Also stuck to Yao’s painting was a speech bubble that said, “No cheese, Gromit. Look at all this cruelty on RSPCA farms!” Animal Rising wrote in its social media post: “Find out why King Charles, patron of the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] should ask them to drop the Assured Scheme”, alongside a link to its website.

The RSPCA Assured Scheme is a program intended to raise welfare standards for farm animals throughout the United Kingdom. According to the RSPCA, farms, abattoirs, hatcheries, and haulers must be assessed and confirmed to have met its standards to remain in operation. A RSPCA Assured sticker is used on products to indicate their high quality.

However the Assured Scheme has faced scrutiny from animal rights activists over the exact criteria used to determine whether a farm passes inspection. Shortly before the vandalism, Animal Rising published an investigation into 45 RSPCA Assured farms, whose operations they described as “indefensible” 

In response to the vandalism, the RSPCA said in a statement: “We cannot condone illegal activity of any kind. Our staff and volunteers work extremely hard rescuing, caring for, and speaking up for animals. Animal Rising’s sustained activity is distracting from our focus on the work that really matters—helping thousands of animals every day.” 

According to the RSPCA, its Assured Scheme is “the best way to help farmed animals right now, while campaigning to change their lives in the future”. The statement added that “concerns about welfare on RSPCA Assured certified farms are taken extremely seriously and RSPCA Assured is acting swiftly to look into these allegations. After receiving the footage on Sunday morning, RSPCA Assured has launched an immediate, urgent investigation.”

Philip Mould told The Telegraph that he was “delighted to say there was absolutely no damage” to the portrait after the stickers were peeled off.

The first official portrait of King Charles III since his coronation last year, Yeo’s painting was unveiled at Buckingham Palace last month.

The work by artist Andrea Saltini was included in a show installed near a deconsecrated church. Worshippers deemed the display “blasphemous,” and a petition calling for the early closure of the show has garnered more than 30,000 signatories. The hostilities came to a head on Thursday when a masked individual visited the exhibition—located in the Museo Diocesano, the former Church of Sant’Ignazio in Carpi—and cut the painting before spraying it with black paint.  

Saltini, who was present at the exhibition, attempted to stop the vandalism and, amid the struggle, was struck on the neck with the blade. Police were called to the scene, but the vandal had already fled, the Italian newspaper Il Resto del Carlino reported.

Authorities found the discarded weapon and face mask at the museum, as well as a black wig that may have been worn by the vandal in a doorway near the display. Saltini, who was taken to the hospital for treatment, escaped serious harm and was discharged several hours later, with four stitches. 

“[Saltini] asks the entire community of Carpi to reflect on the limits of dissent, the right to criticism, the right to freedom of thought,” Giuseppe Chierici, the artist’s lawyer, said in a statement, as quoted by the Art Newspaper. “Saltini hopes an open and free discussion respecting everyone’s sensitivities and opinions can begin as soon as possible.”

The vandalized painting, titled INRI (2024), is one of about 20 works on canvas created by Saltini currently on display in the show “Gratia Plena.” Each piece in the series presents a twist on a famous religious scene. Paraclito (2024), done in the style of the Pietà, features an astronaut in place of the Virgin Mary.

INRI depicts a lifeless, nude Jesus splayed on his back as Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced his side with a lance during the crucifixion, leans over his crotch. Pro Vita & Famiglia, an anti-abortion organization, has since released a statement condemning the “unjustifiable attack” on Saltini. 

Monsignor Erio Castellucci, archbishop of Modena-Nonantola and bishop of Carpi, also spoke about the vandalism, telling Il Resto del Carlino that “artists have always proposed paths and suggestions of a non-canonical nature.” Anyone is free to be offended by the display, he said, though “the important thing is that dissent becomes an opportunity for dialogue and debate and not for accusation and violence.”

Listed among the National Register of Historic Places, the White River Narrows is best known for its winding rhyolite canyons and vast petroglyph galleries spread across some 4,000 acres just a couple hours north of Las Vegas.

The petroglyphs date back to between roughly 4,000 years ago and the 19th century. They depict highly stylized renderings of animals and people, as well as abstract designs, such as spirals and waves.

“No restitution or repair can undo the damage done by those who would vandalize such a sacred and historical site as the White River Narrows, but this ruling demonstrates that such crimes will not be met with a slap on the wrist,” Jason M. Frierson, the U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, said in a statement.

“Our office will continue to work to ensure that anyone who desecrates sacred tribal lands and artifacts are held accountable,” the judge continued.

The vandalism took palce between September 14, 2019, and October 8, 2019.

Both men were sentenced on November 4. The case was investigated by the Bureau of Land Management, which sought to make examples of the perpetrators, as legal penalties for the vandalism of prehistoric sites have not often been enforced.

After pleading guilty earlier this year in June to a misdemeanor conspiracy charge and a felony violation, Jonathon Pavon was sentenced to a year and one day in prison. Pavon spray painted a roughly 20-foot-long tag of his name “Cluer” onto a rock panel.

Daniel Plata was sentenced to 4 months in prison and 8 months in at-home confinement for painting smaller tags of his name “Velor” throughout the site.

The painting, titled Three Figures (1932–34), was on loan to the Yeltsin Center from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery and valued at 75 million rubles ($1.2 million).

News of the vandalism broke when visitors alerted gallery staff of two crude eyes drawn on the painting’s faceless figures in ballpoint pen. A police investigation revealed the culprit as 64-year-old Aleksandr Vasiliev, a security guard employed by a private company. It was his first day on the job.

The Yeltsin Center filed a complaint with the police, but Yekaterinburg’s ministry of internal affairs at first declined to press charges against Vasiliev, as the damage was considered “insignificant.” The painting was restored and has since been returned to the State Tretyakov.

Vasiliev’s life story has also emerged: he is a decorated veteran of the Afghan and Chechen wars, in which he suffered physical and physiological injuries. He was also struggling mentally with the death of his wife and the murder of his son. In an interview with Russian news site E1, he said he believed the 20th-century work by Leporskaya was a “children’s drawing” and claimed he was goaded by teenagers to deface it.

“I’m a fool, what have I done,” he said.

The State Tretyakov has refused to petition for the charges against Vasiliev to be dropped. On August 15, Vasiliev’s lawyer, Aleskei Bushmakov, shared a letter on his Facebook page that he sent to Zelfira Tregulova, the general director of the Tretyakov Gallery.

He wrote that “taking into account the circumstances of the criminal case, the damage inflicted to the painting Three Figures” and “the high level of public attention in connection with the incident,” the museum considered closing the case “via reconciliation” but ultimately decided that it “does not regard it as possible to take such an appeal to the magistrate.”

In what appeared to be video shot immediately following the incident, a person dressed as a woman who was seated in a wheelchair is escorted out of the museum by security guards. The suspect, who has since been identified as a 36-year-old man, was reportedly arrested and placed under psychiatric care.

“There are people who are destroying the Earth,” the man says in the video, speaking in French. “All artists, think about the Earth. That’s why I did this. Think of the planet.”

A spokesperson for the Louvre said that the museum had filed a complaint with investigators regarding the man who threw the cake.

“The museum salutes the professionalism of its agents who reacted immediately during this incident,” the museum said in a statement.

The Mona Lisa is one of the Louvre’s—and the world’s—most widely-seen artworks. Before the pandemic, it attracted as many as 30,000 people per day, according to officials at the Paris museum.

There have been attempts periodically to vandalize the Leonardo painting, sometimes in protest of various issues. In 1974, when the painting traveled temporarily to the National Art Museum in Tokyo, a woman spray-painted the Mona Lisa in an attempt to highlight the institution’s policies for disabled visitors. In 2009, a Russian woman threw a teacup at the painting. The Mona Lisa was not damaged on either occasion.

There have also been attempts to steal the Mona Lisa, most notably in 1911, when an Italian nationalist successfully removed it from the Louvre, only to be apprehended trying to sell it to a Florentine dealer.

In a prior post, the Qatar Museums said the vandalism took place on December 28 and that an unspecified number of people had been apprehended in connection with them. Since the vandalism, the institution has undertaken a cleaning effort for the work to rid it of scratches and graffiti.

“Over the last 2 months, security have patrolled the area and are reporting incidents to the police,” the Qatar Museums wrote on Wednesday. “Vandalism of all kinds is a crime punishable by law, and Qatar Museums emphasises our collective social responsibility to preserve public art.”

East West/West East was commissioned by the Qatari royal family, and it features a set of monolith-like steel plates arranged across a half-mile stretch. Those plates are of varying heights, with the tallest one rising 55 feet into the air.

Serra’s sculpture—among the largest ones that the Minimalist sculptor has ever produced—has been the subject of vandalism on at least one other occasion. In 2020, the Qatar Museums said that East West/West East was “severely and deliberately damaged” by vandals. A campaign to support the protection of public works in Qatar was launched months later that involved the addition of surveillance systems to monitor the area around the Serra commission.

1OO Years Ago

October 31, 1914

London art lovers have drawn up a protest against the acts of vandalism committed in Belgium by the German soldiers, a copy of which has been sent to the American ambassador with a request that it may be brought to the notice of the President of the United States. This document, which has been signed by the most eminent names among our collectors, critics and experts and by the Directors and Principals of practically all our national museums and galleries points out that “the splendid monuments of the Middle Ages which have met with annihilation, are the inheritance of the whole world and that it is the duty of all civilized communities to preserve them for the benefit and instruction of posterity.”

75 Years Ago

October 7, 1939

Can art survive? Can its fundamentals—free creative activity and untrammeled aesthetic experience—endure the terrible, all-affecting struggle which may only euphemistically be called a “European” war? If to ask that now seems premature or perhaps disproportionate to greater issues, it must forthwith be emphasized that such are the very imponderables at stake. The war just begun is but a physical extension of the war against the spirit and intellect which has been brutally waged for the last years, even decades, by the same aggressors upon whose heads is the carnage of today’s battlefields and bombardments. With the same contempt for a civilized ethic and the right of the individual now manifested in Hitler’s deliberate provocation of the slaughter and in Stalin’s cold-blooded coöperation in its extension, the Nazi and Communist states have, from the first moments of their respective being, savagely attacked and suppressed the artistic and, in fact, the entire cultural basis of Western civilization. Of these crimes committed against art in the name of the perverse, lying ideologies of National Socialism and National Communism we know to expect no quarter in the, we pray remote, event of their victory. In a world ruled by Hitler and Stalin, the only art that could survive would be the ordained posters and effigies propagandizing their dictatorship of the rabble, and a handful of other objects too impotent and innocuous to offend those rulers, triumphant over all other creative efforts of the past and present which would probably be consigned to the pyres for which the burning libraries of Germany have already set the example.

5O Years Ago

October 1964

Obviously, power in art is not like that in a nation or in big business. A picture never changed the price of eggs. But a picture can change men’s dreams; and pictures may in time clarify men’s values. The power of the artist is precisely the influence he wields over the fantasies of his public. Its measure lies not only in the magnitude of this influence, but in its quality as well. Picasso competes with Walt Disney who in turn competes with “Mary Worth.” As it is involved in quality, art is a moral act. The artist usually sets out only to be good at his work, but once he recognizes the nature of his acts, his obligation is to serve that nature well, and perhaps in ways which can be confused with practices of hustlers and fakes. When the New is hard to separate from the pseudo-New, motives and results are obscure; but in the absence of standards beyond “Each to His Own,” the best must contend on the same field with the worst. The effectiveness of an artists’ vision becomes largely a matter of his insights balanced by his responsibility to them as Value. Practically, this means defending them against other values that may be more immediately compelling; it also means attending to their future. An artist’s work, as Rothko and Still have warned, may be misused, perverted, and watered down when it is taken up by the community he has asked to buy it. No artist can assure his success any more than he can control the public’s reception of his vision.

25 Years Ago

October 1989

When Christina Orr-Cahall, the director of Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, canceled its retrospective of the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs last June, she expressed the hope that her decision would stimulate serious reflection about what is art and what is not.

Senator Jesse Helms’s subsequent proposal to bar federal support for the “obscene or indecent” art reflected thus on obscenity and the people who create it: ‘the work of weird, crude minds” and “ugly, nasty things on the men’s room wall.”

Mapplethorpe, in an ARTnews interview published last Decemeber, was more philosophical. “I’m not afraid of words,” he said. “ ‘Pornography’ is fine with me. If it’s good it transcends what it is.”

We asked artists, museum directors, writers, and politicians, among others, three fundamental questions: What constitutes pornography? When is it art and when is it obscenity? Where do you draw the line?

John Baldessari, Artist:
1. What constitutes pornography?
Depiction of around-the-clock extremely athletic sex in countless positions employing all the body orifices and functions. The intended effect is to be “dirty,” boggle the mind, and provide sexual arousal! It should also promote guilt, embarrassment, eye popping, tongue clucking, raised eyebrows, and head wagging. No one should see you experiencing it and you should feel naive and out of it. Inwardly a voice should say, “I knew it. I knew it. I knew people did things like this!” …

2. When is it art?
Not often and only when it goes beyond pornography and I wish I had thought of it.

3. When is it obscene?
When it offends me.

4. Where do you draw the line?
At boredom, and if it’s not boring then it’s probably Art.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 128.

Vandals sprayed “Vermin” and “Scum, you are devils” over works by Alisa Zrazhevskaya and Alexander Dorokhov at the Sakharov Museum.

COURTESY SAKHAROV MUSEUM AND PUBLIC CENTER, MOSCOW

In January a gang of vandals wearing camouflage gear invaded the S.P.A.S. Gallery in St. Petersburg and splattered paint and ink over an exhibition of Oleg Yanushevsky’s constructions, called “Contemporary Icons.” Yanushevsky’s ironic message—that President George W. Bush, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other political and pop-culture celebrities were the modern equivalents of holy figures—was considered an insult to the Russian Orthodox Church and to the sensibilities of believers. Although the works were destroyed and the gallery seriously damaged, the St. Petersburg prosecutor refused even to investigate the vandalism.

A similar incident in Moscow, a year earlier, had more serious consequences. In January 2003, a gang of Russian Orthodox activists destroyed an exhibition in the Sakharov Museum and Public Center called “Caution! Religion.” Last December two Sakharov Museum officials and three of the exhibition organizers were charged by the state prosecutor with inciting religious hatred. They face prison terms of up to five years. The vandals, meanwhile, were hailed by church officials as heroes and martyrs, and all criminal charges against them were dismissed.

These alarming events in the art world have taken place against a background of rising nationalism and Orthodox assertiveness. The Russian Orthodox Church has acquired enormous political clout in recent years, and few politicians will risk offending it. The Sakharov Museum exhibition was subjected to a vituperative media campaign, and the matter was almost immediately taken up in the Duma, where nationalist deputies vied with each other to denounce the sacrilegious artists and laud the vandals.

In February 2003, the Duma passed a decree stating that the 1999 exhibition’s purpose had been to incite religious hatred and to insult the feelings of believers and the Orthodox Church. The state prosecutor was ordered to take action against the organizers, with 265 of 267 deputies present approving the measure. Sergei Yushenkov, leader of the Liberal Russia party and one of the two who voted against the measure, mounted the podium and stated sadly, “We are witnessing the origin of a totalitarian state led by the Orthodox Church.” (Yushenkov was murdered in Moscow a few weeks later. Four men were convicted of his murder in March.)

In April 2003, the Duma voted to toughen the law against inciting religious hatred by adding prison terms of up to five years for offenders. This was a direct reaction to the Sakharov Museum show. The law was invoked for the first time against Ter-Oganyan. It has never been used against anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups, which operate undisturbed.

“It’s a tragic situation,” Elena Bonner told ARTnews in a telephone interview from Boston, where she lives part of the time. Bonner, the widow of Nobel Prize–winning physicist and famous dissident Andrei Sakharov, is chair of the Sakharov Center, which was founded to educate Russians about their totalitarian past. “The events around the exhibition discredit the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the fatwahcondemning Salman Rushdie to death discredited Islam,” she said. Bonner pointed out that the vandals had come to the museum prepared to be offended, with axes, hammers, and cans of spray paint in their pockets.

The organizers of “Caution! Religion” say that they wanted to attract attention to the new role of religious institutions in Russian life. In his speech at the show’s opening, curator Arutyun Zulumyan, who is now in hiding, called for a careful and respectful treatment of religion, but he also warned of the danger of religious fundamentalism, both Muslim and Russian Orthodox, and of the identification of the state with religion.

The 40 participants included artists from the United States, Japan, and Cuba, as well as Russia. One of the works was Russian-born American artist Alexander Kosolapov’s image of Christ on a Coca-Cola advertisement along with the words “Coca-Cola. This is my blood.” The face of Christ was obliterated. “As the owner of the artwork, I’m upset,” Kosolapov told ARTnewsin a phone interview. “As an artist, I’m proud. I think their action adds value to my art—it still provokes such strong feelings.”

The vandals were locked in the gallery by an alert custodian and arrested by the police. But they had influential protectors. All of them were members of the congregation of St. Nicholas in Pyzhi, whose archpriest, Alexander Shargunov, is a well-known radical fundamentalist. A graduate of the Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow and a former translator of poetry, Shargunov abandoned literature for the priesthood and since the early 1980s has been campaigning for the canonization of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, and his family. In 1997 he established a movement called the Social Committee “For the Moral Revival of the Fatherland.” In 2001 the committee’s Web site carried instructions on how to vandalize “immoral” billboards by splashing paint on them, and followers promptly destroyed 150 billboards in Moscow. Now the Social Committee is agitating against the ad campaign for the popular Red Devil Energy Drink, which Shargunov believes promotes Satanism.

A Social Committee activist, Olga Lochagina, filed a complaint accusing the exhibition organizers of “provoking national, racial, and religious hostility.”

A group of well-known nationalist intellectuals, including film director Nikita Mikhalkov, artist Ilya Glazunov, and writers Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Belov, weighed in with a petition calling the exhibition a “new stage of conscious Satanism.” They wrote that Russia’s enemies were bent on humiliating the powerless “Russian people, their objects of worship, and their historic values.”

Who, precisely, were these powerful enemies? The intellectuals didn’t identify them, but the fascist political party Pamyat (Memory) had no hesitation. The appeal posted on the party Web site called on Orthodox Christians to protect “our Lord Jesus Christ” from “Yid-degenerates,” using the most derogatory term for Jews.

After all this, no one was surprised when the vandals were acquitted of having committed any crime. It was a victory for the mob of believers and priests who had surrounded the courthouse throughout the trial, carrying icons and waving crosses.

It is the exhibition organizers who are likely to suffer. The investigator appointed by the prosecutor, Yuri Tsvetkov, looking for expert testimony that would confirm the guilt of the accused, consulted art historians at the State Center for Contemporary Art, but the experts didn’t find the artworks blasphemous. The relentless Lochagina, who had filed the original complaint, promptly filed another, against the art historians for providing what she called “false” expertise.

Tsvetkov looked elsewhere. He lined up another group of art historians and added a psychologist, a sociologist, and an ethnographer for scientific reinforcement. In November they presented their conclusions—nearly a hundred pages of expertise.

This time they provided the opinions Tsvetkov was looking for. All of them agreed that the exhibition had incited hatred. Natalia Markova, the sociologist, could hardly suppress her contempt for contemporary art, using such phrases in her expertise as the “sticky spiderweb of postmodernism.”

In December 2003, Sakharov Museum director Yuri Samodurov was charged with actions “leading to the provocation of hatred and enmity.” If he is found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to five years in prison. Church officials are not calling for that harsh a penalty. In March the Moscow Patriarchy’s External Relations Department issued a statement that surprised everyone. It asserted, in effect, that the Sakharov Museum exhibition organizers had committed an administrative rather than a criminal offense. The difference is that administrative offenses are punished, at most, by fines, not by prison terms.

Samodurov denies that he intended to offend anyone’s religious feelings and said that his freedom of expression had been violated. “Icons have one meaning when they are in a church,” he said in a press conference at the Sakharov Museum, “and a completely different meaning when they’re hanging in an exhibition hall.”

The Moscow journalist Aleksandr Averushkin titled his article on the Web site atheist.ru about the attack on the Sakharov Museum show “Orthodox Bulldozer,” referring to the infamous “bulldozer exhibition” of 1974, when KGB thugs, with the help of bulldozers, destroyed a show of “unofficial” art in a Moscow park.

Ironically, not long ago, during Soviet times, artists were imprisoned for depicting religious themes.

Anna Alchuk, an artist who participated in “Caution! Religion” and was later charged with conspiracy, told ARTnewsfrom Moscow that she had met Samodurov, with whom she was accused of conspiring, for the first time at the exhibition opening. She said she had read all 14 volumes of evidence collected by the prosecutor, and that 11 volumes consisted entirely of letters from “working people” expressing their outrage at the show and demanding that the artists be punished. Almost none of the writers had seen the exhibition—most had signed form letters—but they accused the artists of such sins as torturing Christ. “If this case actually goes to court,” Alchuk commented, “we will see a real theater of the absurd.”

Konstantin Akinsha is a contributing editor ofARTnews.

This article has been abridged for the Web site.