MIAMI — Any new museum can expect teething problems.

The Pérez Art Museum Miami, named for a local developer, had seen its share of contention long before its opening two months ago on an imposing site overlooking Biscayne Bay. But nothing has quite equaled the stir that followed Sunday’s news that a valuable vase painted by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had been deliberately destroyed by a visitor in what the man later said was an act of protest.

“It hasn’t been the highlight of my career,” Thomas Collins, the museum’s director, said in an interview on Tuesday. “This was a deplorable act of criminal vandalism, and to say anything further is to dignify the action as if it had merit.”

A video shows the visitor — later identified by the police as Maximo Caminero, a 51-year-old artist — picking up a green vase, holding it for a moment on its side, and dropping it on the museum’s polished wooden floor. The man can be seen watching the vase smash into pieces. A moment later, the video shows him calmly putting his hands into his pockets and strolling off.

The police arrested Mr. Caminero and charged him with criminal mischief. After spending 24 hours in jail, he was released after posting bail and faces up to five years in prison. The vase was one of a group of 16 in an installation titled “Colored Vase,” part of a retrospective exhibition of Mr. Ai’s work that has been on view since the Pérez museum’s lavish opening in December. Mr. Caminero said in an interview on Tuesday that he had been protesting what he said was the museum’s exclusion of local artists in its exhibitions, a charge the museum strongly denies.