[MSN] Art as a target for vandals: The cost of freedom.

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Art as a target for vandals: The cost of freedom 
By Michael Kimmelman

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 

MADRID: Earlier this month, on what Parisians call White Night, when
thousands of people cavort in the streets until dawn, a bunch of intruders
broke into the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and punched a hole in a Monet.

Then, from the obscure and formerly bucolic university town of Lund, in
southern Sweden, came news that a group of hooded vandals with crowbars and
axes stormed into an art gallery and, to the accompaniment of death-metal
music, destroyed several sexually explicit photographs by Andres Serrano.

While the Parisian hooligans were undone partly because they were caught on
the museum's security cameras, the Swedish gang went them one better. They
proudly advertised their crime on YouTube.

So the other day I stopped into the Reina Sofía here to check on Picasso's
"Guernica." The threat of violence is nothing new in Spain, where Muslim
terrorists blew up commuter trains a few years ago, killing many, and where
the threat of killings by Basque extremists (there was a bomb attack in
Bilbao last week, a truce with the government having broken down in June)
has again become part of the daily background noise of life.

Only a simple stanchion, and a discreet alarm, as I discovered when leaning
too close, separates the public from Picasso's famous mural about a
midcentury act of terror: the German bombing of the ancient Basque town of
Guernica in 1936. The picture presides over a big gallery of related
Picassos, each a target, I suppose, if you adopt the mindset that
terrorists, and those who would exploit terrorism, like to foster.

Twenty-six years ago, when the painting arrived in Madrid from New York, it
was installed in a huge bulletproof glass cage at an annex of the Prado,
flanked by soldiers guarding what had become an international symbol of
antifascism. Picasso had wanted it to go to Spain only when Generalissimo
Francisco Franco was gone. To anyone who remembered it at the Museum of
Modern Art, the sight at the Prado was sad and shocking. The picture looked
forlorn, suffocated. It was almost impossible to see.

It had already been vandalized at the Museum of Modern Art when a small-time
artist named Tony Shafrazi sprayed the words "Kill Lies All" on it in 1974.
In the creepy, amnesiac way that celebrity and money operate in America and
in the art world, Shafrazi went on to become a rich and powerful art dealer.

The painting moved some years ago from the Prado to the Reina Sofía and was
finally let out of its glass prison. I've never loved "Guernica," to tell
the truth. Its lofty ambition obscures the detriments of its telegraphed
emotions and inflated billboard-size Cubism, but time only adds to its
patina of glory for the crowds that come to commune with it and who can now
get almost, but not quite, close enough to touch the picture.

Proximity is the cost, and virtue, of a civil and democratic society. We run
the risk that some lunatic or self-promoter will violate the public trust of
an open space because we value that space as a democratic ideal. Part of
what's beautiful about an art museum, aside from what's on view, is that it
implies trust - it lets us stand next to objects that supposedly represent
civilization at its best and, in so doing, flatters us for respecting our
common welfare.

Complaints that museums are snobbish palaces and that works of art in them
are treated like holy relics may not be all wrong, but they miss the point
that people go to museums partly to enjoy this compact with what, as a
society, we decide has enduring value - with art whose fragility and
vulnerability to attack make our encounters with it that much more special.

Even a commercial art gallery that sells lousy art trusts the public enough
to let strangers off the streets through the doors to see what's on the
walls. Unlike many museums, galleries are free. Often they've got the best
shows in town.

Walling off art behind alarmed glass wouldn't guarantee total safety,
anyway, although people in France might well be asking about erratic
security there. A spate of attacks includes one in July in Avignon by a
woman, an artist named Sam Rindy, who left a lipstick-stained kiss on a
white painting by Cy Twombly, saying that she thought it had improved the
picture. Last week Rindy's lawyer told a court in Marseille that she had
been "overcome with passion."

The lawyer for the picture's owner responded, "In love, there need to be two
consenting people."

Touché. But the alternative to an open society can't be what the Louvre does
with the "Mona Lisa." Every year it seems to recede farther behind glass.
It's a station on the cross of package tourism and an emblem of our own
worst fears and impulses, the opposite of the way you experience "Guernica."

It's tempting to look for a grand, unified theory of vandalism, but the
specific motivations of the people who attack art are clearly as diverse as
the objects they choose to hurt. More often it's not pranksters who slash
art but self-promoters with a supposed cause. For the moment, let's leave
aside the opportunism of artists who seem to provoke reactions. Their art
may be a cheap trick, but that's never an excuse for violence. With the
memory in mind of the riots that broke out last year after the publication
of cartoons mocking Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, Al Qaeda extremists
recently promised a reward to anyone who kills the publisher of a newspaper
in Sweden that lately printed a Muhammad cartoon and the artist who did it.
No doubt they're disappointed at their failure so far to rekindle similar
mayhem.

You might say that what troubles such terrorists is precisely the freedom
that art, and its public display, represent. Many of the criminals are
religious and sexual puritans. They are offended by art's power to embody
values they fear. Art has a totemic power that goes back to cave paintings,
which is too easy to dismiss in the modern world. It's why ancient Greeks
used to chain statues to prevent them from fleeing, and why in the
Philippines enraged citizens attacked billboards of Ferdinand Marcos.

But art is also expensive, even more so in an increasingly deranged
commercial art world, and the combination of money and symbolism means that
attacking art will make headlines unlike other acts of ordinary vandalism.

Getting attention is always the bottom line. That the hooded Swedes with
crowbars in Lund went straight to YouTube (the video has since been removed)
was predictable and ominous, a case of Internet self-promotion that is minor
compared with the beheadings in Iraq, but with the same idea: that direct
technological access promotes acts of violence whose basic requirement is to
be witnessed.

Thanks to its historic authority, the aura of "Guernica" has become like a
bubble or halo that psychologically separates it from the gazing mobs, never
mind that there's no longer a glass wall.

Standing before it, you can almost imagine that it has, historically
speaking, passed beyond harm - that to attack it now would only make the
picture a martyr, that it's indestructible.

Of course it's not.

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