Everything about this story should infuriate me. Sexism and DEI, liberals behaving badly, and special privileges dispensed by feminists to annoy men. 

But the troll is just so EPIC that I doff my hat to this woman. She may be a leftist, but she is a genius troll, too. 

These Picassos prompted a gender war at an Australian gallery. Now the curator says she painted them https://t.co/2mLKuOepvJ

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 12, 2024

So what happened here that is so funny? From the headline, you would think that a massive art forgery fraud took place, and the mildly funny thing is that art "experts" were taken in. Perhaps worth a chuckle and a tut-tut, a fine and a small sentence as long as the curator didn't sell the paintings as part of some big money scam. 

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — They were billed as artworks by Pablo Picasso, paintings so valuable that an Australian art museum’s decision to display them in an exhibition restricted to women visitors provoked a gender discrimination lawsuit. The paintings again prompted international headlines when the gallery re-hung them in a women’s restroom to sidestep a legal ruling that said men could not be barred from viewing them.

But the artworks at the center of the uproar were not really by Picasso or the other famed artists billed as their creators, it emerged this week when the curator of the women-only exhibition admitted she had painted them herself.

If this were the full story, it wouldn't be worth commenting, at least not more than a cheap shot at some elite "experts" who can't find their backsides with their hands. 

What comes next is the brilliant troll.

The saga began when Kaechele created a women-only area at MONA in 2020 for visitors to “revel in the pure company of women” and as a statement on their exclusion from male-dominated spaces throughout history.

The so-called Ladies Lounge offered high tea, massages and champagne served by male butlers, and was open to anyone who identified as a woman. Outlandish and absurd title cards were displayed alongside the fake paintings, antiquities and jewelry that was “quite obviously new and in some cases plastic,” she added.

The lounge had to display “the most important artworks in the world,” Kaechele wrote this week, in order for men “to feel as excluded as possible.”

It worked. MONA — famous in Australia for its strange and subversive exhibitions and events — was ordered by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in March to stop refusing men entry to the Ladies Lounge after a complaint from a male gallery patron who was upset at being barred from the space during a 2023 visit.

“The participation by visitors in the process of being permitted or refused entry is part of the artwork itself,” tribunal Deputy President Richard Grueber wrote in his decision, which found the exhibition was discriminatory.

Apparently, by creating an exclusive "all-female" space, people like me got incensed by the unfairness, believing that they were excluded from something truly special, with the best artworks available behind closed doors and available to an exclusive class of people. 

They were all fakes and junk, and nobody noticed until a court ordered the discrimination to stop. 

That, you have to admit, is funny. I think so, and in a very real way, the joke is on me. Not me specifically, but me as a conservative activist who probably would have joined the crusade to open the exhibit. 

The tribunal ordered MONA to cease refusing men entry. In his ruling, Grueber also lambasted a group of women who had attended in support of Kaechele wearing matching business attire and had silently crossed and uncrossed their legs in unison throughout the hearing. One woman “was pointedly reading feminist texts,” he wrote, and the group left the tribunal “in a slow march led by Ms Kaechele to the sounds of a Robert Palmer song.”

Their conduct was “inappropriate, discourteous and disrespectful, and at worst contumelious and contemptuous,” Grueber added.

Rather than admit men to the exhibit, Kaechele -- who is married to the gallery’s owner, David Walsh -- installed a working toilet in the space, turning it into a women’s restroom in order to exploit a legal loophole to allow the refusal of men to continue.

OMG, I LOVE this woman. 

Hate her too, of course, but COME ON. This is genius. This is Trump-level trolling. 

After Kaechele wrote her letter revealing that she was the "Picasso" who painted one of the works on display, the Picasso Foundatipon was asked to comment. They had little to say. 

But Kaechele did. 

“I’m flattered that people believed my great-grandmother summered with Picasso at her Swiss chateau where he and my grandmother were lovers when she threw a plate at him for indiscretions (of a kind) that bounced off his head and resulted in the crack you see inching through the gold ceramic plate in the Ladies Lounge,” Kaechele wrote this week, referring to the title card on one painting.

“The real plate would have killed him — it was made of solid gold. Well, it would have dented his forehead because the real plate is actually a coin.”

Genius. 

Pure, unadulterated genius. I may hate her politics, but I tip my hat to her.