In 2003, the private owners of a copy of Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, 1898, removed it from a courtyard of the Caracas Athenaeum, apparently fearing politically motivated vandalism. The next year, demonstrators knocked down the figure of Christopher Columbus from the Monumento a Colón en el Golfo Triste, erected a century earlier to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the explorer in the Americas. Daniel Medina has recorded those dramatic events in his native city by culling from the Internet a photograph of each of the eviscerated public sites, which he then included in