Red Trevi — Episode 2: 'It's a resurrection of Andy Warhol, the act of highlighting an object of mass consumption'

So said Italian blogger Roberto D'Agostino about last Friday's (October 19, 2009) red dye dump (above) into Rome's famed fountain, as quoted in today's New York Times article by Elisabetta Povoledo.

Excuse me?

Warhol wasn't about trashing existing monuments or objects.

Rather, his world view flattened everything into projections of greater or lesser desire, making their essential emptiness painfully apparent.

Wrote Povoledo, "One day a vandal, the next an artist.... As soon as it was clear that the 18th-century Baroque fountain had not been seriously damaged, intellectuals and art critics began reconsidering the gesture as something nearing genius."

Oh, I see how it is: you wait to see how it turns out, then decide if the act was good or bad.

I think not.

The act is what it was.

To say now, after it's evident that the red dye wasn't an acid that ate holes in the fountain, permanently damaging it, that dumping it was a positive gesture — that of an artist rather than a vandal — is to make the mistake so prevalent in daily life, that of deciding after an outcome that the decision leading to it was good or bad.

There are no good or bad decisions — we make the very best choice possible at the time.

To criticize or find fault with one's judgment after the fact is to open the way to a never ending, lifelong stream of internal questioning and pain.

Likewise, to praise oneself for making a good decision is to take credit for luck and chance happening to smile rather than frown.

Don't be fooled.

To judge retroactively like this implies that you should have been able to see the future — or did see it, yet chose to proceed in a way that wouldn't result in the best possible outcome.

Not likely.

Don't confuse your dreams with what's around you: it does a disservice to both.

Here's a link to a video taken by a security camera of a man in a baseball cap dumping the dye into the fountain (below),

then running away.

Here's the Times story.
....................

Dye in the Trevi: Some Romans See Red, but Others Cry ‘Art!’

One day a vandal, the next an artist. That is the story of the baseball-capped culprit who dumped a bottle of dye into the famed Trevi Fountain here on Friday, turning the waters blood-red for a day.

As soon as it was clear that the 18th-century Baroque fountain had not been seriously damaged, intellectuals and art critics began reconsidering the gesture as something nearing genius.

“Once the indignation had died down, we rediscovered the Fountain of Trevi,” said Roberto D’Agostino, an Italian blogger. “It’s a resurrection of Andy Warhol, the act of highlighting an object of mass consumption.”

A box found near the fountain held leaflets signed “Ftm Futurist Action 2007,” a reference to Futurism, the early 20th-century art movement that advocated a violent break with the past. The fliers said that the act was, in part, a protest of the cost of the Rome Film Fest, which runs until Saturday, and that the color referred to the event’s red carpet.

It is a lackluster festival, said a media critic, Gianluca Nicoletti, “with no depth, no color.”

“The real splash was the one made at a fountain,” he said.

Calling the dyeing a “dramatic representation of the decline of the country,” Mr. Nicoletti said, “it was a marvelous event” that put Rome in the spotlight “at practically zero cost.”

Initial reactions were of outrage and concern, and underlined how exposed Italy’s precious monuments are. Over the years, vandals have damaged dozens of statues, including the Pietà by Michelangelo in the Vatican. A 1993 bombing aimed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence that killed five was attributed to the Mafia.

Anita Ekberg, who took a swim in the fountain for Fellini’s 1960 classic, “La Dolce Vita” [below],

fumed in newspapers that dyeing it was “an offense to Rome’s culture.”

Photographs by tourists and a video captured a man, baseball cap pulled low, flinging the dye and hurrying off. News reports have identified him as Graziano Cecchini [below],

a 54-year-old artist.

In a telephone interview on Tuesday, he was asked if he was the man in the photographs. “Who knows?” he answered.

“If it had been me, wink wink, I’d say that this had been a media-savvy operation in the face of a very gray society,” he said.

He said he had taken refuge in an undisclosed location with the photographer Oliviero Toscani, known for his bold, iconoclastic work for Benetton clothing.

“We see the same thing,” he said, citing a comment by Mr. Toscani about the fountain’s new color in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, “Rome that’s still menstruating, Rome that has not entered menopause yet, can still have children, is still fertile.”