Iconoclasm and the Museum addresses the museum’s historic tendency to be silent about destruction through an exploration of institutional attitudes to iconoclasm, or image breaking, and the concept’s place in public display. Presenting a selection of focused case studies, Boldrick examines long-standing desires to deface, dismantle, obscure or destroy works of art and historic artefacts, as well as motivations to protect and display broken objects. Considering the effects of iconoclastic practices on artworks and cultural artefacts and how those practices are addressed in institutions, the book examines changing attitudes to the intentional destruction of powerful artworks in the past and present. It ends with an analysis of creative destruction in contemporary art making and proposes that we are entering a new phase for museums, in which they acknowledge the critical roles destruction and loss play in the lives of objects and in contemporary political life. Iconoclasm and the Museum will be important reading for academics and students in fields such as museum and gallery studies, archaeology, art history, arts management, curatorial studies, cultural studies, history, heritage and religious studies. The book should also be of great interest to museum professionals, curators and collections management specialists, and artists.

King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book, Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles, impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging, Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and general readers interested in American history and New York City.

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

It is not an everyday event for an artwork in a museum or gallery to be harmed deliberately by a member of the public. Such acts of iconoclasm do occur more regularly than many people might assume though, and when attacks take place the repercussions can be serious. This thesis examines the ways in which cultural institutions react to this phenomenon, investigating how responses could be improved to tackle it more effectively. The first chapter establishes the context to the discussion by categorising and rationalising the various motives behind iconoclastic crimes. The next chapter concentrates on historical trends of response, using the case of the suffragette iconoclasts to illuminate reactions from across society, before assessing the effects of their endurance. The third chapter broaches new ground in the field of prevention by exploring the access and education approach: a means of forestalling destructive compulsions among the public by promoting engagement with cultural institutions and works of art. The fourth chapter looks at security enhancement: the more traditional answer to iconoclastic offences. It evaluates the options open to museums from a defensive standpoint, but it also discusses the wider impact of implementation on accessibility. The final chapter presents the findings of a postal survey of 250 British museums and galleries undertaken in 2006. The purpose of the survey was to gauge the current nature and extent of the problem, and to determine how contemporary museum professionals deal with it. Although some cultural institutions respond to iconoclasm with considered, sustainable and effective tactics, others would be wise to revise their conduct. This thesis concludes that while instances of iconoclasm will never be eradicated from galleries completely, the threat could be curbed significantly if the museum sector was to make a concerted effort to study its own responses and introduce necessary changes.

All cultures make, and break, images. Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present explores how and why people have made and modified images and other cultural material from pre-history into the 21st century. With its impressive chronological sweep and disciplinary breadth, this is the first book about iconoclasm (the breaking of images) and the transformation of broader sets of signs that includes contributions from archaeologists, curators, and museum conservators as well as historians of art, literature and religious studies. The chapters examine themes critical to the study of iconoclasm: violence, punishment, memory, intentionality, ruins and relics and their survival. The conclusion shows how cross-disciplinary debate amongst the contributors informed Tate Britain?s 'Art under Attack' exhibition (2013) and addresses the challenges iconoclasm presents to the modern museum. By juxtaposing objects and places usually considered in isolation, Striking Images raises provocative questions about our understandings of cross-cultural differences and the value of representational objects from the broken swords of pre-historical bog graves to the Bamiyan Buddhas and contemporary art. Are any such objects ever ?finished?, or are they simply subject to constant transformation? In dialogue with each other, the essays consider this question and expand the field of iconoclasm - and cultural - studies.

Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches — one the size of two football fields — were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative “practice history” that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

Striking Power--the very first exhibition and publication to explore the history of iconoclasm in ancient Egyptian art--is an in-depth examination of the widespread campaigns of targeted image destruction that periodically swept through ancient Egypt, driven by political and religious motivations. Focusing on the legacies of pharaohs Hatshepsut (reigned c. 1478-58 BCE) and Akhenaten (reigned c. 1353-36 BCE), as well as the destruction of objects in Late Antiquity, the book pairs damaged works, from fragmented heads to altered inscriptions, with undamaged examples. In ancient Egypt, the deliberate destruction of objects--a nearly universal practice that continues in our own day--derived from the perception of images not only as representations but also as containers of powerful spiritual energy. Considering this historical phenomenon, Striking Power raises timely questions about the power of images and the ways in which we try to contain them.