What I don’t get about attacking art – other than the actual point of it – is why this crime should be so difficult to foil.
Video footage of the latest stunt shows a couple of mild-looking young men approaching Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of King Charles, getting out the necessary kit, and then plastering an image from Wallace and Gromit over the King’s face. While all this is going on, you can hear gasps and giggles from the other gallery-goers – but no alarms going off, no security guard thundering in to overpower them, not even so much as a disapproving tut.
One gets the sense that the malefactors themselves feel a bit mystified by this inaction. Having been asked to leave by the gallery owner, Philip Mould, they are reported to have waited outside for two hours, perhaps in anticipation of being arrested. But the police never turned up.
Mould is a private gallerist, entitled to handle such irritants however he chooses. The same cannot be said for the British Library, where last month two elderly women reportedly attacked – very, very slowly – the Magna Carta display case. The video of this incident (there is always a video; the last redoubt of the cowardly bystander) is even weirder, not least because of the respectful hush that prevails throughout. As befits a library, I suppose.
There was a beefy security guard right there at the scene, presumably because the most important document in British history is thought to be worth protecting. Yet he seems to have stood and watched as the little old ladies – one of them a vicar, in a dog collar – are said to have pulled a chisel out of a handbag and allegedly hammered it repeatedly into the glass case surrounding Magna Carta. At one point, to be fair, he did get on his walkie-talkie to summon back-up, not wanting to take on such dangerous outlaws alone. But in the video I saw, the only people he seemed to tell off were the bystanders filming the incident.
Did the rules change without us being informed? Is deference to alleged vandals now standard protocol? I can understand why institutions, including the police, might prefer to downplay these stunts, for fear of making things worse. Like parents tiptoeing backwards from an angry teenager, hands aloft, they are afraid of inflaming the righteous, shape-shifting sense of grievance that animates this kind of activism.
But for those of us who cling, wanly, to the idea of a rules-based civic order, such timorousness is alarming. If supposed miscreants of this calibre – a pair of Adrian Moles and their trendy grans – are now considered too forbidding to tackle, who or what will protect us from more serious threats?
The social fabric is a delicate material, woven from multiple layers of trust and inhibition. To feel safe, we need to know that the rules are clear, universally understood and reliably enforced. Most of our impetus to obey the rules is internal, but it can disappear quickly if civilians don’t have faith in institutional enforcement.
A new poll by Neighbourhood Watch has estimated that 28 per cent of crimes went unreported last year, because the victims didn’t think anything would be done. It would be a stretch to pin the blame for this on the British Library, or any of the institutions attacked by apparent middle-class vandals. But it all contributes to a gathering mood of dysfunction – of a social fabric becoming alarmingly frayed.