You break it, you’ve bought it

 By ann summers

Unlike delusional folks who attack artworks for unimaginable reasons, evidently this budding art historian felt the image lacked punch or Chinoiserie, and decided to violate the picture plane among other museum rules. Or had he decided that the connoisseurship was faulty and that to protest this failure of authenticity and scholarship, he decided to test the sublime itself in an academic act of 21st Century performative transgression. An empirical example of new restoration processes: head-butting to test for Rococo hardness. This young follower of the Ash-Can School has a future in selling rock-crushers, or maybe just soda can recycling machines.

A 12-year-old boy had the worst museum visit ever this past Sunday, at Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park. The boy tripped and punched a Paolo Porpora painting valued at $1.5 million as he was trying to keep his balance.

According to Focus Taiwan, the boy was with a guided tour group visiting the exhibition “The Face of Leonardo, Images of a Genius,” which gathers 55 paintings by key artists starting from the Italian Renaissance and going up to the 20th century.

The unfortunate incident was captured by CCTV and the footage first shows the teenager, who is holding a soft drink, admiring the Baroque masterpiece with the rest of the group.

Then, as he follows the group towards the next artwork, the boy looks momentarily back to something or someone outside the camera, loses his balance as he bumps against the platform and rope which are meant to protect the artwork, and hits the paintings as he falls, smashing the beverage container against it.