UPDATE: As reported by the NY Times and others, the alleged assailant of two Museum of Modern Art employees was arrested early today (Tuesday) in Philadelphia. And MoMA, which had been mum about this disturbing, much publicized incident, finally broke its silence with a tweet this morning, prior to reopening its doors to visitors after a two-day closure:
We’ve reopened today and look forward to welcoming you back. From all of us at MoMA, thank you for your support. We’re relieved and grateful that our colleagues are recovering, and the attacker was arrested.
— MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) March 15, 2022
The NYC police have now released a video of the stabbing on Saturday of two Museum of Modern Art staffers (which I reported on here, in a post that I updated several times after its initial publication). You can find the police-released video by searching for it online, but it’s too gruesome and upsetting for this squeamish blogger to feel comfortable posting it on CultureGrrl.
Also upsetting was the insufficient intervention of a man who appears to be a lone museum guard: He can be seen making hostile but ineffectual gestures towards the perpetrator, while remaining on the other side of the admissions counter that the assailant had leaped over to get at his two cornered, cowering victims.
Here are three screenshots from the video:
Screenshot from video released by the police
Screenshot from video released by the police
After the employees are repeatedly stabbed, the man in the blue jacket (whom I believe to be a guard) manages to distract the assailant sufficiently to give the victims time to flee.
Screenshot from video released by the police
It’s no secret that New York City, on edge because of the disruptions and distress caused by two-year pandemic and political tensions, has been afflicted with a rise in violent crime by emotionally disturbed perpetrators. This incident should serve as a wake-up call for museums, notwithstanding the financial shortfalls and the attendant cutbacks caused by the pandemic, to beef up their security to more adequately insure the safety of their art and, especially, of their people.
I’m no law-enforcement expert, but what is particularly hard for me to understand is how the assailant (whose identity the museum and the police say they know) managed to do all that he did without being apprehended at the scene or nearby. Also hard to understand is the absence of any public statement by MoMA’s officials about this shocking, much publicized incident—how and why it happened and its ramifications, not to mention a public expression of sympathy and support by MoMA for the injured staffers.
Beginning on Saturday night, I had sent emails to MoMA’s press office (with copy to its director) requesting reliable, authoritative information about the attack and subsequent developments. I have thus far received no reply. Also insufficiently explained was the fact that the museum first decided to close on Sunday, and then extended the closure to Monday (March 14). As you can see from the revisions in my initial post, various crucial bits of misinformation were promulgated in early mainstream-media reports of the incident—confusion that might have been averted if there were better, quicker messaging from the museum. Perhaps for legal reasons they feel they need to be careful about what they say.
There’s been nothing about this situation on MoMA’s press site and not much more on its home page—just “Closed Today” (with no elaboration) and this at the very bottom of the home page (where you can easily miss it): “Thank you for your support. MoMA and its Stores will reopen to the public on Tuesday, March 15. For more details, please contact information@moma.org.” (In yesterday’s post, I wrote about the inadequacy of those “details.”)
All of which is to say: In these troubled times, museums urgently need better elucidation and implementation of their emergency plans, strategies and procedures. On a much less serious level, I had gotten a sense of the Metropolitan Museum’s inadequate protocol for addressing potentially dangerous situations when I was involved in its lackadaisical evacuation last April, which had been triggered by a bomb scare.
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