Have you ever visited a museum and noticed that there doesn't seem to be very much separating the public from the precious art or artifacts on display? Often, it's nothing more than a velvet rope, and sometimes even less. What would happen if you tripped and stumbled right into a shelf of priceless Etruscan urns? Well, they would obviously break, but what happens to you after picking the shards of three-thousand-year-old ceramic out of your hair? If it were me, I’d put on my most sad face, well up some tears in my eyes, tremble my jaw just so, and with a shaky voice say to the museum person: Um, that lady over there did it. No, I wouldn’t do that. I’d just go Total Urkel and say “Did I do that?” The good news is that you don't have to keep wondering. Thanks to a handful of intrepid klutzes, we now know what happens when you fall face-first onto a priceless artifact.

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In 2010, a young woman was attending a class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City when she tripped and accidentally punched a hole in a piece of priceless artwork. The painting in question was Picasso’s “The Actor,” and was valued at 130 Million dollars right until the unnamed student opened a six-inch gash in the canvas. One museum official described the frayed edges as resembling the fibers of an old jute rug. At least she learned something else about art: it's fragile. Fortunately, the damage turned out not to be as severe as it initially looked. The tear may have been big, but was near the edge and far from the focus of the painting. After three months of restoration it was as good as new. The painting went back on the wall, this time protected by a sheet of plexiglass, just in case. So, what happened to our unsteady aspiring art expert? First, the museum released a statement stressing that she hadn’t been injured in the fall. Then, she went home. The museum didn’t even charge her the cost of restoring the painting. As anticlimactic as it might be, her situation is pretty much the norm whenever a piece of art is damaged. The absolute worst thing that happens is that the perpetrators find themselves banned from the museum, but even that’s extremely rare. A few years before "The Actor" lost its boxing match with the young woman, a man in Cambridge tripped over his shoelaces and completely destroyed three irreplaceable 17th-century vases (or vah-ses) The worst that happened to him was the museum politely asked that he not return in the near future. Even in cases where patrons were breaking the rules, museums are hesitant to come down too hard on destructive guests. For example, in 2016, an elderly couple severely damaged one of the exhibits at Pennsylvania’s National Watch and Clock Museum. The artifact in question was a one-of-a-kind piece designed by the artist James Bordon. The couple, who probably should’ve known better, began tugging on the clock's moving parts. They wanted to see what the unusual time piece looked like in motion but ended up sending it crashing to the floor. I was going to make a joke about the clock running out of time, but that might be too cheesy, even for me. As with similar incidents in other museums, the couple was let go without so much as a stern talking to. Even selfie-takers have to go out of their way to land themselves in hot water. 

In May of 2016, one adventurous self-photographer decided he really wanted a picture of himself beside a statue of Portugal’s’ King Sebastian. Unfortunately for him, the 150-year-old sculpture stood perched on a pedestal, several feet off the ground. Most people would settle for catching the stone monarch in the background, but this twenty-four-year-old tourist wasn't most people. In a stunning display of misguided determination, he decided to scale the front of the building it was decorating on his quest for the perfect pic. Would you care to guess what happened next? If you answered, "The statue fell down and shattered into pieces," you're correct. [game show music] And you’ve won a brand new car!... Not really. But the man in question wound up being arrested and fined for destroying city property. While destructive selfie-takers have become something of an epidemic, his case is an outlier. If it’d happened in a more traditional museum setting, he might have gotten off scot-free. Pretty much anything you find in a museum will have an insurance policy covering it. The museum might take down the reckless visitor’s name and contact information, but that's just for filling in the insurance paperwork. In most cases, visitors are considered guests, meaning they won't be held financially responsible for the damage they cause. Even museum employees usually won't lose their jobs over an honest mistake. A group of porters in England found this out when they threw away what they thought was an empty box. It was later revealed to contain a painting valued at over 120 thousand dollars. Unfortunately, that discovery was made after the box had been fed into a crushing machine along with a pile of other waste. 

In 2014, something similar happed in Italy when a janitor mistook some modern art for a pile of literal garbage. While that sounds like a joke, the "sculpture" in question consisted of several loosely strewn pieces of cardboard and crumpled newspaper. The same thing happened again a year later in a different Italian gallery. This time, it was a pile of bottles and confetti that ended up decorating the inside of a trash bin. Look, museums, not to tell you how to do your job, but maybe it’s time to start briefing the cleaning crews. What all those incidents had in common is that the damage was unintentional. Even in cases where the accident was one hundred percent avoidable, museums and galleries tend to take it in stride. The same is very much not the case when people start breaking things on purpose. 

In 2012, a man named Andrew Shannon was visiting a museum in Ireland when he punched a hole in a Monet painting valued at over 11 million dollars. Shannon initially claimed it was an accident, but between security footage and the can of paint remover found in his pocket, police weren’t buying it. The painting was back on the wall after a seventeen-month restoration project, but Mr. Shannon wasn’t so lucky, earning five years in jail after his little stunt. The man responsible for destroying those vases mentioned earlier was actually suspected of the same thing. The museum initially brushed it off as an unfortunate accident and even kept his name, which was Nick Flynn, out of their official statement to the press. However, people got suspicious when Mr. Flynn started giving interviews and really seemed to be relishing his fifteen minutes of fame. Detectives ultimately cleared him of wrong doing, but only after he spent a night in police custody. The lesson here is that if you ever destroy a priceless artifact, try not to seem too happy about it. All of this still leaves this big question to be answered, why don’t museums take stronger steps to protect the items in their care? If the New York Met can put a painting behind Plexiglas, why can’t everyone do that all the time? There are two main reasons for this apparent lack of security. Firstly, many feel that these kinds of precautions get in the way of properly experiencing the art on display. The other reason is money. Securing every single exhibit is so expensive that many museums don’t feel like it’s worth the cost. Incidents like I've described today are incredibly rare, and private museums often struggle financially. While cultural touchstones like the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David are valuable enough to warrant extra precautions, it’s just not practical to treat every piece of art with that level of security. So a word to the wise. If you go to a museum, be careful. Great works of art can endure for centuries, and future generations will be grateful there aren't too many holes in our cultural heritage. Unless it was on purpose, you probably wouldn't get in any real trouble, but even minor damage can take months, or even years, to repair fully. But hey, if you do, don't feel too bad. No one is perfect after all, and we've all had moments of clumsiness over the years.