vandalism

Unethical Quote Of The Month (and most idiotic, too!): Two Unnamed American Tourists

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

“We did not imagine it was something so serious!”

––One of two young California women, ages 21 and 25 , after being arrested by Roman authorities for carving their initials “J” and “N” about four inches high into a wall of the Colosseum.

Get this guy a ticket to Rome. I've got a little job for him....

Get this guy a ticket to Rome. I’ve got a little job for him….

Naturally, as is the current practice among morons everywhere, they posed for a selfie with their “artwork.”

Well, you have to sympathize with them: why would anyone get upset over a couple of letters  carved into a 2,085-year-old irreplaceable iconic architectural structure?

I find myself unable to discern the upbringing, education and cultural conditioning that would produce two adults from our nation capable of such a pointless, stupid, destructive act against history, art and civilization.

I am similarly incapable of arriving at an appropriate punishment that recognizes the enormity of their crime and their proven worthlessness to society that does not resemble the screenplay of “Saw.”

Would it be too cruel to pass a law that allows the U.S. to just revoke the citizenship of people like this?

Ethics Quiz: Smashing The “Million Dollar Vase”

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Miami performance artist Maximo Caminero walked into the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, entered a special exhibit of sixteen ancient Chinese vases painted over in bright colors by celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, picked up one of them, and immediately after a security guard instructed him not to touch the exhibit, allowed the vase to fall from his hands, shattering into bits. Some strange and interesting details of the incident:

  • He did not say “Oopsie!”
  • In fact, he admitted that smashing the pottery was intentional, and was his protest against in support of local artists like himself whose work is not exhibited at the museum while the art of international artists like Weiwei is.
  • The painted vase the 51-year-old artist destroyed is said to be valued at a million dollars. Each of vases used in the exhibit  are about 2,000 years old, dating back to China’s Han Dynasty. The artist often uses ancient  artifacts in his work, and has drawn criticism that his art consists of  defacing the original work or another artist.
  • Caminero says he thought the vases were cheap pottery purchased at Home Depot, and never suspected that they were so old or valuable. (And yet he still didn’t say “Oopsie!” Or “Doh!”
  • The museum HAS exhibited local artists.
  • He broke the vase directly in front of a series of larger-than-life photos of  Weiwei dropping and destroying another Han Dynasty vase.
  • He says that he interpreted the photos as a fellow artist’s provocative statement, encouraging him to break the vase.
  • Caminero was charged with criminal mischief, which is not a trivial charge. At very least, he would be required to pay for the destroyed item.
  • The news reports say that the museum is assisting police in the investigation. What investigation? The entire episode on video.

No, you can’t make this stuff up.

And our Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz is this:

Should the justice system treat Caminero’s act  more leniently than any other act of deliberate vandalism resulting in the destruction of a million dollars worth of property?

To me, the answer is a resounding “no”:

  • The fact that the vandalism is a protest? It doesn’t matter why he destroyed the vase. It wouldn’t mitigate the crime even if he had something legitimate to protest, which he did not.
  • The fact that he didn’t mean to break a a million dollar vase, just a cheap one? Too bad. You break it, you’ve bought it.
  • The fact that the photo display behind him showed the artist doing exactly the same thing? Completely irrelevant. The artist was breaking his own vase.
  • The fact that the art that Caminero was destroying was itself created by a destructive act? Oh, there are a number of bad rationalizations he can use in his defense, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he uses them all. The protest was performance art, and punishing it severely infringes on free artistic expression! Punishing him is the ultimate hypocrisy, as he was calling attention to Weiwei’s own vandalism! He started it! Tit for Tat! It’s for a good cause! All ethically invalid.

Someone this stupid, irresponsible, self-centered and reckless is a danger to the community. His next protest may harm more than a vase.

I hope they throw the book at him.

________________________________________

Pointer: CNN

Sources: Miami Herald, C News

Forgetting The Unwritten Boy Scout Law: “A Scout Is Not A Destructive Idiot”

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

David Hall, Glenn Taylor and his son—the first two are scoutmasters—face felony arrests after posting video, taken by Taylor’s son, of the two men destroying a 200 million-year-old rock formation at Goblin Valley State Park last week. They knock over the rock, high-five each other, cackle with joy, and then say—and this is now their defense—that a child could have been killed if the rock fell on its own. Moe, or perhaps it is Curley, also says, perhaps more significantly, “We have modified Goblin Valley!”

Some observations: Continue reading →

A Damning Role Model For Wisconsin’s Public Union Protests

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Fair game for Wisconsin's public unions

The ethical line between Fred Phelps’ anti-gay protesters who disrupt the funerals of  soldiers killed in action, and the self-righteous union protesters opposing Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker’s budget balancing efforts has thinned to the vanishing point.

On Friday, Walker visited the Messmer Catholic Preparatory School in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, to read to third-graders. The third-graders have no political agenda, but 100 protesters felt it was appropriate to disrupt a special day for school children to show their hatred for the governor.
Just as the Westboro Baptist Church feels that its homophobic crusade justifies interfering with military families’ private grief, Wisconsin’s ethically tone-deaf unions feel that innocent student are appropriate collateral damage in their quest to hold on to their privileged status among Wisconsin workers, and elections, laws, deficits and common sense be damned. How especially cynical of the teachers unions, to disrupt the experience of Catholic school students, who, apparently, don’t count. Tell us again, you dedicated teachers, how it’s “all for the children.” Continue reading →

Ethics Hero and Artistic Champion: Stephen Sondheim, Defending “Porgy and Bess”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Steve has your back, George.

I read with horror last week that the Gershwin estate, lured by the temptation of an increased revenue stream from the works of their more talented forebears, have agreed to allow director Diane Paulus and the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to mess with ( that is, “improve”) “Porgy and Bess,” the classic 1935 opera that is one of the towering works in the history of American musical theater. This is, of course, vandalism in the name of ego and commerce, and a full-fledged assault on the masterpiece of not one but four great artists: the Gershwins, George and Ira, and the Heywards, Dorothy and DuBose, who wrote the novel and the play the opera was based on.  It is also stunning disrespect and abuse of power, with the living director and adapter wielding the power of celebrity and influence, and the dead artists retaining no power at all (being dead), having unwisely entrusted the protection of their legacies to greedy and tasteless relatives all too willing to sell out their kin for thirty pieces of silver.  Now, as the New York Times reported, the creators of the New Improved Porgy and Bess are readying new scenes, jazzed up dialogue, back-stories for the characters and an upbeat ending.    

This, as you might imagine, struck to the core of my work as an ethicist and in my position as the co-founder and artistic director of a  professional theater devoted to classic 20th Century stage works. I began to prepare a post on the rape of “Porgy and Bess,” but was distracted by other matters, and didn’t get the piece finished.

That was lucky. I should have remembered that Stephen Sondheim, the only musical theater artist alive who can claim the right to be mentioned in the same breath as George Gershwin, had extolled “Porgy and Bess” as the very greatest American musical in his autobiographical work, “Finishing the Hat.”  Needless to say, Sondheim is an authority on these matters, and also an artist who can appreciate what Paulus and Parks are doing to his colleague, peer and fellow geniuses, the Gershwins. On top of that, he has the wit and rhetorical skills to defend the rights of artists and dissect the rationalizations of vandals like few others.

And he did. John Glass of Drama Urge kindly alerted me that Sondheim has written a letter to the New York Times explaining…not arguing, because there is no argument…why the new “Porgy and Bess” is wrong.  Here it is; you just can’t do it better than this: Continue reading →

Unethical Website: Hillbuzz

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Hillbuzz is the right wing website leading the charge to get Bristol Palin, who can’t dance a lick, voted as the best celebrity dancer on TV’s  “Dancing With The Stars” because, illogically enough, the site’s operators like her mother. Makes sense to me! Actually, it only makes sense in that I am familiar with how self-absorbed political fanatics on the Right and Left think, which is often inherently unethical. In this case, Hillbuzz thinks it’s reasonable to louse up the fun of a dancing competition and turn it into an expression of Tea Party power. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“Passivity cloaked in tolerance results in nothing being done.”

—-National Public Radio Correspondent Megan Williams, reporting on how Italians are apathetic regarding the ugly graffiti marring virtually every public building, including churches, in Rome.

Tolerance as a virtue receives too much unqualified praise.. Often what passes for tolerance is really ethical negligence and laziness, or, as in Rome, apathy. Some things do not deserve toleration, and tolerating what should be intolerable is no virtue at all.