Andrei Molodkin's Dead Man's Switch, a 21-ton vault containing 16 works of art. A pneumatic pump will activate the destruction of the works of art remotely. Photo: De Gieterijstudio
The security at the National Gallery in London becomes more oppressive every time I visit. Now there are new airport-style scanning gates and additional searches: recently I saw someone's art materials apparently confiscated upon entry. It seems heavy-handed until you remember that Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, a subtle and complex painting of a naked woman standing with her back to us as we can see her thoughtful face in the mirror, was attacked here with hammers last fall. Easy to forget, because attacks on art have become routine. When the Mona Lisa got soup recently, I wrote a short piece without even bothering to make my disapproval clear, because this is how it goes when the outrageous becomes normal - we learn to accept it with a lot of irony.
Now Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin is going one step further - or is he? Molodkin claims to be sealing original works of art by Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Andres Serrano and more in a vault designed to destroy them all with acid. Their destruction will be triggered if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were to die in prison. Serrano, Franko B and others freely provided their own work for the project: Picasso was probably not asked. But is this device for erasing art real, holding the "masterpieces" hostage, which Molodkin refuses to specify, really that special?
If he actually prepared acid to destroy a Rembrandt, and Assange got rid of this mortal body in prison, and the machine works, the fake war on art would become a reality. False because no masterpiece has really been thrown away so far: protective glass has protected paintings from the rather superficial attacks of climate activists. However, the Velázquez incident at the National Gallery is the most disturbing yet, as safety hammers were used to breach that protective barrier, and a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil cited the "precedent" of a suffragette cutting the canvas, which apparently implies that there is permanent damage. art is justified: you can still see the streaks of Mary Richardson's attack in 1914 as pale scars on Venus's back.
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Why is violence against great art such a trend of our time? And why is it seen by some as fair enough, or at least not something to worry about? The explicit justifications are clear enough: art matters less than life, a painting matters less than the planet, or as Molodkin has said, "freedom is much more important" than art.
But behind these platitudes lies a festering pile of sloppy thinking and inaccurate art history. The idea that attacking art is always a progressive act is based on a crude mythology that defies any analysis. Take the story of the Rokeby Venus. Reports of last year's hammer attack presented the 'precedent' of Mary Richardson's attack as if she were a lowly suffragette hero. In fact, she joined the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and supported Oswald Mosley with the same zeal she had led in attacking a Velázquez with a helicopter: "I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I was in them saw the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service and the ability to serve that I knew in the suffragette movement.
As for it being a feminist act, anyone who thinks so should study the painting and see the indelible marks of its violence: this attack on a statue of a female goddess seems to me more the work of a misogynist than of a feminist.
Regardless of anything else, the idea that artistic destruction is radical is old, old, old. Richardson did not consider herself a Dada provocateur when she made her move in 1914, but the Dada movement would be born a few years later: soon its funniest member Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and beard on (a reproduction of) the Mona Lisa and said he wanted to use a Rembrandt as an ironing board.
Molodkin wearily treads the same ground as generations of the avant-garde of the past century or so. His vaguely Dadaist art-destroying machine uses acid, just as Gustav Metzger, the inventor of "auto-destructive art," did during a 1961 action on London's South Bank, where he used acid to create abstract paintings that dissolved and burned away as they were created.
Clearly, there can be moral clarity and integrity in rejecting, even to the point of violent destruction, the excesses of modern wealth and consumption, and of art as one of the most absurdly expensive luxuries. Metzger's acid anti-art had very dark roots, in his youth in Nuremberg, when as a Jewish boy, he told me, he watched the annual Nazi Party rallies march through the streets.
But Metzger's moral intensity or Duchamp's humor are pathetically absent from Molodkin's stunt. After more than a century, the Dada rage against art is part of the banal little change of our superficial time. The truth is that we are ready to consider art being staged, inked, battered or dissolved with acid, and we casually give credence to the idea that it is somehow the fault of oil companies or the extradition of Assange, because art itself is now such a big threat. devalued currency.
When a Banksy work of art destroyed itself in an auction room it was funny, but the joke was bigger than we could admit, because Banksy's art is not worth a fraction of a percent of the value it has acquired. He is just one example of the casual pretense we now share that tenth-rate business is actually a hugely important art of our time. There hasn't really been an important street artist since Haring and Basquiat, but we'll pretend anyway. And at the same time we talk lightheartedly about dissolving a Rembrandt with acid.
The truth is staring us in the face. The reason the 21st century seems so interested and perversely drawn to destroying the masterpieces of the past is that we know deep down that we are unable to match those achievements. No artist now makes anything even close to the revolutionary genius of Picasso, so we try to "cancel" him because of facts from biographies we've never read. And now Molodkin proposes or pretends to destroy one of his works with acid.
It is the rage of a decadent period of artistic insignificance against the titans of a past whose energy and originality we cannot bear. We will be happier when all the masterpieces are destroyed and the museums stop shoving our decline in our faces.
