The security at the National Gallery in London gets more oppressive each time I visit. Now, there are new airport style scanning gates and extra searches: I recently saw someone’s art materials apparently being confiscated on entry. It seems heavy handed until you remember that last autumn Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, a subtle and complex painting of a naked woman who has her back to us while we can see her thoughtful face in a mirror, was attacked here with hammers. Easy to forget, because attacks on art have become routine. When the Mona Lisa had soup chucked at it recently I wrote a quick piece without even bothering to make my disapproval clear because this is how it goes when the outrageous becomes normal – we learn to accept it with knowing irony.
Now Russian dissident artist Andrei Molodkin is taking it up a notch – or is he? Molodkin claims to be sealing original works of art by Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Andres Serrano and more in a safe designed to destroy them all with acid. Their destruction will be triggered should WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. Serrano, Franko B and others have freely given their own works for the project: Picasso was presumably not asked. But is this art-erasing device real, and are the “masterpieces” being held hostage, which Molodkin refuses to specify, really as special as all that?
