Fuck you right into eternity if you try to pretend even for a second that you are not consumed with jealousy for this man, that you would not be in exactly his position if you possessed the merest suggestion of a spine:
A man who punched a hole through a painting worth nearly £8 million painting has been jailed.
Andrew Shannon, 49, ruined the Claude Monet masterpiece hanging in the National Gallery Ireland in 2012 by attacking it in front of stunned art lovers.
On Thursday a court finally brought him to justice for his crime.
The famous painting, titled Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat, was left with a large hole through the middle of it.
It is valued at $10 million (£7.8 million).
Mr Shannon told the police after his arrest he committed the thoughtless act of vandalism in an attempt to ‘get back at the state.’
1. That is a perfectly good way to get back at the state.
2. Look at how incredibly satisfying that punch-hole is. Just imagine punching through an old piece of art with your own hand. It feels incredible. Don’t pretend you’re not thinking about it.
3. Monet painted like 800 paintings of sailboats, we’re not exactly hurting for pastel dots in the shape of old French boats, as a society, and also Monet is dead. It’s not like this guy punched something rare.
4. DON’T PRETEND YOU’RE TOO GOOD TO WANT TO PUNCH ART. YOU’RE JUST RULED BY YOUR FEARS. THIS MAN IS BRAVER THAN US ALL.
5. Like you’ve never wanted to just fuck up some art or something
6. Look at that idyllic goddamn scene, there’s like one and a half colors in it, this painting looks like it is asleep. This painting needed a good punch in the middle to liven things up.
7. I would give anything in the word to hit a very old drawing of a boat right in the canvas. This man is living his best life, and the rest of us are shadows on the wall.
Tags: artwork, bravery, punching art
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Personally I’ve always wanted to draw a moustache and comedy eyebrows on one of the millions of pictures of old, rich, white men that populate every art gallery ever.
Or punch them.
Or both.
I agree! If this hero made one mistake, it was selecting a landscape to punch. I personally would feel drawn– for punching or, as you say, hilarious vandalism– to one of the zillions of portraits of bored, fussy, rich children that clutter all Western museums.
There are millions of pictures of rich, white, dead men and small, spoiled children across the world.
Would we really be poorer off if a few were vandalised?
Obviously we want to keep the ones where the artist slipped in a load of satire.
but, there’s this John Singer Sargent portrait of the Boit Daughters in the Boston Museum of Fine Art that was attacked, an x slashed into it. one can from certain angles still see the scars to the canvas. i weep for it.
Such misandry! XD
Also googly eyes.
I touched a Monet painting of Rouen Cathedral at a Paul Allen personal collection show once. It was exhilarating. I have personally always wanted to put dinosaurs into paintings, just in the background.
Lemme just drop the mic for you
I would fold a Toulouse-Lautrec litho into a sort of jaunty hat.
I feel like Holbein drawings would make really aerodynamic paper airplanes.
A jaunty chapeau, yes!
…or a broach, or a pterodactyl…
“this painting looks like it is asleep.”
My world went quiet, as did my soul.
I thought painting TIE fighters and AT-ATs on them was brave but now I see I just lacked purity of vision.
May ye be pure of vision and pure of fist.
#3 & #6, yes!
Look at the frame they put on that fucker. The person who framed that painting knew it was boring and desperately tried to liven it up a little.
Now that you mention it, I would like to see a team of football players crash through “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” like it was a paper homecoming banner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-QW2YhKq-A
This video makes me smile every time.
Rembrandt’s The Night Watch would also work for this. And it would be spectacular.
If that’s not the opening credits for the CSI: Ankh Morpork TV show they’re working on, I will be severely disappointed.
“Living his best life.” Ain’t that the fucking truth. There’s a statue of a giraffe down in the lobby in my office building; I think I’ll go punch it in its smug giraffe face.
Knock it over. That money could have fed the family of you or one of your coworkers for a year. A year.
But maybe it fed an artist instead…?
Well, yes, obviously.
Once it’s punched they’ll have to buy another one – EVERYONE WINS
Now it is new art
http://salvageartinstitute.org/benlerner_damageco…
I came here to post this same thing!
I have an uncle who touched a Rembrandt once because he claimed that the feathers on the goose in the painting were so lifelike that they couldn’t be painted. Of course, this is the same uncle who, as a teenager, lied down on George Armstrong Custer’s grave pretending he had an arrow through his chest because he and my mom were really into Little Big Man.
My uncle is kind of weird.
He’s just living his Best Life
Same uncle also spit into the La Brea Tar Pits as a child. Best Life, indeed.
Your uncle is kind of a hero.
I’m not gonna lie, your uncle sounds kind of awesome.
Never had an urge to punch art, but at the British Museum I surprised myself with an incredible urge to physically drag away a tourist that was clambering all over a FIVE THOUSAND year old statue so her friend could take a picture.
I was slightly horrified that they didn’t have better protection for the artwork.
The last time I was at the American Museum of Natural History, I saw a woman climb into the elephant diorama to pose for a photo. If it hadn’t been for the hordes of schoolchildren on a tour blocking my way, I would’ve hauled her out of the exhibit by her ear.
I’m a big fan of the British Museum’s slightly bizarre choices. Most of their artefact blurbs are serious and informative, but occasionally there will be one that sounds like they got the serious, nerdy intern there drunk and then let her write it: goofy, usually pointing out phalli when it wasn’t strictly necessary, but still well researched and punctuated.
Also, they have days when you can touch boxes of old things. Once, I got to hold a 300,000 year old hand axe, an ancient Egyptian makeup pot, and clay tablets from Sumaria, without getting in trouble once.
Please tell me that there is one exhibit in the British Museum that has phalli. Maybe it depicts one person with multiple penises?
I believe it is always necessary to point out phalli, so that people may avoid them if they wish to.
FUCK I WANNA TOUCH THE 300000 YEAR OLD HANDAXE
I think that if whole books are part of a particular piece, the museum in question should put up a reminder not to touch any part of the artwork.
(I admit nothing.)
If it’s survived five thousand years and a British looting team, it’ll survive a selfie.
They have a secret room in like the WALLS of the British Museum where they keep the hundreds and hundreds of ancient coins that they don’t display – when I was reading for my Master’s I got to go in that room and they brought out all these trays of coins and tiny tiny hinged magnifying glasses for me to look at them with and you had to give a letter of recommendation to this wizened guard who is in charge of the secret coin room and oh wow it was the best.
Also, he definitely got back at the state with this one. State, consider yourself gotten back at!
*all across Ireland, various representatives of the state think about the Monet and nod soberly to themselves, realizing that the score is settled now*
This is kind of a different subject–kind of–but once, a substitute teacher rubber-stamped right in the middle of a picture my friend was drawing in his sketchbook. Right in the middle of it! I have never forgiven the substitute teacher for it.
A teacher did that to me right at the end of a class once. People were leaving. I was pretty young and pissed. I flipped all the desks in my way on my way out. Only got a detention so it was worth it.
I see a lot of high school drawings, and it KILLS me when there’s a really nice drawing and right on the front a teacher writes in marker “A+ great work!”
Like, dude. If you admire it so much get the fuck off there. Now it is practically useless.
I saw this story this weekend and immediately thought “that’s so badass” but then I mentioned it to a friend who’s a normal human and they were like “how awful!” I’m glad the toast has my back.
Last time I was in the Met I was stuck in a really long line to get into an exhibit and there it was. The same sibilant voice, hissing so softly I could almost convince myself I was imagining it. But I knew it was real, I felt it in my bones.
“Lick the Rodinssssss. Lick them alllll.”
I have truly and regularly thought this while in museums and I wonder what it says about the human mind. Just having a highbrow afternoon in a museum, being all cultured and shit, when suddenly the thought pops into my mind “look how shiny that is, you should touch it with your mouth.” What? Why?
Now imagining a museum running an ill-advised PR campaign featuring the phrase “You can taste the culture!”
Oh may I? FINALLY. I really only appreciate culture orally.
Also, does bird internet have a meaning that is not related to Kenneth Ellen Parcell?
Nope, it’s just Kenneth.
Oh good. My first thought was ’30 Rock!’ swiftly followed by, ‘Dude, you don’t know about things. This has nothing to do with 30 Rock. It’s a coolkid internet thing you’ve never heard of.’
So… uh. Anyways. Neat!
I used to work in bicycle shops and the sheer number of smooth, shiny, beautiful things made out of carbon fiber was impossible to resist. I feel not bad at all about any of it, sorrynotsorry guy whose DuraAce brake levers I licked.
This makes me feel SO MUCH BETTER about my almost overwhelming desire to lick the balloons I blew up when I worked at a party store.
Not my fault, I mean, look at these things. How do you NOT want to lick it???
http://bike.shimano.com/content/dam/shimanoweb/bi…
I would like to eat a famous painting. I don’t want to punch it, but imagine just chewing on a little corner of the mona lisa. It would be worth the lead poisoning.
Imagine that afterwards they punished you by making you spend the rest of your life sitting below the corner you ate. Oh man, awesome!
Reminds me of this: http://mentalfloss.com/article/12975/highest-comp…
Yes! I read that right after Sendak died and it remains my favorite story of an artist-fan interaction.
“He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
Sendak gets what I feel in my heart. Its love. Pure all consuming love.
just a wee bit of judith and holofernes
just the teeniest bit
like the amount of canvas equivalent to when you go to bbq and there’s that one little piece in your molar.
A teeny tiny flake of a Frida Khalo, and then I wake up and my brow is as glossy as a beetle’s wing, and my hair is a flawless crown of braids.
That reminds me of Red Dragon. Coincidentally a new Blake exhibition just opened in my home town…
Sesame Street had a thing or two to say about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcQ7m1vFlYI
Oh my gosh. While in high school a friend and I went to the Chicago Art Institute. There were massive blackouts in Chicago that day and we decided that were the museum to lose power we would lick a Monet. Sadly, the power remained on but we couldn’t help but muse on, “What if…”
Daniel Pinkwater licked a sarcophagus once!
Wow, I never realised so many people wanted to lick art. I think I have some new life goals.
I met a local artist who described her art as “I like to make art you want to lick.” So apparently it goes both ways.
Nope.
Signed,
An Art Conservator (in-training)
Weirdly enough, I feel more rage towards people who think scotch tape and glue are acceptable ways to fix old books/documents than this guy. This guy did it on purpose and knew what he was doing. The other people are just stupid.
Also, now the painting has an even more interesting story to tell about it, though that’s probably just the archivist in me talking.
Well, I do vent frustration by accusing the previous owners of maligning their documents out of a fiendish desire to spite me. But I know full well that sometimes knowledge and best practices turn out to be disproved down the line, and that sometimes someone’s best effort did more harm than good by the time it reaches me. But, it’s reached me! Sometimes it’s better to be held together with cement and spit than lost forever.
This asshole, however. Conservators got enough to deal with thanks to the _basic entropy of the universe_ without having to mend paintings that were perfectly whole before some looney with an exaggerated sense of importance took out his petulance on it.
I’m an art conservator in practice and I’ve definitely wanted to punch some art. But usually because it was badly behaved. I would also fantasize about the building burning down and taking that object with it.
I threaten recalcitrant paper with a “flick flick fwOOOOM” Zippo gesture. :3
Aw, but this guy just wants to make sure your (future) job stays interesting!
(Am on your side, though, really. For many sensible reasons, but also I don’t think punching a hundred-year-old canvas would involve enough resistance to be as satisfying from a tactile perspective as Mallory makes it out… ha.)
On the one hand, there was one piece of stupid-ass public art that turned up in a place I loved and made a lot of people there very unhappy and when someone did finally vandalize it I did a little secret happy dance.
On the other, I would like to throw mud at this woman and scream at her: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/16/worl…
So my feelings are mixed but violent, and it depends on whether I like the art or not.
My feelings towards that woman do not stop at throwing mud at her. They may not even stop at throwing her in jail. I don’t think I have the creativity to think of an appropriate punishment for her. How do you punish someone for cultural destruction on that scale?
She finally told police that she was so furious with her son that she had destroyed them out of spite, fearing that because of his imminent conviction the Swiss authorities would certainly withdraw her work permit and she would find herself out of a job.
I…I…there are no words.
Art lovers could paint her portrait in the bowls of museum toilets and urinals, I suppose.
Does everybody else remember that guy who criticized the Mondrian by vomiting on it? Three quarters of my conversational similes involve me comparing myself in some ways to “that guy who puked on the Mondrian” and sometimes I worry that not everybody knows what I am talking about anymore if, indeed, they ever did.
p.s. I don’t want to punch any art just now but there’s a life-size wooden John the Baptist in the National Gallery that I would seduce if tourists wouldn’t stare.
I like Mondrian but he makes a cogent point
I was at a Frida Kahlo exhibit once with my sister. Wandering around, I noticed several pieces that said they were painted on metal.
I leaned over to my sister and whispered, “When it says it’s painted on metal, don’t you want to just reach out and… ting the edge of it?”
It was not my sister who was standing next to me. I no longer trust my peripheral vision to identify people.
I totally want to snack on some Blake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsnN408weA
Balthus. I would fight Balthus.
here come the copycat punchers…
I would LOVE to punch this particular piece of public art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Fountain
…but I would probably get electrocuted? Seriously, though, I hate that thing with a mad passion.
My art museum had a so-called sculpture for some months made out of road chat piled in a circle. I really wanted to bring in a kid’s toy bulldozer and drop it into the thing.
My art museum has a so-called sculpture that is literally a pile of felt. I can’t find it on their website right now but if I do I’ll post a link here.
edit: this is not the pile of felt but seriously, what the hell is this? “lolol all these numbers are ‘equal’ because I messed around with the font size but also these numbers are NOT equal because they represent different numeric values” GET OUT OF HERE. This is why I have a lot of trouble with modern art. At least with old-timey paintings you can at least appreciate the technical difficulty of making the painting or sculpture or whatever. With this stuff, I can never tell if the artist was making a sincere effort to convey an emotion or something, or just thinking, “I wonder what is the most blatantly stupid piece I can make that will still get exhibited in a respected museum.”
Now THERE’S a piece of art I could punch. Jesus H. Christ.
Ah! Here is the pile of felt.
The random arrangement contrasts with the predetermined and logical order by which the felt strips were cut.
STOP TRYING TO IMPART A SENSE OF GRAVITAS TO THIS, IT IS A PILE OF FELT STRIPS!!!!
I’m okay with the felt, although I would be happier about it if visitors were allowed to play with and rearrange the pile. But I am really astonishingly angry about that fucking stoned-freshman-in-a-philosophy-class “can we truly say that these numbers have different values… if they’re written the same size?” bullshit. No, you know what, I’ve been in a philosophy class with stoned freshmen and they were better than that.
” Morris gave the following instructions for installing the felt: ‘Mix the pieces thoroughly and heap on the floor with no special arrangement of the pieces.'”
Oh, so he didn’t really even MAKE the art except for cutting the pieces. ARGH.
So at one point in high school my mom started turning collages and shit for English papers….which she got away with for a while. And then one time she decided to just turn in a box full of cut-out images and said “it’s participatory, you assemble it yourself” and…..still got away with it. I suspect she was high at the time. Also, she was dating her English teacher, so….yeah.
Some of these I can sorta appreciate because the real art piece is in the line of bullshit the artist writes to make the garbage pile sound profound and symbolic
Like, yeah it’d been done but it can still be a lot of fun sitting around cackling and instructing museum directors to strew trash all over their floor “in no special arrangement” to represent something something Freudian symbology something something Hegel dialectic
The was a piece of art a few years ago that was trash strewn around the floor. As I recall, the evening cleaning staff accidentally cleaned it up and threw that art away.
…Ah yes. it was this: http://gawker.com/cleaning-lady-throws-away-expen…
If the artist had any vision at all it woulda been him dressing up as the cleaning lady and sneaking into the gallery
In “art that is actually a pile of things” I actually kind of liked the “pile of green candy” modern art that was on display at the modern art museum in Fort Worth a while ago, as it was kind of pretty: http://fortworthanewperspective.com/main/2013/10/…
Although now I’m super bummed that I didn’t take a piece of candy. No one told me you were ALLOWED to eat the art. Geeze.
That frame looks more fun to destroy than the painting itself. I wanna wing it into the wall and dent it into a D and then slam dunk it in a dumpster. I want this very badly.
I have poked a Degas!
When I was fourteen and in Paris with my grandmother, I was at the Musee d’Orsay, and standing alone in front of one of the paintings of ballerinas, and I just… reached out and poked the corner.
And then I just walked away, half expecting to be tackled by security guards. It was amazing.
I did that to a Van Gogh once. The impasto was just SO THICK that it reached out and touched ME.
I can’t remember how old I was (11? 12?), but I poked a Picasso. That feeling!
The Monet becomes even more valuable for having been punched. It survives its assault and goes on to draw crowds fascinated by the open wound. Art collectors begin to pay thugs to punch their paintings, raising their value exponentially. These are not your ordinary masterworks. These are the ones that survived battery by plebians and fools. These are the noble warriors of art.
At least that’s gonna be how I spin it once I punch something of Picasso’s.
Hey, if no on wants that painting because it’s “ruined”, I’ll definitely take it.
All I ever want to do in museums is chip away at the paint on the thick oil paintings. Imagine how satisfying it would be to just slowly peel apart a Van Gogh or Monet and drop the pieces on the floor like chipped off nail polish.
Oh god. I …. I have a complicated and new sort of lust in my heart now.
I work in an art museum so there’s part of me that is totally horrified while at the same time the other part of me that enjoys tactile things like peeling labels off beer bottles is like “WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE?”
I’ve been there too. I always think it would be as satisfying as picking at a scab, except with the bonus of not causing you any physical pain. I also like to imagine that the especially thick blobs of paint might still be damp in the middle, and that if I pressed down on the edges, the top would burst and liquid paint would leak out… like popping a very, very old and prestigious pimple.
I actually made myself shiver typing that out, am I a weirdo?
Not that there is NO punchable art in the world, but honestly looking at the photograph is making me feel rather faint and nauseated.
I can barely watch fight scenes in superhero movies because I’m too overwhelmed thinking “WHAT ABOUT THE PROPERTY DESTRUCTION?”, seeing someone actually punch a hole in a Monet is killing my soul a bit.
It will be fine. Conservators will repair it and it will barely be noticeable again. Don’t fret. (Signed, an art conservator)
But yes, I agree on watching those action movies! Who’s going to pay for all that produce ruined when the cart was overturned? Won’t someone please think of the produce?
MY CABBAGES!
Hmmm, suppose museums place a metal plate (assuming a conservator friendly one…if that even exists? Apologies for my art preservation ignorance) directly behind (but not touching – I’m assuming that would be a no-no?) all canvases hanging in museums and don’t tell anyone! Yes, I enjoy watching karma in action, especially when it involves a$$holes being violently injured due to their own folly!
It would be pretty difficult to make them punch-proof, since you’d have to put the plate right up against the canvas (or wood, or whatever medium they used) in order to really support it. the canvas is stretched pretty tight, so there’s not a whole lot of give to it, especially to a fist-sized object. Then, of course, you have to be careful about the metal you use. You want something that won’t interact with the pigments or rust or anything like that.
When I was eighteen, I drank some coffee and took a new migraine medication just before going into the SF MOMA and was asked to leave about an hour later for touching a sculpture. A shiny, shiny sculpture.
I went back ten years later (My mother in law: “Should we get coffee first?”) and that sculpture is now in a glass case, which I choose to mean that MANY people touched it.
Isn’t it more satisfying to think they put it in that case just for you??!
But how could this man have passed up the opportunity to punch a Warhol painting and then declare I Punched Andy Warhol?
At 18 I kicked a piece at a modern art museum. It was literally just a pile of large glass shards, about knee-height, and it had a pretentious, nonsensical title like “The New Atlantis,” and something about it just filled me with rage. There was a large cluster of people around me so after performing my act of non-peaceful protect I sauntered away and the guards never caught me (if they were even looking for me; perhaps they were privately cheering me on and chose to pretend they hadn’t heard the tinkling of the glass as it broke further).
What confuses me is how far from the wall the painting must have been for this dude to actually be able to punch a hole right through the canvas. I would have assumed it would be so close that at best he would have warped the canvas a little bit, but hit the wall long before piercing it.
Maybe it was really tightly stretched and olde-brittley (canvas)?
Can I skip the art and just punch Damien Hirst in the face?
Also my first thought upon learning of this story. We are kindred anti-Hirst spirits.
Yes!!! Yes you can and please do! I fully condone violence against Hirsto
So this happened at my old school: http://www.thejustice.org/article/2014/11/vandali…
My first reaction was not to be horrified that someone ruined a rare edition of The Raven with booze, but that the booze was Bailey’s. BAILEY’S. So embarrassing. If you’re going to have a secret ceiling cache of library booze, let it be at least a mid-grade sipping whiskey.
Or canonically cheap gin or something.
That story was fascinating. My mind came up with a very elaborate story to explain why there was an amount of mystery booze hidden in the ceiling, in a quantity enough to damage 200 books, but I’d love to know how it really came about!
I know. I know. It’s unimaginable.
When I was a kid, I went to acting classes at a regional theatre that had- possibly still has- a huge, ugly sculpture in the lobby. If I recall correctly, it was called “The Late Shift,” and it was of a woman kissing her husband before he left for work. I walked up to it, took a good look, then reached out and WHUMPED it as hard as I could.
My teachers told me not to do it again, but they also said “it’s ugly as sin, and we don’t know why it’s still here.” It was an immensely satisfying WHUMP.
I bet that painting just went up in value.
I’m trying to think of art that I would punch and all I can think about it my intense desire to yank Ernest Hemingway’s beard right off.
I would also snip the collars off all his fisherman’s jumpers.
ETA: thought of one. William Theed’s monstrosity of a statue depicting Victoria gazing lovingly up at Albert’s mutton chops while she’s dressed as a Saxon queen and he’s some sort of Saxon schoolgirl in knee-socks.
How have I never seen that statue before, it’s so delightfully vomit-inducing.
he’s some sort of Saxon schoolgirl in knee-socks.
A fetish I did not know I had until this very moment!
Never mind Hemingway, how satisfying would it be to kick Jack Kerouac in the balls? I have hated him so long and so fiercely.
Let’s build a time machine and do both! I would also like to snap James Joyce’s glasses in half and watch him try to tape them back together like Harry Potter. Then I would go further back in time and set fire to Thoreau’s pube ruff of a beard just to hear it sizzle.
Clearly my English degree has brought to the surface some very violent fantasies…
Now all I can imagine is a time-traveling girl gang bullying male authors!
It would certainly make Dr. Who more interesting…
Yes indeed, Awful soppy thing .
I got to visit Japan when I was 15 for a student conference and my immediate reaction to being shown to my host family’s beautiful guest room was a deep, deep desire to punch in one of the sliding paper wall panels. Even at 15 I knew this was why I could never have nice things.
There is no such thing as a ten million goddamn dollar painting, no artist has ever recieved $10 million for their work, that painting is theMy Super Sweet Sixteen kid throwing a tantrum over getting a new car on the wrong day of art.
That guy turned a billionaire’s plaything into a performance piece and that he got jail time for this just shows that the West is as regressive as any Chinese bureaucrat trying to suppress Ai Weiwei
Aww man. I saw a little girl reach out and touch a sculpture at some art museum in Pittsburgh, and the guards went berserk. Like, running over, grabbing their walkie-talkies *KSSHH* Yes we have a code 9 on the 4th floor, requesting backup *KSSHH.* I felt so bad for the kid, she was like six years old and majorly embarrassed.
This post was extremely satisfying for me.
At the Art Institute in Chicago, I saw a little girl, maybe four years old, who reached out and touched an old painting. It was a family portrait, and she stroked the baby’s head with her finger. A tiny fleck of paint came off. No alarms sounded and no guards came running, and I didn’t say anything. Clearly she appreciated the painting more than most people, so maybe it was OK that she damaged it slightly in the process?
When I was 13 and on holiday in New York with my family, we were visiting the Museum of Modern Art and I had really bad period cramps. There were no benches, so I sat on the floor, and guards (with guns? My memory says they had guns) came and made me get up.
BRB, just making a GIF of that bit in Parade’s End where the BAMFy suffragette has at the Rokeby Venus with a fuck- off hammer and Valentine’s standing there like ‘oh whuuuut…eh, it’s not right but it’s okay’.
Whenever I see anything beautiful or fragile, my first impulse is to smash it into a billion pieces. Drop the vase, topple the statue, punch the painting – I would do it all if I didn’t think my mother the art historian/conservationist would have a heart attack and die just so she could haunt me.
This is totally bogus: “Mr Shannon told the police after his arrest he committed the thoughtless act of vandalism in an attempt to ‘get back at the state’ however while in court he tried to play it off as an accident by reportedly claiming he ‘felt faint’ and fell into the painting.”
Come on, bro.
That guy’s face, though.
He looks like he’s trying really hard to not laugh or smile.
Dude was smashing paintings in a free museum, but “Upon raiding Mr Shannon’s Dublin home after his arrest, police found nearly 50 stolen items, including valuable artworks, books and antiques.” That’s some Batman villain level weirdness.
srsly guys no I work in a museum have you any idea how much paperwork this generates for me
*looks at art history PhD*
*remembers dreams of research*
*cries while filling in damage reports*
I’ve never felt the desire to punch a painting, but there are a large number of “architecturally significant” buildings I’d like to burn to the fucking ground, so we’ll call it even.
I am definitely not too good to not want to punch some fine art. I probably would have been FULLY into participating in the Bonfire of the Vanities.
he’s an arsehat. he hasn’t damaged the state at all. he’s damaged the people who enjoy looking at this painting, which actually isn’t too bad a picture
When I was about 8 I went through a phase of sneaking into the art room during recess and (coldly, deliberately) pushing my index finger through the paint on other students’ drying paintings.
My teacher should really have been less insistent that keeping in the lines and “correct” colour choices were the best indicators of artistic merit and put my goddamn paintings on the fucking achievement wall.
Your poor classmates! I would have cried hot tears of fury! Monet at least is dead and didn’t get to see his painting punched.
Gimme some Rothkos to spin-kick
I want to punch any painting or sculpture that shows a nude woman with a clothed man.
God yes, especially ones where she’s made to hold a mirror and they call it Vanity or some such misogynist crap
Guys, I think this art punch was an act of art. I’m pretty sure the whole thing was a posthumous colab with Monet.
HOLY SHIT WHAT THAT'S AMAZING
i don’t know. i have complicated feelings about this that mostly come out of two of my oldest convictions, which are “fuck canonization of artworks/texts/creators” and “museums are awesome”
like… i understand that museums are important, and that art should be preserved; i really don’t think anyone’s arguing that.
but like FUNDAMENTALLY, most people in the world are never going to see the actual physical original artwork. the internet and other forms of art education like books and reproductions and prints mean that the original image WILL be preserved. and you can talk all you want about how the actual artwork is better or different or special, but by the very nature of any given ~classical and famous artwork~ it is going to be SUPER inaccessible to probably 99% of the people on the planet.
i’m not a mathematician, but like – this is a form of performance art! super valuable old-ass art is NOT accessible, if only because you’re expected to have an education & an understanding of the culture and history and time period it originated in to be allowed to ~talk about it. which is bullshit.
ALSO most of these artists – monet included! – regularly destroyed their own artworks. lots of artworks have been damaged or destroyed over the years. it’s not like art STOPS BEING A PART OF THE WORLD – which is full of people, who are alive and living and active beings. artwork doesn’t get to exist trapped in amber! unless you box it up and put it into storage – which imo is a shitty thing to do, we should be trying to find ways to MAKE art more accessible – you have to accept that this shit is goign to happen, that the world is going to keep changing around and with artworks and add to their histories.
i never said it was a cogent position but basically
like, yeah, idk how i feel about the fact that this guy DID THE THING but i just find the shocked reverence with which people treat Great Art super incomprehensible bullshit that’s designed to be exclusionary on just about every level
I don’t know how much it matters that there are reproductions and that the majority of people will never see the actual thing (the majority of people on Earth will never see a reproduction either). But seeing an artwork in person is different from looking at a reproduction. I never liked Jackson Pollack or Rothko until I saw their art in person, but when I did, it clicked. A giant Rothko, with its textures and colors pulsing, just can’t be reproduced in an art textbook. It’s not even close. I agree that storing artworks or keeping them in private places where the public can’t access them generally sucks, but there isn’t an infinite amount of space in museums, and if there wasn’t a private market for art artists wouldn’t be able to make a living, and museums probably wouldn’t be as interested in certain artists. I don’t think all art is worthy of religious reverence, but I do think that what that guy did was shitty because he (one white male) doesn’t get to decide what paintings get destroyed and what don’t. No one person should decide that.
yeah. most of the world won’t ever get to see any of it in person, but those who do can be forever changed by it. i’ve learned so much about what i want to do with my own work by being in the presence of the works themselves, more than i ever could have looking at reproductions. even works that i have issues with (like, all the self-important rich people, and all the objectification of women. such that, that Rembrandt in russia, of Danae naked (of course) in bed, awaiting or welcoming zeus, it was slashed and had acid thrown at it for being sacrilegious or something. that sickens me)
Barnett Newman (for those who don’t know: huge expanses of color interrupted by occasional vertical stripes – they make no sense at all reproduced) is the world’s most vandalized artist. every time i visit moma, i visit his Vir Heroicus Sumblimus (ok, the title: ugh), i get this amazing mix-of-unease-and-peace – the sense of my embodiment, incarnation, that still can reach out to the divine. once i’m done communing with it, i take a moment where i attempt to channel some sort of protective barrier in around it. it needs to be there for others who might feel the same.
I think the pure, unbridled delight I derive from this is a perfect example of why it was a great decision for me to leave the museum world behind me.
I’ve never felt that way about art, but I do always want to throw baseballs at the giant walls of glasses and plates that you find in the wedding registry section of department stores.
I BET IT”S WORTH MORE NOW!
There are plenty of Monets in the world, but how many are there with punch holes? Huh? Huh?
Yeah, I felt bad. Sometimes.
Years ago, the National Lampoon ran a photograph of that nut smashing The Pieta statue with a huge hammer. The caption was, “Péta? I thought you said ‘Piñata!'”
Most art doesn’t make sense to me when viewed as a print or photo. But to stand in front of Van Gogh’s “Irises” is a thrill for me. Klimt’s “The Kiss” seemed to be trying too hard, as a poster on my relative’s wall, but seeing another one exhibited in LA a few years ago and being a few feet from it (huge work) I kinda felt like I got it.
I feel angry at the painting being punched. We just got to where art can be exhibited without being behind glass and ropes. The point a Toastie makes here on not deifying art and artists is interesting. I also get appeasing the anger that’s behind punching something held dear. But, I want to look at the art.
ok, so i’m an artist, and very much so anti-violence. so the destruction of art feels personally painful and saddening.
that said: JEFF KOONS. DOUCHEBAG ARTIST MAKING DOUCHEBAGGY (and occasionally racist) ART FOR DOUCHEBAGS.
i would shed no tears if his big museum and gallery shows in new york recently were blown to smithereens.
(but i’d still sell my work to him and his collectors given the chance. sigh)
Sometimes there are too many sex things in the British Museum. In the last few years, I've been to the Pompeii exhibit and the Japanese Shunga exhibit.
The Pompeii exhibit, which I attended with a friend and his parents, was full of phalli! Full! Sometimes, a big phallus would have a second, mini phallus attached to it, just for extra fertile energy (or something). I had never met my friend's parents before, and we spent ten very awkward minutes saying things like 'gosh, the tiles on that mosaic are so… blue', before someone started making jokes and it got funny.
The Shunga exhibit was just exhausting, like it's own personal, 500 page dissertation on pornography. It also was full of people looking extremely serious. I felt like a Victorian lady (of stereotype, not the actual, debauched ones), and needed a cup of tea and a biscuit afterwards.
Someone has made a game where you can punch a Monet. It’s a Christmas miracle. http://punchamonet.gallery/
At the last art show I went to, the artist took a pair of scissors to her canvas and chopped it into pieces and gave them to us to pin onto our clothes.
Most fun I’ve ever had at an art exhibit.