Before we begin, take a look at this act of artistic genius/madness:
The collective gasps on the video as this hero/monster transforms Ai Weiwei's cube of what appears to be painted-ceramic pvc pipes.
From this
Into this:
The man in the video is the infamous art provocateur Vaclav Pisvejc: a failed Czech painter.
And it's no wonder why he failed in the art world.
Just look at these monstrosities:
For pity's sake, just let Picasso's style die already!
Anyway, without much success in the modern art world, Pisvejc has found a new approach to art: provocateur.
Here are some of his past escapades.
When Italy covered a copy of Michelangelo's David with a black shroud to protest the Ukraine war, Pisvejc burned the shroud.
How can you be mad at that?
Another time, he smacked performance artist Marina Abramović upside the head with a portrait he painted of her.
Not familiar with Abramović?
Here's her latest performance piece:
So I totally get Pisvejc's rage.
I'll be honest, the PVC-pipe piece doesn't bother me the way most modern art does. It's not art, but at least it took some skill to make it. So why did Pisvejc break it?
My hypothesis is that he was making a statement about Ai Weiwei himself.
Wei became famous for his piece "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn", in which he drops a priceless, irreplaceable Han Dynasty Urn.
The art work is widely interpreted as … well, this needs a quote because I can't bear to say it in my own words:
[Weiwei] began a lifelong interest in questions regarding the real and the fake, copy versus original, and began to look askance at the unquestioning veneration for anything old.
The brief performance Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn raises many questions, and this accounts for a large part of its fascination. There may be a reference to to the violence of The Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao's statement that the only way to build a new world is to destroy the old one.
I will, however, offer my own interpretation of Pisvejc's recent artistic reworking of Weiwei's piece:
Pisvejc looks askance at Weiwei's ridiculous expression of Mao's new world.
And turns it into garbage.
Boy, was it cathartic.
On the other hand, destroying art — even bad art — isn't the answer.
Heaven knows, we don't want to lump ourselves in with the heathens of Stop Oil Now.
So, while I get it, I still have to be upset about Pisvejc's wanton criminality. The guy should go to prison …
But maybe after he visits a few more modern-art museums.
