| Summary: | This article aims to identify the aesthetic and political stakes raised by artistic vandalism as practiced by the Joker at the Flugenheim Museum in Gotham City in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). The analysis takes as a starting point the use that Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay makes of this very scene in Made to be Destroyed, a video exclusively composed of film scenes showing artworks being burnt, smashed, or defaced. Whereas the editing done by Marclay tends to reduce artistic vandalism to the compulsive repetition of the dialectics that connects creation and destruction, the playful iconoclasm practiced by the Joker and his gang reveals the symbolic violence produced by the aesthetic object and the universalist claims of the art museum as an institution, their performance being reminiscent of the ethos of 20th century avant-garde movements. Yet, their act of vandalism also undermines the very criteria that serve to establish the hierarchical distinction between “low culture” and “high culture”.
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