Museum Volunteer Accidentally Destroys Art Piece After Mistaking It For A Dirty Mirror And Cleaning It

A volunteer at a museum in Taiwan inadvertently destroyed a contemporary art piece after mistaking it for a dirty mirror and scrubbing it clean.

The artwork itself, titled “Inverted Syntax-16”, was simply a dust-covered mirror sitting on a plain wooden board, and had accumulated four decades of dust as an integral element of what made it ‘art’. Stick with me here…

The artist, Chen Sung-chih, says the dusty mirror with the deliberate smudge in the middle symbolises the “distorted self-awareness of the middle class”.

I guess the volunteer failed to recognise the artistic merit in all this because all he saw was a dusty mirror, and so naturally began wiping it clean.

Staff at the Keelung Museum of Art attempted to stop the cleaning once they realised what was happening, but ‘significant damage’ had already been done to the installation. The volunteer had removed most of the dust that had gathered over 40 years, fundamentally changing the artwork entirely.

Before:

And after:

The Keelung Culture and Tourism Bureau has issued an apology to the artist and may need to provide financial compensation for the incident, although legal expert Tsai Chia-hao suggests that removing dust from an artwork might not qualify as physical property damage.

And so artist Chen Sung-chih may just have to go back to the drawing board and think of something else, because there’s no way he’s going to wait another 40 years for all that dust to accumulate again. Maybe he could take a mirror into a hot shower, get it all steamed up, hang that up instead?

Or maybe he could recognise that even a museum volunteer wiping a dusty mirror clean is in itself an artistic act (unfortunately). In fact that cleaner may have accidentally added a whole new layer of symbolism to Chen Sung-chih’s art piece. May as well keep it up at the museum and create a new narrative around it, at this point.

For the ‘bored’ security guard who drew eyes on a £740,000 painting after he was pressured by a group of teenage girls, click HERE. Classic.