My two grandchildren are old enough to experience an art museum. Thus, I added a family membership to the wonderful Santa Barbara Museum of Art and one to the fabulous Santa Barbara Historical Museum. That very day I came across an article from a ‘business of the arts’ magazine describing damage caused by kids in museums and liability issues, and further, who pays for restoration. Some museums charge the parents, who are claimed as negligent, some museums don’t. Some insurers pay for damage from museum guests if accidental, some will not. I pulled together ten stories about this issue that I know will make you CRINGE.
Maybe the Sanghai Museum of Glass Isn’t The Place For Kids
In 2016, two parents filmed two kids pulling at a wall sculpture made of delicate glass. The kids climbed the platform. The sculpture, titled Angel is Waiting, appears in the shape of two glistening angel wings. One of the kids broke the bottom of one wing. The artist, Shelly Xue, turned this mishap into a noble (media garnering) gesture. She renamed the artwork Broken Angel, and installed a video from the surveillance cameras of the boys torturing her work of art directly next to the piece on the wall. The story reported in the important magazine Hyperallergic, and went viral.
Five years ago in the same museum of glass, two kids chased each other around the exhibition space. They collided with a display case holding 30,000 pieces of glass which comprised a scale model of Disneyland’s Enchanted Storybook Castle by the Arribus Brothers, Disney Crystal Artists. The boys apologized to museum staff! Bet they felt sorry when they say the Castle in pieces.
In another tragedy, a young boy became intrigued by a work of art created completely out of Legos. He pulled the six-foot sculpture down at a museum in Ningbo, China, one hour after the display opened to the public. The boy, who loved the Fox character from Disney’s Zootopia, apologized for destroying the $15,000 work. The artist accepted the apology. Another gracious move.
Trying to make a carving more eligible, two Norwegian kids attempted to dig a little deeper into the lines of a 5,000 year-old petroglyph on the island of Tro. The glyph, the oldest representation of “skiing,” became the theme of the design for the Olympics years before this destruction. Likewise, a young man on a trip to visit the monuments of Luxor in 2013 thought he’d remind people he “was there.” On the bottom of a 3,500 year-old hieroglyphic, he wrote “Ding Jinhao visited.”
Kids Climbing, hugging, and Pulling
Museum staff who thought large ceramic and stone works of art were “safe” as mounted on their custom made plinths didn’t understand how fast a four year-old can climb. In Southend-on-Sea in England, a display of Roman artifacts contained a 800 year-old child’s coffin of sandstone. For a joke, a child climbed inside. He scared his parents to death, and broke off a chunk.
A young man attempted to climb an ancient stone Native American landmark in Oregon and broke his legs doing so. His friends achieved revenge by toppling the stone column to the ground, shattering the stone.
At Tomahawk Ridge in Overland Park, Kansas, a museum was rented out for a wedding. A young boy, in love with a low to the ground sculpture created in stone by Bill Lyons, Aphrodite di Kansas City, hugged it—and pulled it over. The museum hasn’t decided who will pay for the restoration. Love is love, and is rampant at a wedding. Can we blame the young man for falling in love with Aphrodite?
In 2024, Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel featured huge ceramic jars used to store water and oil in the sixteenth century BCE. A four year-old wanted to see inside and pulled a massive jar close to his face. While he peered inside, it fell over and shattered. The jar, from the Middle Bronze Age, had sustained no damage for 3,500 years.
Safe from little ones on a wall?
Three virtually irreplaceable works, all wall mounted, were damaged, all with exceeding high values.
One, by contemporary modern master Donald Judd created a stylized ladder to nowhere: repeating ledges of blue glass traveling up a white wall to the ceiling, commissioned for the Tate Modern for $10 million. A young girl managed to climb the work like a fun ladder, knocked it off the wall in part, and then got scared at the top. Her parents explained to the guards that their child was “anti-establishment,” and clearly the piece was irresistible to kids. They blamed the museum for tempting their child.
In Taipei in 2015, a work of Baroque art (1600s) hung on the wall behind a rope barrier. A 12 year-old tripped, fell through the rope, and punched a hole through the work. The museum declared the event an accident and the parents are off the hook.
Finally, possibly the most valuable piece damaged by a child is a $56 million Rothko, No. 8: Orange Yellow Maroon, 1960 a large vertical wall mounted work, neither glazed nor varnished. Rothko intended the flat “color fields” to appear intense. At the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, a young man couldn’t resist the color and attempted to “feel” it, scratching the paint layer.
I’m going to be careful when my grandkids visit….