While museums around the world were making headlines for works being taken out, one Los Angeles artist decided to put a work in. David Miklatski, working under the name Sabastian, quietly installed an oil pastel drawing on a gallery wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Sunday, October 25, and documented the whole manoeuvre in a video posted to Instagram.

The drawing, titled The MET 2027, shows a gala guest climbing the museum steps past photographers and shrubs while police in riot gear confront demonstrators in a burning scene below. In the accompanying video, Miklatski cuts between footage of celebrities arriving at the Met Gala and images of mining in Congo, street unrest in Paris and Milan, homelessness in the United States, fighting in Gaza, Haiti and Ukraine.

According to the artist, the point was the gap between celebration and crisis. He described the painting as a portrait of famous guests enjoying themselves while the world beyond the museum gates falls apart, and said he wanted viewers to notice how thin the line between extreme wealth and extreme hardship has become. He stressed that the gesture was not aimed at the Met itself, but at a moment when artists need to respond to the times.

The installation itself relied on misdirection: a friend, a stroller and a portable speaker playing an audio clip drew the attention of security staff long enough for Miklatski to hang the work and its wall label unnoticed. The label gave his birth year as 1777, a detail that reportedly left three guards studying the display in apparent confusion. The museum declined to comment on the episode.

The work was removed from the wall later that Sunday, and Miklatski has said he does not want it returned. The episode joins a small recent run of unsanctioned museum insertions, including an AI work about child hunger placed in the National Museum Cardiff last year and a painting secretly hung by a technician at Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne in 2024.