A month before the alleged incident in the Bronx, a group of mostly black Brooklyn high school kids were kicked out of the Guggenheim just 20 minutes into their visit, after a few were accused of unruly behavior.
About 80 kids from Downtown Brooklyn’s Science Skills Center HS were forced to wait an hour on the sidewalk for their bus in April 2015, after one kid allegedly spat inside the museum’s rotunda lobby and another threw a penny off its winding walkway. The school was then banned from the Upper East Side institution.
Sounds like the reporter is excusing this kind of behavior.
Then again, much of what the Guggenheim calls “modern art” has on display could be spat upon, burned up, or torn and cut to pieces .... And what would not be improved by the vandalism, would not be harmed by the incident.
Seriously, these museums CANNOT just let typical kids from ANY school wander through exhibits and hallways any more. They need to be escorted front and back and in the middle just to protect the “art” from the kids’ mindless actions. And the deliberate actions.
I was in an art museum in Baltimore recently and a group of urban kids came in, shouting, running, putting their hands all over the art and ignoring their teachers and the guards completely. The guards, who were all black men, were looking at me for sympathy. I remarked to one of them (they were older men and I am retired, too), "When we were kids, the teachers would have paddled any of us who acted that way," to which he replied, "And then we would get it again when we got home."