Tainted Trevi

A man chucked a bucket of some red substance into the Trevi Fountain in Rome on Friday, briefly turning the clear water the color of Kool-Aid. It wasn't a schoolboy prank — although, I've seen that one before &mdash but rather an act of political protest. The group laying claim to the guerrilla strike on the iconic fountain was objecting to the money spent on the Rome Film Festival — the red water symbolizing, of course, the red carpet rolled out for movie stars.

What is it with this rash of art vandals? Since July, a woman has kissed a perfectly white canvas by Cy Twombly on view at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, having been so overcome by its beauty; some drunken teenagers have put a fist through Monet's The Argenteuil Bridge in the Musée d'Orsay; and a band of thugs wielding crowbars and axes has destroyed seven of Andres Serrano's sexually explicit photographs at the Kulturen Gallery in Lund, Sweden because they found them offensive. The incidents have incited calls for better museum security, but there must be something more to it than that. Has the media (ahem) latched on to such stories, raising the public consciousness? Or are there barbarians at the gate?