In his essay, “Damage Control” (Harper’s Magazine, December 2013), Ben Lerner raises the touchy subject of the relationship between art and money. Focusing on acts of vandalism to works of art carried out by people who say they are artists, Lerner confronts us with the fact that vandalism that increases the dollar value of a work of art is not considered vandalism. Thus, when the Chapman Brothers purchased a suite of Goya’s “Los Caprichos” etchings, “reworked and improved” them, and sold them for $26,000 a print, they were creating art, while if my neighbor were to allow her fifteen year old son who enjoys making art to draw on the same set of prints, their value would be decreased and his act would be considered vandalism. If a conservator were to be given both sets of prints and not told anything about them, would that conservator feel that both sets required intervention?
The difficult philosophical questions never go away
