I was going to try to make a Yakov Smirnoff reference here, but I decided to leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Guy in Peoria is hired to paint a “Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster” on a building and gets paid (well, he claims) in cash. Guy paints mural.
Guy finds out after the fact that the person who hired him was not the property owner, but someone posing as the property owner. Hilarity ensues.
In a brief interview, Mr. Comte [the real one, the guy who owns the building – DB] expressed fury over the attention that the apparent prank had gotten from national and international news outlets.
“This isn’t news,” Mr. Comte said, then added an expletive. “I’ll give you a headline: Man paints his own building wall.”
“I don’t hate art,” he earlier told The Journal Star of Peoria. “But I don’t know what the hell that was.”