It’s up there on the list of parents’ worst nightmares: You bring your kids to a museum, turn around for a moment, then turn back to find they have broken or damaged some priceless piece of art.
No, this doesn’t only happen in movies. At a museum in the Netherlands, for example, a child under the age of five recently scratched a painting from American artist Mark Rothko, causing it to be removed from display for restoration.
Children, it should be noted, rarely damage art on purpose. The case above was an accident, as are many others. Sometimes, they are driven by curiosity—like the boy who knocked over a 3,500-year-old vase because they wanted to see what was inside. At other times, it’s a case of, for lack of a better word, misinterpretation—the like girl who (quite understandably) mistook a modern sculpture for a climbing rack.
Often with juvenile iconoclasm, the common denominator isn’t the kids so much as the supervising adults—who may be unaware, uncaring or, in some instances, even filming their children as they break the first rule of museums: don’t touch. Here’s a rundown of some of the most cringe-worthy instances of kids gone rogue.
Boy Accidentally Punches Hole Through $1.5 Million Baroque Painting
The moment when the 12-year-old boy punches the painting was recorded by CCTV
Photo: via YouTube
In 2015, a 12-year-old boy accidentally punched a fist-size hole into a painting by Renaissance artist Paolo Porpora valued at $1.5 million. The boy was visiting “The Face of Leonardo, Images of a Genius,” an exhibition at Huashan 1914 Creative Park art center in Taipei, Taiwan, when he tripped and pushed up against the painting to catch his fall.
The exhibition’s curator, Andrea Rossi, later clarified that the painting—titled Flowers—was insured, meaning the boy’s family thankfully wouldn’t be charged for the incident. Rossi also floated the possibility of returning the painting to Italy for restoration.
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Oops! Boy Accidentally Shatters a 3,500-Year-Old Vase at Israeli Museum
Image courtesy Hecht Museum’s staff. Haifa, Israel.
In 2024, a 4-year-old boy accidentally knocked over a 3,500-year-old jar from the Middle Bronze Age during a family visit to the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel.
According to the museum’s general manager, the boy climbed onto the jar’s platform without the security guards taking notice. Talking to the BBC, the boy’s father said his son “pulled the jar slightly” because he was “curious about what was inside.”
The accident was especially unfortunate considering the jar was completely intact, whereas most other specimen from the time period were discovered already broken. Still, the museum said that “photographic documentation” of the artifact would help them reconstruct it.
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Parents of Kids Who Climbed Donald Judd Sculpture Speak to Press
Untitled piece of artwork by American artist Donald Judd, at the auction in West London. Photo: Leon Neal/AFP via Getty Images.
In 2014, visitors at the Tate Modern in London were shocked to see a 9-year-old girl climb onto a ladder-shaped, $10 million Donald Judd sculpture while two adults stood by.
Photographs of the incident went viral on social media, prompting the girl’s parents to share their side of the story with the London Evening Standard. “They were just interested,” the parents said of their child, whom they went on to describe as “anti-establishment.” Their rationalization of the incident involved the sculpture’s playful design: “Their only crime was to be seduced by a ladder of jewel-colored shelving,” they said.
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Kids Break Delicate Glass Artwork at Shanghai Museum
Security footage from the Shanghai Museum of Glass shows that adults pulled out their smartphones to record the kids vandalizing art by Shelley Xue. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Museum of Glass.
In 2016, arts magazine Hyperallergic released surveillance footage from the Shanghai Museum of Glass in China showing two kids damaging Shelly Xue’s Angel in Waiting – a glass sculpture constructed over a period of two years in honor of the artist’s newborn daughter.
The footage shows the children ducking underneath the artwork’s barrier as their supervising adults hold up their phones. Only when the children began to pull at the delicate statue, breaking it, did the adults try to intervene. While people across the internet were outraged, Xue took a different approach. Rejecting to repair the statue, she instead renamed it: Angel in Waiting thus became Broken.
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Breaking News: Two Boisterous Kids Smashed a $64,000 Glass Sculpture of a Disney Castle at the Shanghai Museum of Glass
The glass sculpture of the Disney castle on view at the Shanghai Museum of Glass. Photo by Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group/Getty Images.
Four years later, the Shanghai Museum of Glass bore witness to yet another juvenile incident. In 2020, two kids were chasing one another through the exhibition space when they bumped into the display case of a 132-pound, $64,000 glass sculpture of Shanghai Disneyland’s Enchanted Storybook Castle, shattering it.
The sculpture, which consisted of more than 30,000 pieces and reportedly took over 500 hours to put together, was made by Arribas Brothers, a company which specializes in designing handcrafted Disney collectibles.
“The little visitors knew that their behavior was inappropriate, and, under the encouragement of their parents, reported the incident to the museum staff,” the museum team wrote on Weibo. “Their attitudes were friendly and sincere, and they agreed to help out with follow-up matters.”
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Boys Damage Norway’s Most Famous Stone-Age Artwork Trying to Make It Easier to See
Norway’s most famous ancient rock art, of a man skiing, has been damaged by well-meaning child vandals. Courtesy of Nordland County.
In 2016, two boys vandalized a 5,000-year-old rock carving on the Norwegian island of Tro. One of the most famous pieces of rock art in all of Scandinavia, it is thought to represent a person on skis. The carving, which went on to inspire artwork for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, thus constitutes the oldest known depiction of the sport in the world.
Ironically, the boys weren’t trying to destroy the carving but only make it more legible by reinforcing the faded scratches with engravings of their own. Initially unaware of what they had done, they went public and apologized as soon as their handiwork was reported to the police.
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