Art Imitating Art?

Above is a photograph of an installation at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) featuring the work of Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei.  The picture was taken at the beginning of an Ai exhibition in December.

If you were to visit the museum now, you might notice that the one of the colored vases on the stand has gone missing.  That is because a Florida artist, Maximo Caminero, smashed it on the floor last week to protest what he believes is the failure of Miami museums to feature the work of local artists.

In fact, Carminero said he was inspired by Ai Weiwei to smash the vase, and it is easy to see why that might be.  Hanging on the wall behind the vases is a photographic triptych called "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn."  The man dropping the 2,000-year-old urn is Ai Weiwei himself.

The colorful vases in the picture's foreground are also Han vases that Ai has "dipped in industrial paints as if they were glazes," according to a PAMM description.  The museum says the works "challenge the viewer to consider questions about the authenticity and the value and meaning of an original work."

In fact, there seems to have been a whole lot of trangressive art action in recent years.

     -- In 2012 a famous Ai Weiwei work, "Coca Cola Urn," was smashed by the art collector who owned it.

     --Jake and Dinos Chapman, contemporary artists, have drawn cartoon characters on Goya etchings that they own.

     -- Last year a man glued a photograph onto a John Constable painting on display at the National Gallery in London.

     -- In 2012, a Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern in London was decorated with permanent-marker graffiti.

But back to Miami.  Carminero, the vase-smashing frustrated artist, was taken into custody and then released on bail.  If prosecuted he may face a prison sentence of up to five years.

Jonathan Jones, an art blogger for British newspaper The Guardian, took a jaundiced view in a column this week on the larger situation.

"So -- smashing art is interesting if an acclaimed global artist does it, and even if an art collector does it.  But the guy who walks into a museum and smashes it is a vandal," Jones wrote.

"Could it be," Jones continues "that smashing masterpieces is never interesting?  That this illegal attack on art exposes the shallowness of the high end of contemporary art, where it's cool to smash Han antiquities or doodle on Goya prints?"

Interesting questions.