Is there anything more thrilling than a vandalised piece of art? David Beckham has never looked more exciting than he did peering through the words "YOU LOOSERS", scrawled in indelible red felt-tip on his photograph in a public gallery in London. The now-defaced picture by Mark Hom was attacked when it was hanging at the Royal Academy in a show called "The Fifa 100", which, according to the gallery blurb, is "where Art meets Football for the first time". (Though L S Lowry and Mark Wallinger, I seem to remember, allowed art and football to meet quite a few times.)
What the defilement of the Beckham photograph represents is one of those arresting moments when a pretty standard work of art is suddenly transformed by vandalism into an icon of its time. In Beckham's case, the deliberate mis-spelling indicates not only what England fans felt after the Euro 2004 exit, but also the nation's angst after the revelation that the self-appointed god of all things monogamous and fatherlike, as well as of hair slides, sarongs and Police shades, had been sullied by the kiss-and-sell revelations of his PR assistant Rebecca Loos.
Equally, Damien Hirst knew he had arrived in mainstream culture at the precise moment in 1994 when a disaffected artist marched into the Serpentine Gallery and poured black ink into Away From the Flock, his little white lamb in formaldehyde. Two years later, the organisers of "Sensation", also at the Royal Academy (what is it about that place?), must have danced around their ticket office when Marcus Harvey's vast portrait of Myra Hindley was hit by eggs and ink. The curators always pull long faces for the cameras, but, more likely, they are privately congratulating themselves. Such protests suggest that the exhibition in question has achieved that rare goal of "breaking through" the aesthetic barrier. It moved off the darkness of the arts pages, and into the brilliant sunshine of news.
A vandalised piece of art becomes an important piece of art, even if it had been globally celebrated before the event; Michelangelo's Pieta, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, as well as his Virgin and Child With St Anne, Velazquez's Rokeby Venus and Rembrandt's Night Watch have all been attacked, but the muggings simply enhanced their status. Rehanging them behind a box of bullet-proof glass is as much a proof of celebrity as of anything else and causes visitors to linger just that bit longer.
Since the vandal struck Beckham, David Grob, the "extremely upset" curator of "The Fifa 100", has described the picture as a "write-off". How very misguided he is. It is probably the most interesting, topical and thought-provoking interaction the show will achieve, and Grob is bonkers if he replaces the photograph with a virgin print. Quite apart from anything else, its current value (£7,500) will have tripled since its meeting with the anonymous Pentel-wielding football fan. I predict it will appear in an auction room several decades hence, when it will achieve a value of several hundred thousand euros, and provoke a huge round of nostalgia.
