Ai Weiwei vase destroyed by protester at Miami museum

Officials at Perez Art Museum in Miami have confirmed that a valuable vase by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was destroyed by a visitor in what appeared to be an act of protest.

A museum spokeswoman said the incident occurred Sunday when a local artist, Maximo Caminero, walked into the waterfront museum and picked up one of the vases in an installation of Wei's work titled "Coloured Vases."

A guard asked Caminero to put it down, but instead he threw it to the ground, smashing it, the spokeswoman said.

Caminero, 51, was arrested. Perez Art Museum Miami, which opened in December, published a statement on its website saying that after the vase had been broken, a security team “immediately secured the galleries and the person was apprehended.”

Without mentioning Caminero’s name, the statement said the museum was “working with the authorities in their investigation”.

“Although the museum can’t speak directly to intentions, evidence suggests that this was a premeditated act,” the statement said.

“As an art museum dedicated to celebrating modern and contemporary artists from within our community and around the world, we have the highest respect for freedom of expression, but this destructive act is vandalism and disrespectful to another artist and his work, to Perez Art Museum Miami, and to our community.”

Caminero, a native of the Dominican Republic who has long lived in Miami, told Miami New Times, a weekly newspaper, after his arrest that he had broken the vase to protest what he said was the museum's exclusion of local artists in its exhibits.

Local news reports said he was charged with criminal mischief. Miami police officials would not confirm that Caminero had been charged but said they would address the issue this morning.

Ai has become China's best-known artist and has been under intense pressure from authorities there to curtail his advocacy efforts, which included a lengthy investigation he undertook into shoddy construction that contributed to the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in their classrooms during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

The 56-year-old artist was detained for 81 days in 2011 on tax-evasion charges and remains subject to travel restrictions.

News reports said the destroyed vase was worth $1 million, a figure the museum said was provided by police as an estimate based on previous appraisals of similar works by Ai. An official appraisal of the destroyed work's value is underway, said Alina Sumajin, a spokeswoman for the museum.

Caminero told the Miami New Times that he destroyed the vase “for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here.”

Caminero suggested that he had been inspired by one of Ai’s most famous works, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a series of three photographs, on exhibit here, in which he dispassionately shatters a priceless ancient Chinese vase to make a point about valuation of art and everyday objects as well as the fragility of cultural objects.

The Perez museum’s description of the photographs says the artist dropped the urn, dated between 206 BC and AD 220, “to express the notion that new ideas and values can be produced through iconoclasm.”

“I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest,” Caminero said.

New York Times