but the episode continues a small, deliberate tradition of artists bypassing institutional gatekeeping. The pattern:

• Last year, UK-based artist Elias Marrow installed an unsolicited AI artwork commenting on child hunger on the walls of the National Museum Cardiff in Wales.
• In 2024, an unnamed technician at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich was fired after secretly hanging his own painting in an exhibition. The work reportedly aimed to comment on elitism in the art world by exposing the invisible labor behind exhibitions.

Miklatski's case differs in one respect: he doesn't want the painting back. The work was removed from the wall on Sunday, and he said he has no interest in reclaiming it.

That detail matters. The gesture was never about acquiring an object or a credential — it was about occupying the wall, however briefly, and forcing a museum audience to confront the gap between the gala's opulence and everything outside its gates. As institutional trust faces pressure on multiple fronts, expect more artists to treat museum walls as contested territory rather than waiting for permission.