various Dutch artists / knife

(In 1989, a 61-year-old man entered the Dordrechts Museum and slashed ten different Dutch master works in less than two minutes. The man (whose full name was not released because Dutch law protects the anonymity of criminals) was unemployed and apparently acted in protest against workers from foreign countries living in his city. As he later stated, “By letting all those foreigners live in our country, we are throwing away our Dutch culture—thus, there’s no need for those paintings anymore.”

The man was released after promising not to visit a Dutch museum for the next six months. After this incident, he began a successful business selling his own works of art. The works, which are monochromatic with slits in them from left to right, represented, in his words, “the conflict between abstraction and realism.”)