When Artists Attack—Themselves

In a blatant act of vandalism, along with ruining the work of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Miami artist Maximo Caminero soiled his own reputation. In a bizarre incident of vandalism imitating art at the Perez Art Museum Miami last Sunday, Maximo Caminero, 51, shattered one of the Han dynasty vases on view in Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s traveling survey exhibition, According to What? The act mirrored almost exactly Ai’s own work in which he has destroyed similar vessels. Yet in doing so, Caminero, a South Florida-based painter struggling at the fringes of the art world, effectively ended his career as an artist. Caminero’s mistake wasn’t destroying the vase. Instead, it was...