Museum Curator Gives Advice on Statue Vandalism - Paint Comes Off Easily - Use Tomatoes!

 

A museum curator who sparked outrage after tweeting a guide about vandalising ‘racist’ statues has left her job. Madeline Odent posted messages to her 5,000 followers in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement outlining how household items could permanently damage monuments.

The furore began in June when the Oxford-educated curator, who comes from a wealthy family in Georgia and is married to banker Pascal Odent, tweeted her comments days after protesters in Bristol toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston.

She wrote: ‘From an art perspective, it’s honestly fine to throw paint on memorials of genocidal racists! Paint is pretty easy to clean off. What would be an absolute shame is if people threw certain household items that cause irreversible bronze disease. Of course then the artefact can’t really be on display. … Because, like, if somebody were to throw a ton of tomatoes at a bust of a genocidal racist, nobody would probably notice the chemical reaction until it was too late to save the artefact.’ … (Toppled? Museum curator who sparked outrage after tweeting a guide about vandalising ‘racist’ statues using household items has left her job, The Daily Mail, 26th September 2020)