Art in a Magical Town

In the "magical town" town of Lund, Sweden, four vandals, plus camera crew, broke into the Kulturen Gallery and smashed seven photographs by Andres Serrano in an exhibition called  “The History of Sex." The vandals, allegedly a group of local neo-Nazis, shouted "We don’t support this shit" as they took crowbars and axes to the photographs in the gallery containing the most explicit of the photographs. On Friday night they posted a video of the attack on YouTube, complete with subtitled commentary and a death metal soundtrack.

If these self-appointed (fascists are always self-appointed) preservers of public decency re-enacted a chapter in the history of art: philistine outrage at sexually explicit artworks. Their act was entirely symbolic, since the exhibition reopened the next day, the offending presence of the photographs only circumcised. It's interesting that the vandals didn't simply remove the photographs, as any true defender of public decency would. The defaced photographs remained visible, in shards in the gallery and in the YouTube video.  The fascinated gaze of the museum goer has been replaced by the distracted gaze of the Internet video--still voyeuristic spectatorship, but with the rage of the repressed.