Explained: Why do people want Jeff Bezos to buy and eat the Mona Lisa?

An online petition that started as a joke has gone viral, becoming a kind of performance art piece all of its own

In order to “imagine a new art, one must break the ancient art”, the French author Marcel Schwob wrote more than 100 years ago. Today, that call to action has been boldly made in the form of a Change.org petition demanding that Jeff Bezos buy and eat the Mona Lisa.
 
The petition, which at press time had over 10,500 signatures, was started by Kane Powell, a resident of Stevensville, Maryland. “Nobody has eaten the mona lisa and we feel jeff bezos needs to take a stand and make this happen,” his petition reads.
 
Powell isn’t wrong, in a