When life imitates art...The Art Basel edition

This is real ife...not art.
Photograph by Rudy Perez. 

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Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. ~Oscar Wilde

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It doesn't get any more Miami than this: A woman attending Art Basel on Miami Beach Friday night is stabbed by an X-acto knife wielding stalker. 

Witnesses to the assault think they're seeing performance art. (This is, after all, what passes for art these days.)

The aftermath is photographed by an artist who takes a picture of the attacker being handcuffed.

The cop doing the handcuffing is Miami Beach Police Chief Dan Oates.

Miami Beach Police Chief Dan Oates handcuffs Siyuan Zhao.
Photo by Rudy Perez. 

From the Miami Herald story:

The stabbing occurred in a corridor near an art installation entitled “The Swamp of Sagittarius,” by Miami artist Naomi Fisher.

Fisher said she was at her exhibit when she heard a scuffle and later saw a woman being wheeled away by paramedics at about 5:30 p.m.

“A guy walked up to me and said, ‘I thought I saw a performance, and I thought it was fake blood, but it was real blood.’”

She said an artist named Rudy Perez showed her a photo that he snapped on his cellphone, showing a woman dressed in white with blood stains on her clothes.

Fisher said the stabbing took place in front of booth N29, where Freedman Fitzpatrick Gallery from Los Angeles was exhibiting.

Police cordoned an area near the Washington Avenue entrance to the convention center. It was in a section of the show called NOVA designed to promote young artists.

“It's horrible ... I'm so freaked out,” Fisher said. “I feel nauseous.”

Art gallery representatives who witnessed the incident declined to give their names but said they saw a woman with what appeared to be a pen in her neck. One gallerist said she heard a scream and ran over and saw a young woman lying on the floor bleeding from her neck.
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Inside the convention center, security guards and event organizers worked quickly to clean up the scene, and to keep public attention focused on the art and not the stabbing.

Siyuan Zhao.
Miami-Dade Corrections Department.