Ella Fontanals-Cisneros is the former wife of tycoon Oswaldo Cisneros, whose family owns a Latin America media and Pepsi bottling empire worth a cool $6 billion.
In Miami, she's one of the biggest art collectors in town, and the owner of the flossy flossy Cisneros Foundation. Nothing to be bummed about.
So why is she so distraught in this picture? Is it those oil-covered seagulls in the gulf? The lameness of Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" video? Derivatives regulation? No, it was a staring contest with performance artist Marina Abramović.
Last week, Abramović completed a blockbuster retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the most talked-about piece, The Artist is Present, she sat mute in a chair for seven hours a day while throngs of people waited in line to sit opposite.
Celebrities came to see her, including James Franco and Marisa Tomei. Some people sat in the chair for minutes, others spent as long as an hour, and many of them cried. Like, full-on, snot-filled cries. So many in fact there's now a Tumblr called Marina Abramović Made Me Cry.
Fontanals was the first person to sit before the Buddha-like Abramović on May 8, and after 11 minutes, she spontaneously started bawling. Who knew? Rich people have feelings too.
When we asked her for comment, Fontanals very kindly responded back. "Because of my longstanding friendship with Marina, when I sat down and looked into her eyes, we both just erupted in tears and in an instant I felt one with her emotions as a woman," she wrote in an e-mail. "I was so overcome with joy and I am so proud of her for all of her efforts and her stamina."
There you have it. Lady emotions made her cry.
