Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What’s the Appropriate Punishment for the Art Vandals?
The latest from the “let’s ruin art to make a statement” crowd.
The Johannes Vermeer masterpiece “Girl with a Pearl Earring” on Thursday became the latest artwork targeted by climate activists in a protest at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. The priceless work reportedly was not damaged.
A video posted on Twitter showed one man pouring a can of what appear to be tomatoes over another man who appeared to attempt to glue his head to the world famous painting.
So far, the targeted works of art seem to have survived. However, what if one of these idiots actually destroys a painting, say the Mona Lisa? Would it be too much to ask for the death penalty? If not the death penalty, how about life in prison?
This raises an interesting argument. Life is valuable, and no doubt the life of a climate activist (as despicable as they are) is more valuable than any inanimate object.
Or is it? Can there be some things that are more valuable than a human life? Are there some priceless objects that if lost forever, would be a detriment to humanity?
I’m dying to know your thoughts . . .
Published in General
I think these protests are fitting. It pits cognitively empty narcissism against the inspiration, skill, and depth of great art. Spoiled young wastrels with zero technical grasp of the physics or economics of the climate issue demand that they be praised for a pathetic expression of an ideological fetish. How so very now.
Which is why it’s a suitable punishment for these climate activists when they try to destroy works of art . . .
I’m sufficiently uncouth that my instinct is to apply a baseball (or cricket) bat to the side of the head of each of them.
Yes. It is narcissistic and wicked.
Upon further reflection, these people sound like a villain from a Batman movie. Turn the world upside down for me or I will destroy the world’s most precious works of art!
Literally:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/destruction-of-monte-cassino-1944
Now if these vandals attacked the collection at Muncie Indiana’s Bob Ross museum, there would be no punishment too painful.
Per your link, it was going to have to go anyway. The Germans who invested the place when it was rubble would likely have done so when the tide began to turn against them, but that tide was turned for far fewer American lives.
I agree. But who’s Bob Ross?
Would never happen, because, I bet, those patrons are packing heat.
Send them to work on farms (dairy farms, pig farms, orchards during harvest, working with wheat farmers in the Palouse, etc. – this is just a smattering of what comes to mind in the moment). Put them to very hard labor. Makes me think of crab boats and salmon processors in Alaska, too.
It’s all a dance. They pretend to deface a protected painting with the tacit approval of the museum: how very brave. The museum does nothing because really, their hearts are in the right place; we simply can’t go on with oil, you know. The entire event is created so we can look at their T-shirt messages.
It will stop when people are either roughly marched off to jail – and I mean proper jail, not some Scandinavian extended-stay facility – or the wrong people start seriously defacing works of art that aren’t famous but come from protected groups. Then you’ll see action.
Or when every attempt to engage in this fatuous, narcissistic, fanatical cultism is met with a quick and brusque response by museum patrons who’ve had enough.
When those activists spray food coloring on the macaroni art at a posh school, then we’ll see what the consequences for iconoclasm really are.
Ideally, a sentence of three years on a North Sea oil rig.
Second Prize: ten years living in the kind of third world gaiahole they approve of, with permanent loss of citizenship in any civilized country.
Third prize: five years carrying Greta Thunberg’s luggage and living in close quarters with each other.
Fourth prize: no wireless access or social media for 10 years.
The museum donors need to have a serious conversation with the morally bankrupt staff about their responsibilities.
Exactly right.
Or worse . . . go on a date with Greta . . .
Appropriate punishment would be lots of community service mandatory and paying for the restoration – this includes monuments, churches, public buildings and national treasures.
Have any of these acts of vandalism ever brought anyone around to the side of the vandals? Has anyone ever decided to trade in their automobile for a bicycle because their awareness was raised by these hooligans? Has anyone ever stopped eating meat because of the publicity stunts and/or trespassing/vandalism done by PETA?
Ship them off to North Korea?