Last Friday I had a stomach wrenching experience. I walked into the lobby of my theatre and saw what appeared to be a long scrape along the entire bottom of the 104 foot long Jean Charlot fresco mural adorning the wall.

The college maintenance crew had been painting the wall below the mural. In our work order to them, we specifically said not to paint the ledge below the mural for fear of damaging it. I initially thought the guy had used a wire brush or a sander on the mural.

However, when the tech director came out to inspect the mural, he pointed to the roll of 2 inch wide masking tape sitting nearby. The width of the tape matched the width of the damage. It appears the guy put masking tape directly on to the mural and unfortunately it wasn’t the low adhesive tape 3M puts out for the purpose of edging while painting. It was the regular sticky stuff.

As a result, when he removed the tape it took the paint and chunks of plaster off the wall.

I put in calls to his supervisors to halt further operations and notified the folks up the chain from me. The worst part was notifying the state office of public art which commissioned the work and has been responsible for restorations over the last 30 years.

Actually, I assume things will get more uncomfortable when they come out to survey the damage.

There were some questions that came to mind as a result of this incident. Was this guy a careless idiot or was he ignorant of the import of his actions?

My first impulse was careless idiot. Even if the mural had been painted on a cinderblock wall with plain old interior paint, chances are the tape he used was still going to remove the paint. The damage wouldn’t have been as bad, but he would still be defacing the work.

Also, when you start to remove the tape and chunks of the wall are sticking to it, why don’t you stop and reconsider what you are doing?

I honestly don’t have an answer for the second question, but the first I can give the guy the benefit of the doubt a little. When you are working in an institutional setting, there is more of a focus on the quantity of work you can complete in a day rather than the quality and precision of your work. If you aren’t familiar with the the fragile properties of fresco, you don’t know not to use the same tape you use everywhere else. Everywhere else, you remove the tape and a few flecks of paint come off, but the job looks decent enough and the scuff marks are no longer visible so it is a good job.

I also can’t help thinking this may be a result of the lack of arts in our schools. When faced with a work of art this size with detailed coloring and stylized figures, it is tough to equate it with a cinder block wall of institutional white. One should recognize that there are qualities about it that suggest approaching it with more care than usual.

I have a hard time believing that even a person who has not had formal arts classes hasn’t been enculturated enough to pick up on these cues, but perhaps I am mistaking my subjective world view as an objective reality.

Would more exposure to the arts in school prevented this from happening? I don’t really know the guy who was painting well enough to know. He may not have had classes in school, but there are strong cultural elements here on the islands that he could have been exposed to growing up that could give him a more intutive sense of beauty than a school could ever hope to.

He just might have just been mindlessly doing what he does every day of the week in building after building not considering that this instance was quite different.

I know this is getting into the whole “what is art” debate, but anyone have any thoughts?