Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' from the 2020 exhibition 'Rothko & Me’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam
The headline: Child Scratches Rothko Painting Worth $56 Million in 'Unguarded Moment' at Museum.
An unguarded moment: those are the moments we really say what we think.
This kid didn’t like the Rothko. Neither do I. This Rothko was the worst thing he saw all week, and he revolted.
A small act of rebellion. With a fingernail.
This Rothko claims to move my soul.
But it leaves me cold.
(The child considered all angles.)
They made a temple to this Rothko. Ok, it’s an interfaith chapel, but a holy place, nonetheless. They’re always trying to cram transcendent moments of Rothko down our throats.
The child was Dutch. Of course. The Netherlands are so progressive and the guard knew in this critical moment to step away.
To allow the child, this burgeoning art critic—or is he artist?—the space to express the innermost feeling elicited by Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8.
The guard saw the message writ clear and bright as day in the child’s eye, and accordingly, he stepped into the shadows. Or perhaps around the corner, perhaps dodged into a bathroom stall, or eyes averted to another work—perhaps to Anne Wenzel’s House of Fools, a decadent, clumpy bust of a man that looks as if it were made with squished-up fistfuls of half-molten bronze: A recent acquisition by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
But the child, yet unnamed in the press (his parents, what must they think of the disgrace brought upon the family name!), had turned his attention to the Rothko, in all its pomp and circumstance, swaddled in holy half-light and shadow.
“A meditative and striking color landscape” was what had been promised by one museum curator.
Not so, thought the child: I feel an agitation at this shade of maroon, which is nothing like maroon. Maroon is a shade of brown, a chestnut, burgundy, claret, mulberry, crimson. What Rothko has done here is precisely an aubergine or eggplant, a muddied violet. Even a child knows this.
Transcendence? Nothing approximating euphoria here, baked into the 56 million dollar, unvarnished abstraction. Only a garish slash of throbbing orange against the maroon that is not maroon but eggplant. The grey—now, we could get lost in the grey. There’s some delicious bleakness packed in that gaping rectangular void, into which any soul could tip. But it is not a rapturous void.
And so the guard turned a blind eye and the child took out his feral nail and scratched.
(This is why you fucking put varnish on your paintings, Rothko.)
The result of the scratch is mere “superficial damage,” claim the conservators. It will only cost a few million in repairs. Only the best will attend to the hideous scratch that has pierced the pristine dullness of this bruisy maroon, that is not even maroon. It will likely never be shown in public again.
Amanda Manitach is a visual artist and the editor of Public Display Art. The daughter of an evangelical minister, she spent her childhood in Kansas and Texas drawing on the backs of church bulletins during long Sunday sermons. She eventually dropped the faith, but not the pencil. The best thing I saw this week is an ongoing documentation of art encountered in the wild.
