Should children be welcomed at art galleries?

After a few mishaps in which over-excited children have destroyed art exhibits around the world, Matilda Battersby asks whether there's a place for youngsters at galleries

Shelly Xue’s ‘Angel is Waiting’ was retitled ‘Broken’ after toddlers got too close to the piece in Shanghai

If you were Mr Zhao, the artist whose £10,000 Lego statue was smashed to pieces unceremoniously by a four-year-old last month, you might suggest banning children from art exhibitions.

The statue of a character from Zootopia, which took Mr Zhao a reported three days to build, ended up as smithereens just an hour after going on display thanks to the toddler’s enthusiasm for it at the Lego Expo in Ningbo, China.

The child’s parents, who must have been mortified, apologised publicly and offered to pay for the damage. But the artist declined their offer, insisting: “The child did not intend to break it.” Not everyone would be quite so magnanimous.

Indeed, the debate over the appropriateness of allowing non-adults into the hallowed corridors of galleries that was sparked by professional controversialist Jake Chapman (brother of Dinos) when he said two years ago that taking them to galleries was a “waste of time” has been reopened thanks to a slew of unfortunate acts of kiddie vandalism.

Last month two toddlers were filmed bouncing around prestigious Chinese gallery the Shanghai Museum of Glass – their parents apparently unperturbed as their offspring had the time of their lives. Then, the inevitable happens: a child reaches out to feel the silvery, frailty of Angel Is Waiting by Shelly Xue. It falls back. It breaks.

The work, which took 27 months to construct and was dedicated to Xue’s newborn daughter, will never be the same again. The artist has apparently decided not to fix the damage and instead has renamed it Broken – there is now a screen beside it showing the footage of its destruction on loop.

Last August a 12-year-old Taiwanese boy slipped while examining a 350-year-old Paolo Porpora painting called Flowers, valued at $1.5m (£1m), and put his hand through the canvas. Organisers of the Face of Leonardo: Images of a Genius exhibition in Taipei released footage showing the youngster holding a drink before stumbling into the painting in a move Charlie Chaplin would have been proud of.

But this triptych of destruction does not a watertight case against children in galleries make. After all, hundreds of thousands of pre-schoolers and schoolchildren traipse through public exhibition halls every year and plenty of galleries – many of which have invested heavily to attract families – are brilliantly set up to attract and accommodate kids.

But the hushed tones, the seriousness of being around valuable art, often in settings that could be mistaken for playgrounds were it not for a discreet velveteen rope, can be very stressful for parents and security staff.

Two years ago the couple behind fashion label All Saints, Kait Bolongaro and Stuart Trevor spoke out after a photo of their nine-year-old daughter, Sissi Belle, climbing on a multi-million-pound sculpture at Tate Modern in London was made public. Gallery owner Stephanie Theodore posted the picture on Twitter to shame the couple whom she branded “horrible parents with horrible kids”.

But the couple hit back describing it simply as a “faux pas” and adding that their daughter was “anti-establishment but would never hurt anybody”. They said their children, who had visited galleries around the globe with interest, had also previously clambered on the Henry Moore at Liverpool Street and the Diana memorial.

Who wouldn’t want to climb a giant jewel-coloured ladder? And how do you explain to a child that the installation over there is interactive, but the one in the next room isn’t?

I’ve struggled through a Carsten Holler exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London last year with my toddler on tow. Holler might have turned a swathe of visitors to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall into big kids in 2007 when he installed six huge helter-skelter twisty-turning slides for them to careen down. But taking an actual toddler to one of his installations, chock full of artfully abandoned detritus, piles of colourful pigment and tiny little choke-on-able objects was like inviting a bull into a china shop. Needless to sa, we bid a hasty retreat to the relief of the security staff.

It isn’t just me. Social media gleans immediate comedy gold: a Facebook friend Sarah confesses: “My youngest, who was being toilet trained at the time, did a big poo on the carpet of the William Morris gallery. I turned around and there she was in the corner doing the thousand yard stare. Mortified! The guy in there so obviously didn't have kids and was beside himself. I cleared it up (luckily it was a carpet with a busy Morris design).”

While mother-of-two Pip recalled the time she was visiting the Albertina museum in Vienna. She was holding her seven-month-old daughter up to admire a valuable Monet when the infant projectile vomited – only narrowly missing the painting. Pip cannot imagine what would have happened had she not.

Another acquaintance, Farzana, took her son to the National Gallery when he was just five years old. “We entered a room where there were a few nude portraits and he started shouting ‘They’re naked!’ repeatedly and laughing hysterically.”

Others share tales of stern gallery staff, disapproving looks from others as their children tantrum on the tiles, positive tales of kids engaged, mesmerised even, by artwork. One mother, Penni, asked her daughter, seven, what the best thing about her school trip to the National Gallery was: “The Turners. But mainly it was great because Alex and I made a funny game seeing how many naked people we could spot in paintings. Extra points for a bottom.”

However, those who don’t appreciate the value in terms of laughter and wide-eyed enjoyment that children at art galleries bring would be well advised to remember that it was an adult who tripped over his shoelace in 2006 at the Cambridge-based Fitzwilliam Museum and smashed three priceless Chinese vases. And it was a grown-up (and casino owner) who put his elbow through Picasso’s 1932 masterpiece Le Rêve. The list of unwitting acts of vandalism by fully fledged adults is so far longer than the one attributed to toddlers. So watch out!