A vexed Floridian artist recently decided that he’d had enough of the Perez Art Museum in Miami only displaying foreign artists. It was time for 51 year old Maximo Caminero to take matters into his own hands. Striding purposefully into the gallery, he picked up a vibrantly painted Han dynasty pot by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Defiantly he then smashed it on the floor as an act of art vandalism in front of an audience of presumably aghast patrons and weeping curators.
For the record, Caminero thought he was sticking it to the man by smashing, in his words, a “Common clay pot” and not a million dollar ancient artefact. He now faces up to five years in jail for the rather brilliantly named felony of criminal ‘mischief’. This hapless vigilante is by no means the only destroyer of perceived artistic injustice, read on to discover some more examples of Hulk-like behaviour in the face of fine art.
Victim: Ai Weiwei, whose pot was smashed by hacked off artist Maximo Caminero
1. Shooting a Sawn Off Shotgun at the Baby Jesus
‘The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist’ is a black charcoal drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The piece depicts the Virgin Mary looking extremely happy while holding her hallowed little one. Beside her we can see Mary’s mum, St. Anne, also looking elated as well as a fairly indifferent looking John the Bapist, although we can forgive him on account of being a child at the time and also Christ’s cousin.
The piece currently hangs at the National Gallery in London as it did in 1987 when Richard Cambridge decided to fire a sawn off shotgun at it. “Why?” I hear you ask. Well, the ex-soldier thought that firing 12-gauges of pain at this holy ensemble expressed his disgust at the British establishment. As a result of this Art Attack the piece sustained considerable damage, rather ironically, from the shattered protective glass. After a year of incredible work the drawing was restored and is now back on display.
2. Taking Revenge on Abstract Art
‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III’ by Barnett Newman is what some arty people might describe as a “challenging piece”. By this they mean it’s the type of painting that your grandparents would look at and exclaim “MY CAT COULD DO BETTER!” before storming off to the gallery’s gift shop to buy a souvenir fridge magnet.
When the painting was being exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam one individual took his outrage at the barbarism of Abstract Art to a whole new level. Brandishing a knife, Gerard Jan van Bladeren sliced at the unfortunate canvas until it was severly damaged in what he described as an act of revenge.
How not to behave at an art gallery.
The painting would never return to its former glory. A shoddy restoration job, where it was alledged house paints and a roller were used, meant that the painting is no longer on display. Remarkably, after serving a prison sentence Jan van Bladeren attacked another of Newman’s pieces, ‘Cathedra’, at the same gallery where the previous incident occured.
3. Vomiting on Art because you find it “boring” and “oppressive”
In what was certainly not a thinly veiled and overall lame attempt to gain notoriety, the self styled “Dark Prince of Toronto Art” Jabal Brown projectile vomited primary colours onto two works of art by Piet Mondrian and Raoul Dufy. After spewing blue onto Dufy’s ‘Harbour and le Havre’ it was said that Brown was so emotionally disturbed by the offending piece that he didn’t even have to force himself to be sick. To be frank, it was probably the vast amount of Jell-O and cake icing Brown consumed, not emotion.
After later vomiting red onto Mondrian’s ‘Composition in Red, White and Blue’ Brown said that he hadn’t decided which painting to up-chuck yellow onto but that it would probably be “something by Picasso”. Thankfully Brown’s sickly triumvirate has never come to fruition.
4. Defacing Rothko in the Pursuit of ‘Yellowism’
Quite honestly I can’t even begin to describe what Yellowism actually is, so I’ll give you this quote and let you come to your own conclusion:
“Yellowism is not art, and Yellowism isn’t anti-art. It’s an element of contemporary visual culture. It’s not an artistic movement. It’s not art, it’s not reality, it’s just Yellowism.”
That informative little nugget comes from Vladimir Umanets, one of the founders of the mysterious movement. Umanets came to national attention after scrawling his own name and the phrase “A potential piece of yellowism” across Mark Rothko’s ‘Black on Maroon’ mural. Did this cast a light on what Yellowism is? No, or not no, or Yellowism.
5. A Special Mention
There are two cases of art being damaged or destroyed by accident which I just had to mention in this article. Firstly, a special shoutout goes to the unfortunate man who, while tying his shoelace at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, fell into and consequently smashed not one but three priceless Oriental porcelain vases. Secondly, the porters working at Sotheby’s in 2000 who used a crushing machine to destroy some boxes unaware that a Lucien Freud portrait worth $157,000 was held inside one of them.