The True Victims of Vandalizing Art for Protest

Last September, I attended a dinner party hosted by family friends in Annapolis. The host, an avid traveler from an older family, considered amassing collections part of his life’s work. His were of primarily Venetian blown glass, but also included curiosities from the world’s hidden corners: a diorama molded out of baleen and ivory from an Alaskan village, a carved Egyptian box of unknown age found first in a pyramid, a blowgun and mask that were gifts from a South Seas chief, but he stopped me in front of a simple silver spoon displayed on the wall. “This is the jewel of my collection” he said, “do you know what it is? It’s a spoon from the forge of Paul Revere.” My reaction was immediate and spontaneous: I reached out and touched it. It was still a simple spoon, but somehow, by touching it, I felt midnight rides and redcoats, lanterns and belfry arches, and a shot heard ‘round the world.

The spontaneous urge to touch is correspondent with our experience of beauty and the transcendent. We encounter beauty and transcendence through our senses, most immediately through our sight, especially when the beauty we see is lofty—the Cologne Cathedral, the sunset over Prince William Sound, the sky on a dark night made bright by stars. We cannot hear, touch, taste, or smell a sunset, after all. Music we encounter through our hearing and our sight takes a step back, but it doesn’t disappear; at a classical concert, anonymously-dressed musicians and their instruments aid in our ability to absorb the music by disappearing, for all intents and purposes, or by offering with polished brass and gleaming wood only small glimpses of something more. But when we encounter a particular, beautiful object, our urge to touch it takes over immediately after sight.

In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima says that the first step we take on the ladder of love is to fall in love with one particular beautiful body. But once we recognize what is truly beautiful in the particular, our vision of the beautiful is expanded: we are able to see in other bodies—in nature, in music, art, and knowledge—the features they all share. We become lovers of the beautiful in all its forms. It may be that the love of knowledge—the fifth rung on Diotima’s ladder—is higher than the love of an object and offers a fuller glimpse of the truly transcendent and beautiful, but that does not erase the steps that came before. If we love beauty, the urge to absorb it, to transcend ourselves and become the beautiful, is felt every time we encounter it, whether in a particular human being or when through our studies we gain insight. Proximally and for the most part, we cannot absorb beautiful objects, but we feel the urge. And this urge itself is a part of how we experience beauty and transcendence. 

This urge is most urgent when we are in love with a particular body and at its most diffused when we see something lofty—like a sunset—or when we encounter the beautiful through our other senses, while listening to music or reading, for example. We feel it when we stand before objects of historical significance and before works of art. Visitors at the Louvre are only allowed within several feet of the Mona Lisa, and only after standing in a long line, but just outside the Mona Lisa’s room is Saint John the Baptist, another of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpieces. You can walk right up to it, close enough to see that the brushwork is all but invisible; close enough to touch. And you feel the urge. This closeness makes Saint John the Baptist far more immediate than the Mona Lisa, which is hidden behind glass and at a distance. This immediacy, which we experience when viewing a beautiful object through the urge to reach out and touch, is diffused the further we go from the painting. Seeing it covered by glass diffuses it to a lesser degree than standing at a distance, which diffuses it even less than seeing it on our phones, but at each degree away from immediacy our experience of its beauty is diminished. There’s no substitute for seeing art up close and in person.

So what’s at stake when climate change activists glue themselves to Girl with a Pearl Earring, or throw soup at a Van Gogh? The worst case scenario is unlikely, but consists of private owners pulling their collections from public view or museums greatly restricting access. The first modern museums were private collections, or, when technically public, open only to members of the upper classes after extensive vetting. The general public, they thought, couldn’t be trusted. The Louvre, established during the French Revolution to house the treasures amassed over hundreds of years by the deposed French monarchy, was the first truly public museum, open to anyone. In the democratizing era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberal governments and private philanthropists founded museums with the dual purpose of educating the public in natural history and art and making available to all members of the public exposure to the world’s most beautiful treasures. Climate change activists won’t turn back the clock on oil, but they might hide the world’s great art once again from public view.

But that’s the less likely scenario. It’s more likely that insurance adjusters will insist that priceless works such as Saint John the Baptist are protected, likely by being covered with glass and cordoned off so that visitors are forced to view it at a distance. So it’s the art’s immediacy that’s at stake, and the immediacy is necessary for our experience of the art’s beauty. Take glass and cordoning off far enough and we might as well look at a print or zoom in on our phones. And then, instead of experiencing beauty’s transcendence, we are left cold.