A $20,000 artwork accidentally destroyed by a critic? That's nothing!

I sympathise with the critic who smashed Gabriel Rico’s sheet of glass work. I once knocked a priceless artefact off the director of the Louvre’s desk

Art critics, by our very nature, are prone to taking violently against inanimate objects. Yet we are also given exclusive access to precious masterpieces, with minimal supervision. Now the inevitable has happened. Art critic Avelina Lésper has destroyed a $20,000 piece by Gabriel Rico at an art fair in Mexico City. She says the obliteration was accidental – but also confesses that she disliked the work, a sheet of glass with a variety of everyday objects inside it. When she put an empty drink can near it to take a photograph as a critical comment, the whole thing shattered. Lésper is claiming the accident as spooky critical action: “It was like the work heard my comment and felt what I thought of it.”

I have never destroyed art on this scale, although I have no idea where my Gary Hume drawing got to and I let my stick of Tracey Emin rock crumble into dust. But this incident sounds to me more like a professional nightmare come true. Theatre critics don’t sit on the stage and film critics don’t do their reviewing on set. Yet I am regularly allowed into exhibitions before they are open. Quite often there’s still work being done. Cables, ladders and buckets of water may lie around. The opportunities for slapstick are immense. And I’m quite clumsy. I once knocked an exquisite artefact off the director of the Louvre’s desk while interviewing him. He saved it. The experience haunts me whenever I am alone with expensive art. I imagine myself crashing into a Damien Hirst painting and trying, Mr Bean style, to stick the butterfly wings back on before anyone notices. Worse. What if an inexplicable impulse made me pull off those wings on purpose? Not that I would, would I?

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