What Destroying a Million-Dollar Chinese Vase Looks Like

The unauthorized destruction by a Miami artist of one of Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei’s works turns out to have been, like Hannah Arendt’s evil, noteworthy mostly for its banality.

That’s the takeaway from video footage released this week that shows Maximo Camiero, a 51-year-old painter, walking up to a display of Mr. Ai’s work inside the Perez Art Museum Miami, picking up a painted Han dynasty vase and dropping it unceremoniously on the floor.

Mr. Camiero told the Associated Press he smashed the vase in protest at what he said was the museum’s bias in favor of international artists. Mr. Ai said he wasn’t impressed.

“I don’t encourage anyone to protest by destroying other people’s property,” he told China Real Time earlier this week.

The Chinese artist might as well have objected on aesthetic grounds. The image of Mr. Camiero casually shoving his hand in his pockets after silently dropping the $1-millon vase on the ground is hardly as dramatic as the black-and-white triptych, hanging on the walls of the Perez, of Mr. Ai’s own similar destruction of an ancient urn.

Maybe that helps explain why the museum is showing Mr. Ai’s work and not Mr. Camiero’s.