Surprisingly, the book behind the glass case was worth ten million pounds. The hundreds of other books that surround it, all behind the glass cabinet doors are each individually worth thousands. The walls, doors, frames, skirting, the balcony rail are all ancient English oak, hand-sawn, placed & varnished by craftsmen. Even the floor itself, made from neat interlocking herring bone tiles (too light in colour to be oak) is irreplaceable. Why are we even stood here?
Any one of you – the various managers, the security, the maintenance staff – could’ve told me any of this before we started knocking up this MDF & emulsion wall. You could’ve mentioned this before the Artist turned up and started doing their thing.
I’m sure there’s some delicious irony in there about empire, about plunder, about layers & layers of a system telling of protection not doing anything of the sort, about refusal to take responsibility for the mess you’ve made that could’ve easily been avoided.
