O V E R V I E W: October 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8325665.stm
What makes an otherwise stupid act of vandalism interesting is the reason given in justification.
There is a story about a Chinese professor living in exile in the UK who visited Ely Cathedral. On walking into the starkly beautiful Lady Chapel he said "Ah, I see you've had a Cultural Revolution of your own."
He was referring to the dozens of medieval sculptures of saints, mutilated during the 16th-Century Reformation. The violence directed at art and culture reminded him of China in the 1960s.
So what was behind the furious destruction of thousands of sacred works of art in Britain by the Protestant destroyers of images?
"It was the dismantling of what they saw as the great deception of Catholicism," says Eamonn Duffy, Cambridge Professor of the History of Christianity.
"Iconoclasm is a complicated thing psychologically and the reformers often targeted the eyes, the mouths, the ears as a way of silencing and blinding empty idols. In England in particular, reformers saw artworks as substituting false gods for the true God. You could argue English art never recovered," he adds.
*
Her complaint, that the country cared more for a work of art than for a suffering human being (Mrs Pankhurst) has interesting echoes in possibly the most famous act of vandalism of recent years, the destruction by the Taliban in 2001 of the huge Afghan sculptures known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
"That winter there was a famine, the second year of drought, there wasn't enough aid, the gaps between the Taliban and the west just grew and grew," says the BBC correspondent David Loyn.
"International aid agencies said they would pay to look after the buddhas, put money into the area and it had the opposite effect. The Taliban said 'you care more about this history than about the Afghan people so we'll destroy them'."
The dynamiting in Bamiyan was meant to be heard round the world.
*
Mr Pinoncelli was so annoyed at how a once radical work of art had become institutionalised, that he attacked it.
"I made it fresh and new, I created something new of which Duchamp would have approved, he'd have said 'Bravo!'"
Mr Pinoncelli narrowly avoided three months in jail and a fine of 400,000 euros (£368,566). Not, he says, for being a vandal, but for causing a scandal.