First we have to worry about the teabaggers, now the teacuppers too? On August 2 a Russian woman described by police as "angry," "unhinged," and "deranged" threw a teacup at the Mona Lisa (the actual one). Fear not, art lovers: as Agence France Presse reminds us, Mona Lisa lives behind bullet-proof glass. Apparently the glass was scratched, but Our Lady was left unscathed.
The police--and the headline writers --seemed more amused by the incident than anything else. The woman, remanded into the custody (and, one hopes, the care) of a psychiatric hospital, was simply mentally ill. And she may well be. But iconoclasm isn't always crazy - at least not to those who do the attacking. We should be interested in why she did what she did. Or, rather, why she thinks she did it.
One of my favorite books, David Freedberg's The Power of Images, devotes a chapter to iconoclasm. He takes us back to Exodus, of course, and to Judeo-Christian anxieties about idols. But he also explores cases like the teacupper's, in an attempt to understand why people attack paintings and what it says about them -- and about the image itself. What motivates the attackers? What logics, though foreign to us, animate their thinking? After working his way through countless examples of media coverage of iconoclastic acts in museums, Freedberg asks us to think about these seemingly "unhinged" (and illegal) acts as simply one of any number of responses to art. While we (and the police) might, as Freedberg puts it, declare "the assailant deranged and beyond the pale," we,"on the other hand, are healthy. We are complacent in our self-control and in our love of art." In other words, we are better than that.
But are we? If we let ourselves take this woman's iconoclasm seriously - if we choose to see this as simply one more (admittedly unusual) way to interact with the Mona Lisa, then we might want to ask a few more questions: What prompted her to pull a teacup from her bag, not to mention to put a teacup in her bag and bring it to the Louvre in the first place? And why a teacup? Why not a mug or a martini glass, two other objects that likely would shatter just as satisfactorily? Did the assailant have in mind a tea party of sorts, a civilized meeting among lady friends? Or did she just want to wipe that silly smile from ML's face once and for all? Finally, those of us who wander in big fancy museums - bumping around with those audio tour headphones, looking but not really seeing - might want to ask ourselves about our own responses to art. Are we any better?