By Patrick F. Cannon

An email I received recently reminded me that the famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei once exhibited a triptych of photographs showing him holding, then dropping and shattering, a 2,000-year-old Han Dynasty urn. When asked about it, he said: “Chairman Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one.” I should mention that his father, a famous poet, suffered during Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution.

            I should also point out that Weiwei (pronounced “way” “way” in case you wondered) owned the vase. The Mao comment was meant to be ironic, but his actual point was to suggest that works like the urn are only valuable because we or someone else says they are. Anyone who keeps track of the contemporary art market knows that the strangest things – Jeff Koon’s metal balloon animals and the duct-taped banana are often cited as examples – sell for inconceivable amounts.

            Assuming I had the tens of millions of dollars that a Koon’s balloon now costs, would I be within my rights to blow it up? Even if I believed, as I do, that it’s more a joke than a work of art? Let me get back to the urn.

            During the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) great advances were made in pottery design and production. The urn was almost certainly thrown by hand on a potter’s wheel, just as today. The man who made it took great care in shaping and finishing it. Did he think he was creating a work of art? Probably not. And he probably would be astonished to find out that it survived 2,000 years until it was destroyed to make a statement about the absurdities of the art market.

            But I think he would also have been saddened. He had created a pot that he hoped would be used with care, and would last a long time, or at least until some clumsy oaf dropped it. He would have thought it inconceivable that a fellow creator would break it on purpose. He might well have wondered why Weiwei didn’t destroy one of his own works.

            So, no matter the intent, I don’t think Weiwei had the right to destroy someone else’s work, even though it was probably only worth a few thousand dollars at most. Of course, much worse has happened to works of art throughout history. In 2001, for example, the Taliban destroyed Afghanistan’s famous Bamiyan Buddhas in their fervor to rid the country of idolatrous images. And in case you’ve forgotten, countless works of religious art were destroyed for the same reason during the Reformation by fervent Protestants.

            War is another destroyer of art. It’s impossible to  know how many great works have fallen victim to it. Thousands were destroyed or lost during World War II, including major works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Holbein, Van Gogh, Raphael, Courbet, Degas, Van Dyck, Durer, Canaletto, and Bellini. Coventry Cathedral is only one of the great buildings destroyed by bombing or shelling. And the famous monastery at Monte Cassino was another victim of “military necessity.”

            A more recent phenomenon is the defacement or destruction of works of art for political reasons. Christopher Columbus wasn’t sufficiently progressive, so let’s take his statues down, deface or even destroy them. We don’t like so and so’s ideas, so let’s shout him down or remove his books from our libraries. Wagner? Wasn’t he a Nazi? And on and on.

            As I have said many times, Jeff Koons is a minor artist, if an artist at all. But I would never think of destroying one of his beflowered puppy dogs, even if I owned it, and it was in my back yard.

The Nan Dynasty potter isn’t around to defend his work, but we are.

Copyright 2025, Patrick F. Cannon