Museum Director Sets Fire to Art Collection

thivest.com:

• by Kristina Chew

To protest cuts in funding, Antonio Manfredi, the director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) in Naples, set fire to a painting on Tuesday and announced that it will be only the first to go up in flames. “Our 1,000 artworks are headed for destruction anyway because of the government’s indifference,” he says in the BBC.

The painting was by French artist Severine Bourguignon and she watched her work, Promenade, go up in flames via a Skype link. “I feel as if I am in mourning… And now I have to fix in my mind that I will never see that work again. But I hope it’ll be worthwhile,” she said to the Guardian via Raw Story.
Manfredi said Promenade was worth about 10,000 euros (about $13,120). Without sufficient funding, he described recent flooding and garbage piling up. CAM is privately sponsored and will have to shut its doors unless regional, national or European funding is provided; for this reason, Manfredi he started what he calls an “an art war to prevent the destruction of culture.” He said he plans to burn one artwork from CAM’s permanent collection per day to highlight how the economic crisis and the numerous austerity measures the Italian government has imposed are leading to the demise of the country’s cultural institutions and heritage, both major sources of tourism revenue.........  more