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The glittering collage contained pornographic magazine clippings and hunks of resin-coated elephant dung, which media outlets erroneously reported was “splattered” across the piece. When the show hit the Brooklyn Museum two years later, it was “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a Madonna by Chris Ofili that earned the most scorn. It’s hardly shocking that an exhibition called “Sensation” caused a stir, but that’s just what happened when it opened in London in 1997 with a number of controversial works by the so-called Young British Artists: Marcus Harvey’s painting of killer Myra Hindley, Damien Hirst’s shark-in-formaldehyde sculpture, a installation by Tracey Emin titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963–1995),” and Marc Quinn’s self portrait sculpture made of blood. Chris Ofili, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” 1996 Either way, his provocative body of work has inspired other acts of destruction-like when a visitor to a Miami exhibition of Ai’s work smashed a painted vessel in an illegal act of protest that mirrored the Ai’s own.ġ0. The willful desecration of an historic artifact was decried as unethical by some, to which the artist replied by quoting Mao Zedong, “the only way of building a new world is by destroying the old one.” It’s an idea Ai returns to, painting a similar vessel with the Coca Cola logo or bright candy colors as people debate whether he’s using genuine antiquities or fakes. Not only did the vessel have considerable monetary value (Ai reportedly paid several hundred thousand dollars for it), but it was also a potent symbol of Chinese history. In 1995 the artist nodded to Duchamp with “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a piece he called a “cultural readymade.” As the title implies, the work consisted of dropping, and thus destroying, a 2,000-year-old ceremonial urn. Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995Ĭhinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is one of art’s most provocative figures, and his practice often calls into question ideas of value and consumption. Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Imagesĩ. As the distance from the war has grown, criticism of the memorial has faded. Ultimately it came down to a compromise, when a runner-up entry in the competition featuring three soldiers was added nearby to complete the tribute (a flag and Women’s Memorial were also added later). But Lin advocated for her vision, testifying before Congress about the intention behind the work. One veteran called the design a “black gash of shame,” and 27 Republican congressmen wrote to President Ronald Reagan demanding the design not be built. While the proposed design fit all the requirements, including the incorporation of 58,000 names of soldiers who never returned from the war, its minimalist, understated form-two black granite slabs that rise out of the earth in a “V,” like a “wound that is closed and healing,” Lin has said-was immediately subject to political debate by those who felt it didn’t properly heroize the soldiers it honors. Her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was chosen by a blind jury, who had no idea the winning designer was an architecture student. Maya Lin was only 21 when she won the commission that would launch her career-and a national debate. Maya Lin, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” completed 1982
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One person not particularly impressed was de Kooning himself, who later told a reporter he initially found the idea “corny,” and who some say resented that such an intimate interaction between artists had been shared with the public.Ĩ. It took about a decade for word of the piece to spread, when it was met with a mix of wonder (Was this a young genius usurping the master?) and disgust (Is it vandalism?). So he called upon the most revered modern artist of the day, the mercurial abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, who, after some convincing, gave the younger artist a drawing with a mix of grease pencil art and charcoal that took Rauschenberg two months to erase. “When I just erased my own drawings, it wasn’t art yet,” Rauschenberg told SFMoMA in 1999. But in the case of the 1953 drawing, the artist decided the original artwork must be important on its own. In some ways, Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning” presaged Banksy’s self-destructing painting. Robert Rauschenberg, “Erased De Kooning," 1953 Photo by Ben Blackwell/Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/San Francisco Museum of Modern Artĥ.