How to deter art vandals? Punish them properly
It’s time to weight fines on gallery vandals with the significance of their targets.
How to deter the art vandals – punish them properly. The arts are such an easy target for attention-grabbing stunts. Handing out a few unexpectedly severe penalties might focus minds.
I defer to no one in my dislike of Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of King Charles III, in which the monarch seems shrouded in pink candy floss. So perhaps I should have been mildly amused when two animal activists charged into London’s Philip Mould Gallery in swanky Pall Mall and stuck Wallace and Gromit stickers on the painting, apparently to protest against alleged cruelty on farms “assured” by the RSPCA (of which the King is patron).
But I wasn’t mildly amused. I was more than mildly irritated. Every day the people running galleries, theatres, museums and concert halls achieve small miracles to make their shows truly accessible to the public.
That means removing as many barriers, literal and metaphorical, as possible. Which leaves the art itself, and those performing it, largely unprotected. It isn’t brave or radical to throw soup at a van Gogh in the National Gallery or to let off an ear-splitting glitter cannon right by the orchestra at Glyndebourne. It’s infantile. It requires no cunning. And, ludicrously, it carries little risk of meaningful punishment.
Well, let’s talk about punishment in a minute. First, some history. There’s nothing new about this. It’s 110 years since the suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to the Rokeby Venus, the voluptuous Velázquez nude hanging (then as now) in the National Gallery.
She was protesting not only about the arrest of Mrs Pankhurst but also, she said, about the way that “men visitors gaped at it all day long”. She probably had a point, though as a card-carrying fascist later in life she must have approved of far worse behaviour.
And it’s 50 years since someone scratched the initials IRA on Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. Actually that wasn’t even the most notorious vandalism of an artwork in 1974.
Earlier that year the artist Tony Shafrazi, protesting about the Vietnam War, sprayed the words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s great anti-war painting Guernica, which then hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (In case you were wondering, he said his odd syntax was inspired by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)
But such desecrations entered the history books because they were rare. They had real shock value. They may even have prompted sympathy for their perpetrators’ beliefs. What’s happening today is different. Attacking art has become a cliché.
Across western Europe and the US, just in the past two years, there have been dozens of incidents. Most have been carried out by anti-fossil fuel and climate-change activists, though pro-Palestinian sympathisers are also increasingly involved – as appears to be the case with the slashing of the portrait of Lord Balfour in Trinity College, Cambridge, for which nobody has yet been charged.
There are signs that other countries are finally taking steps to curb these attacks. In the US a woman who sprayed paint on the pedestal of a Degas sculpture at the National Gallery of Art has been sentenced to 60 days in prison followed by 150 hours of community service.
She must also pay $4000 towards cleaning what she defaced. Another activist allegedly involved is charged with “conspiracy to commit a crime against the US”, which could lead to up to five years in prison. He stands trial in August.
Meanwhile in France, after incidents in which environmental activists threw soup at the Mona Lisa and stuck posters on Monet’s Poppy Field, the culture minister Rachida Dati wants a new law specifically to deal with attacks on art. Her point is that if no real damage is done to an artwork (as is often the case), the perpetrator ends up not being charged at all, despite causing much inconvenience.
She certainly seems to have Emmanuel Macron’s support.
“To attack a work of art is to attack our values,” the French president declared after an incident last year.
In Italy, too, there’s now a law stipulating fines of up to £50,000 ($96,000) for people who attack monuments, though that new law itself was cited as provocation for an attack on a Botticelli painting in Florence a few months ago. And in Britain?
The response to these attacks on art can be summed up in four words: inertia and misplaced forbearance. If we apprehend the perpetrators at all, their cases take many months to come to court and rarely result in a substantial fine or custodial sentence.
With the police, courts and prisons so overloaded that even robbers and rapists are going free, one can understand the reluctance to throw scarce resources at this problem. Especially when the protesters turn out to be (as was recently the case in London) two “harmless” ladies in their eighties – one a priest.
Meanwhile the museums and galleries themselves, grappling with huge financial pressures, simply don’t have the funds to protect themselves with more security staff, glass coverings or airport-style scanning machines. Most don’t even search bags manually.
Would a new government offer new thinking? Don’t hold your breath. You will scan the manifestos in vain for solutions to this problem. And to be fair, it’s not the most urgent crisis facing the world of museums.
Yet there is a way forward. The usual verbal challenge thrown down by those who defile art is “are you more concerned about protecting paintings than protecting the planet?” The answer is that people who value the arts are also, in my experience, likely to be highly sympathetic to environmental concerns. So it’s perverse for eco-campaigners to alienate a constituency who would otherwise be right behind them.
The ideal solution would be for the activists to work that out for themselves and desist from molesting any more defenceless Old Masters.
But handing out a few unexpectedly severe penalties, along the lines of what the US has done to the Degas defiler, might spur activists into abandoning these self-defeating tactics more speedily.