It’s the nightmare of many who set foot in an art museum: You trip, lose your balance, and fall right into a priceless work of art. Crash.

Yayoi Kusama rooms.” You don’t have to look far to find some haunting examples. In late February 2017, for instance, the art world took a certain joy at shaking its collective head when just two days intomajor exhibition at the Hirshhorn , a selfie-snapping museum-goer broke a polka-dotted pumpkin in one of the artist’s famed “infinityrooms.”

Cautionary tales such as this have been covered in countless articles and immortalized in videos of surveillance footage, though it’s not often told what happens next—or what to do if this happens to you.

So what happens when you break a work of art? What would (or should) you do?





The Incident



Writer Alison Kinney likes to put a version of this question to strangers at dinner parties. “It’s a moral test with new friends, to find out what they would do in this situation,” she told me, adding with a laugh, “and the right answer is: ‘I would run.’”

For Kinney, the question of what to do after breaking a work of art is more than a hypothetical. In spring 2014, while gallery-gazing in her native New York, she wanted to get a better view of some drawings.

Hyperallergic in 2014, had broken off a corner of the piece. Stepping back to contemplate the works from a distance, Kinney sat on what she thought was a bench. Her husband tried to warn her, telling her it was actually a work of art (made of styrofoam and chicken wire to look like a bench), but it was too late. By the time she realized her mistake, Kinney, who wrote about the experience forin 2014, had broken off a corner of the piece.

Thinking back today, the emotions of the fateful moment are still fresh. “I felt terrified of being caught,” she said. Despite what she expects others to do in the same situation, Kinney didn’t run—not because she’s moral, she said, but because she was afraid. Still, she didn’t fess up right away either.

“What I did do, which I’m totally ashamed of, is I looked around the room as if somebody else had done it,” Kinney said. “Then I went into another room to look at some paintings. But I was just thrumming with anxiety and panic.”

Eventually, fear led her to confess to the accident to a gallery attendant, who thanked her for the honesty and then let her leave. But shortly after making an exit, another gallery staffer came and dragged her back “to face the judgement of their upper boss.”

She was asked to write down her name, address, and other identifying information. The work Kinney broke, by an anonymous artist, cost about $8,000. Regardless, it was money Kinney didn’t have. And though she could have lied to avoid potentially paying for the damages, she didn’t.





The Insurance



Kinney never heard from the gallery again. While she worried that her personal details might have been taken for the purposes of a debt collector, the reason was likely much more banal: insurance. After a work of art is damaged, a gallery or institution will fill out an incident report, which documents what exactly happened and who was involved.

In the vast majority of cases, a visitor like Kinney who breaks an artwork by mistake won’t be held accountable for paying for the repair or the value of the work. “Generally speaking, they’re invitees to the premises,” said Colin Quinn, director of claims at AXA Art Americas Corporation.

Museum- and gallery-goers are technically considered to be invited into those spaces, and assuming that the institution took reasonable measures to protect the piece in question, an insurance company will pick up the tab for any accidental damage to a work of art. The situation is of course different if a person intentionally damages a work of art, in which case they may need to pay for the work’s repairs or cover its value, in addition to facing criminal penalties.

Normally, though, after an incident report is filed, the insurance company will send a representative to inspect the work. They’ll evaluate it for damage and obtain a proposal for its repair from a conservator. Once the museum signs off on the proposal, “that, theoretically, should be the end of it,” Quinn said.

While breaking a work of art might be your nightmare, it really isn’t Quinn’s. “Of the things that keep me up at night, that’s not one of them,” he said. AXA insures work in some 4,000 museums and institutions internationally, 600 of which are in the Americas. Of the yearly claims it processes, work damaged or destroyed by visitors to institutions accounts for less than 10 percent.

“Those situations are very rare,” Quinn said. Professional museum guards, exhibition layouts that thoughtfully minimize the potential for accidental damage, and the use of stanchions or plexiglass to protect work all reduce the potential hazards to a work of art being shown in public. Generally speaking, museums know they’re inviting selfie-lovers into their halls and plan accordingly.