A massive Nick Wilde Lego Sculpture from Disney’s Zootopia – sounds awesomely amazing, right?
It is! Well, at least, it WAS.
Artist Zhao spent three days and nights meticulously stacking together the bricks piece by piece. When he was done, the sculpture (which was estimated to be worth 100,000 yuan, or $AU20,000) went on display at the Lego Expo in Ningbo, China.
AND, THEN THIS HAPPENED…
A young boy, an hour into the Lego exhibition started, accidentally knocked the sculpture over, shattering it into a pile of broken bricks.
In a statement to CCTV News Zhao said, “The child did not intend to break it.” Even though the parents offered compensation, the artist did not accept it. He reportedly felt that the apology was enough needed.
This unfortunate artsy accident is just one in a string of similar incidents (although, not always, or ever, with Lego!).
During a recent visit to the Shanghai Museum of Glass, two children accidentally damaged a pair of glass wings named, “Angel is Waiting.” The artist, Shelly Xue, left the wings in their broken state. She later renamed the work “Broken.”
But that’s not all. Last year a 12-year-old accidentally destroyed a $2 million oil painting (‘Flowers’ by Italian artist Paolo Porpora) in Taiwan.
The social media response to the Lego incident was, of course, swift. One poster wrote, “A kids behaviour is formed and then managed by the parent(s) when in public. The parents should have been fined or banned from the museum for a period of time.” Other comments compared the Sculpture mess with the news of boy wandering into the gorilla’s enclosure (noting that the serious nature of the gorilla situation was much heavier than simply knocking down a Lego sculpture). “This accident and the Cincinnati dead gorilla issue are due to poor parenting.”
Even though there has been plenty of Internet backlash against the mum in this case, not all of the comments have been mean-spirited or judgmental. One person said, “I don’t believe we can judge the parents in this case, or the Cincinnati Zoo. Why are we so quick to assign blame? We weren’t there. We didn’t see what happened.”
Judging the parents of these children, who have strayed away, gotten into trouble and wreaked havoc isn’t going to help anyone. Pointing a finger, shaking your head and labelling mum as the person to blame isn’t always in order. Sometimes it’s just an accident. In this case, even the artist behind the broken piece agreed that an apology was enough.
If he isn’t judging, why should anyone else?
