During the George Floyd affair of 2020, protesters defaced, removed, and even decapitated statues of the “colonialists” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Christopher Columbus. Climate activists likewise attack artworks by Monet, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Klimt, and others as symbols of the modernity of Western civilization, which they hold to blame for a catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels. The egregious destruction of P.A. de László’s Arthur James Balfour 1914 canvas in Cambridge England is of a kind. The Palestine Action Group took credit for the ruination, claiming that Balfour’s 1917 Declaration, which supported the establishment of Israel, “began the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by promising the land away — which the British never had the right to do.”
As an art historian, these events reinforce something that we in the field know professionally: that artworks are powerful conveyors of ideas and values. They demonstrate that cultural artifacts are one place where the rubber hits the road, as it were, with respect to how images and ideas relate. In these protests, art’s power to propound ideas and embody values is being used as a weapon to oppose certain events and ideas some find objectionable. Drawing on the significance governments and cultural institutions place on art, their actions essentially cry “You are destroying what we value so we are destroying what you value!”
I want to consider the moral and psychic underpinnings at play in this artistic context. First, why would someone believe they have the right to destroy something that they do not own? Most people never think to do such a thing. One reason could be that the protesters believe they do, in a sense, own these artworks. For either implicitly or explicitly, organizations like UNESCO and the major world museums continually tell us that important cultural works “belong to the world.” Historical monuments become “World Heritage Sites.” Certain artworks become national treasures (consider the various national galleries). Such thinking is a consequence of the globalization of the world.
Do such universalizing idealizations need to be reconsidered in light of recent events? Decidedly not. Cultural history tells us that art is a unique product of universal humanity. But such a claim does not abdicate the notion of private property. Nor does it undermine the jurisprudence that institutionalizes that right in the name of law and order.
The despoilment of art for political purposes is actually an ongoing practice within human history. Conquering generals in the past took cultural artifacts as trophies to commemorate their victories and to demoralize their enemies. Napoleon raided Egypt. The emperor Titus paraded the menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem into Rome. Hitler stole or burned the prodigious art of Europe. Similarly, rulers in antiquity were sometimes subjected to damnatio memoriae (“the condemnation of memory”), such as the Egyptian Akhenaten and the Roman Commodus. Names were erased from inscriptions and statues were destroyed or dismembered as a way to expunge personas from the face of the earth. Such is the power of art.
The despoilment of art today for political purposes has arguably been going on for decades. So much of modern and contemporary art despoils the beauty of art that in the past marked it as noble, precious, and hence worthy of stealing as a trophy. Barnett Newman’s famous 1948 claim that “the impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty” comes starkly to mind here.
Yet, recent protestant assaults on art are different and more violent than stealing an artwork, which is a zero-sum act of appropriation. They are a far more harmful crime than graffiti, which is as much a creative act as it is the vandalization of property (the Balfour assailant spray-painted the image before cutting it up). Certainly such pernicious violence is its purpose and appeal.
It is critical to understand the psychology of why this takes place. Rather than passive objects of aesthetic pleasure, works of art actively embody truth claims. Indeed, the despoilment of fine art for political causes is only a viable act because of this fact. And because of this reality, we can therefore say that such attacks are an attempt to destroy the truth. The question, then, is what truth are protesters seeking to destroy?
In the case of the Balfour canvas, the artwork’s destruction may be seen as a symbol of the larger geo-political debate over Israel. In my view, everyone knows that Israel has the right to defend itself in the face of calls for its annihilation. Self defense is an indisputable and unalienable right of existence. Either obviously or deep down, everyone in the West also knows that Israel does in fact have the right to exist. Despite the protester’s statement, I believe even those who—corrupted by outright lies and half-truths—believe Israel is a “colonialist” nation know that it is a legitimate product of international law. Consequently, to maintain their political stance anti-Israel militants need to destroy anything that reminds them and others of these truths, like the Balfour painting. The relativism of postmodernism has perfectly prepared them for this task.
Moreover, the events of October 7 were so incontrovertibly wicked and irredeemably evil that those politically aligned against Israel need to destroy the truth of its barbarism. They need to do so to justify their anti-Israel position for two reasons. First, inhuman, horrific, and unspeakable atrocities undermine any sympathy the public might have toward their cause.
But more significantly, the murder, beheading, mutilation, and burning of babies, women, and children is something no normal human being can carry on their conscience. So how could anyone support Hamas after their shocking and irredeemable killing spree? How can they live in tacit agreement with the terrorists’ horrific actions without guilt and culpability?
By destroying the truth before their eyes.
Ingesting corrupting lies is the primary way to do so. Another is by lashing out as violently and bombastically as possible against it. Most humans cannot abide the guilt of death that corrupts the soul for too long. Thus, confronted with what the Balfour portrait represents—the right of Israel to exist—the painting’s assailant attacked that truth and the power of art to communicate it. For what it’s worth, the woman destroying the Balfour painting does not look evil to me. She looks like a normal person doing something inexplicably stupid and wrong. Nevertheless, the art community and the general public need to condemn such cultural violence as forcefully and harshly as possible. Such acts are despicably harmful to the humanity to which fine art belongs, to the memory of those so abominably murdered by Hamas, and to the universal grace that Truth confers upon civilization.