Sometime during the rainy night Saturday, a sharp object passed through at least 30 fabric posters in a traveling art show set up in South Straub Park, along the downtown waterfront. The show, "Coexistence," initiated by a museum in Jerusalem after an international competition, is aimed at promoting tolerance.
The vandals seem to have been tentative at first - a few slits and gashes in posters on the periphery, launched like brief joyrides. The defacement picks up steam deeper into the park, with holes gouged out or sections cut and left flapping in the breeze. On one poster, a racial epithet has been spray-painted. But for that, the damage almost could have been done by natural forces: a high wind or nasty hailstorm.
We know better. These were willful acts and took some time to accomplish. They might have been unplanned; the cuts are all low on the posters, so the perpetrators probably didn't have a ladder. In many instances, blank space has been messed up, leaving messages and images unobscured.
The police are calling it a hate crime because of the epithet (which, oddly, was sprayed on the back of a poster). Whatever the motive, this was nasty, distasteful work.
As destruction of art goes, it's not a seismic event like the attack on Michelangelo's Pieta in 1972 by a deranged man, who smashed off chunks of the marble statue in the Vatican.
With bold, contrasting colors and strong lines, many of the posters in "Coexistence" straddle the border between art and design. Though they please the eye, their primary goal is persuasion. Their quick, immediately grasped visual messages make them function as billboards, though most have a simplicity and elegance that make them more sophisticated than the average roadside advertisement.
Technically, they are photographic reproductions made by taking pictures of original designs created by artists, enlarging and transferring them onto 9- by 15-foot pieces of weatherproof fabric. In other words, these are not one-of-a-kind works of art. They're very replaceable, though at a probable cost of at least $1,000 each.
But "Coexistence" is public art, and the fact that it can be repaired and replaced does nothing to change that fact. Destroying any public art is an affront not only to the artist who created it, but also to the community that makes its existence possible. Damaging art that is visiting us briefly like a valued guest makes it somehow worse.
Left untouched were the quotes below each poster, written by writers and thinkers ranging from existentialist Albert Camus to former Beatle John Lennon. His lyrics ("Imagine . . . a brotherhood of man") are juxtaposed with his widow Yoko Ono's spare, black line drawing of two containers labeled sky and water. What was an innocuous doodle is now scarred by a horizontal slit, granting it a gravitas it previously lacked.
So in their misguided assault, the vandals have actually made the exhibit more compelling and poignant - more people will probably come and see it now that it's been splashed all over the news.
Nor should we make knee-jerk judgments about the moral health of our community. It's tempting, since the exhibit has been in far more volatile places - Sarajevo and Belfast - and far larger places - Zurich and Vienna - without incident. Whether that's because the big cities put the show in highly visible locations while St. Petersburg has it in a small city park that is not well-illuminated when the sun goes down, or whether every other places opted for security and we did not, I don't know.
But should any of that make us feel better?
No. Fine art or not, the work has been compromised on our watch. That something good might come out of something bad doesn't mitigate the bad or excuse those who caused it. It will take more than nips and tucks to patch the rends that have been made in this fabric.
