Smithsonian.com

I tried to think of a witty way to start this, but all that kept running through my mind was the fact that this book costs $155,000. Sure, it is a book of photographs taken by Aurelio Amendola of Michelangelo’s sculptural works. Amendola is internationally recognized for his photography of sculpture, so the images are sure to be skillfully taken to show every chisel mark and claw scratch the artist ever made. And, sure, Michelangelo is a heavyweight Renaissance master and wouldn’t we all love to have a brand new book of his work, but $155,000?

But then this book has a lot of bells and whistles. First of all, it weighs just over 46 lbs as it is covered in a scale reproduction of one of Michelangelo’s earliest works — a marble relief known as the Madonna of the Stairs. It is printed on paper made specifically for the book and is handmade all the way, from typesetting and printing to binding and covering. It includes the already mentioned Amendola black and white photos as well as removable handmade folios of Michelangelo’s drawings (reproductions, of course). It also comes with a 500-year guarantee.

The book was published by Gruppo FMR, an arts publishing house specializing in art, culture and luxury goods. And apparently the Michelangelo book is only the first in what FMR is calling its “Book Wonderful” series. But with a limited print run of 99 and a 6-month wait to get the book (as it is handcrafted upon order), the Michelangelo copies are sure to absolutely fly off the shelves. So reserve your copy today. But don’t try Amazon. I already checked.

(Georgia O’Keefe, Ram’s Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote on historical and contemporary instances of art vandalism. Since then I haven’t been able to get the topic out of my head, but I’ve been thinking about these acts coming from another source entirely—the artists themselves.

Many artists pragmatically own up to the fact that destruction is an integral part of the creative process. Usually it is a matter of dissatisfaction with a project or concept or execution.

As a young artist, Georgia O’Keefe destroyed painting after painting because the end results featured another artist’s style foremost, and her own input was merely derivative. You have to wonder if O’Keefe would have been able to develop into the iconic and original artist we know her as today without the brusque treatment of her early work. She was searching to find herself as an artist and that can’t always be done while wearing kid gloves.

Destroying paintings and sculptures is also sometimes a damn-the-torpedoes response. Claude Monet went through several bouts of financial depression during his lifetime, but would often destroy his paintings rather than allow them to be seized by his creditors. Marsden Hartley worked during the heights of the Great Depression and during those rough years he was forced to destroy at least a hundred paintings because he could not pay the price to have them stored.

For Jean-Antoine Watteau, it was a sign of atonement. On his deathbed, he ordered many of his more salacious paintings to be destroyed as a way to clear his conscience. During the conflagrations that marked the reign of Girolamo Savonarola’s in 15th-century Florence, artist Fra Bartolommeo likewise destroyed many of his works, but then took his penance one step further by renouncing his art for six years.

El Dorado, the Garden of Eden, Shangri-La, Nirvana—Utopia has come in many different manifestations over the centuries. But in Russia, the pursuit of paradise offers an unprecedented look at the country’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Russian Utopia [http://www.utopia.ru/english/] is an online museum depository of more than 480 building projects that were commissioned over the past 300 years but never actually constructed. Even though all that remains are the plans, the impact these drawings have is undeniable. They are a testament to how strong the human impulse is to dream of what is possible.

Russian Utopia shows that the pursuit of the ideal (an important part of Russia’s political, social and artistic history) takes many forms, including plans of settlements, bridges, palaces, monuments and mausoleums. But the creators of these blueprints differ vastly, ranging from professional architects to amateur designers, children to adults and senior citizens to college students.

The earliest offering in Russian Utopia is a 1717 city plan of St. Petersburg. The latest is a model from 2003 called Jupiter Tomb. The maker, one Avvakumov Y., describes it as “a monument/testament to ‘all the artists of the world, and those who know me.’”

As much as words like powerful and imposing are used to describe art, the objects that embody these terms are incredibly vulnerable to defacement and destruction.

Picasso, Rembrandt, Monet, Duchamp, Lichtenstein—the list goes on and on of artists whose paintings have been attacked through the years. In 1972, a mentally ill geologist attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer while the sculpture was on display in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This was before the days of encasing the piece in bulletproof glass. The Madonna’s right hand was shattered; the tip of her nose and eyelid were also damaged. Restored at the Vatican, the sculpture still bears the scars—the lines where the marble fragments were fused back together—of this violent act.

The whole world was watching when the Taliban systematically destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. These carvings, both more than 100-feet tall, were created sometime in the third century A.D., and had been revered and left untouched in cliffs since then.

In the last few months alone, a number of art vandals have made the news. A lipstick-wearing woman gave a Cy Twombly painting a big smooch while it was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon, leaving a red smear on the $2 million canvas.

Vandals in Sweden broke into an art gallery to destroy sexually explicit photographs made by artist Andres Serrano that were being shown in his “History of Sex” exhibition.

I don’t pretend I understand the reasons for these acts. I don’t really care to. What I want to highlight is that in the face of all this destruction, there are some people who are actively fighting back and actually saving our objets d’art, even while breaking the law to do it.

One guerrilla restoration that always cheers me due to its sheer audacity and playfulness took place in Paris in 2005. Four members of the Untergunther, an underground collective of native Francophiles, set up shop in one of the city’s most beloved landmarks, the Panthéon. For approximately a year, the quartet slipped into the building and worked to restore and repair the antique clock that resides there. They completed their mission and then alerted the monument’s staff, not to boast about how they snuck in and out undetected, but so the administrators would know to wind the clock.

Modern art historians have spent a lot of time grappling with the question of when a copy of an artwork is as effective as the original. Can a viewer have a truly authentic experience with a Michelangelo fresco or Donatello bronze through an inauthentic medium—a slide or photograph or reproduction?

Strip away all the highfalutin theory and what this comes down to is whether or not art should be readily available (even if it is a crummy postcard or some such) to everyone, or if access to art is about pursuit not experience.

The latter principle is a bit too elitist for me, which is why the work Factum Arte is so noteworthy. A collective of digital technicians and art specialists, Factum Arte produces take-your-breath-away-they-look-so-real facsimiles of artworks for conservation and archival purposes.

Their latest project was creating a life-size reproduction of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana for the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, where the massive painting was housed hundreds of years ago. During the French invasion, Napoleon absconded with the work and took it home with him; it still resides in the Louvre. But thanks to Factum Arte, the church has a second-to-none replacement that restores the work to its rightful place in a context that asserts the power and presence of a “mere” copy.