The commemorative sculpture Ouroboros in the Dunedin Botanic Garden was damaged by a person or persons unknown, it was reported in last Wednesday's Otago Daily Times.
Your columnist went and inspected the damage. The piece is a flexible tube made of numerous interlocking links which are thick and made of marine grade stainless steel.
At a point near the end which lies on the ground the tube is dented and the links have sprung. As the city council's parks manager Mick Reece said, it must have been hit with something very heavy and a sledgehammer comes to mind.
It isn't broken and local engineers are in discussion with the Hamilton fabricators to see what can be done to mend it and the council is thinking of installing CCTV.
The garden is closed at night so you'd have to break in to do the damage at a time when no-one is about.
You'd have to bring whatever it was which was going to be used to do the damage so clearly this was no casual or spontaneous bit of mischief.
Was someone outraged at this piece of modernist art, or the expenditure of public funds on it? Quite likely we shall never know.
Some years ago, the statue of Queen Victoria in Queens Gardens had its face damaged by something hard and graffiti was scrawled on it suggesting someone objected to New Zealand's having been a British colony.
It seems rather late to take such umbrage but presumably the perpetrator thought there shouldn't be monuments marking that period of the past.
Some other damage is really just petty vandalism with no more thought behind it beyond shocking people by defacing public and private property.
Other acts are considered and symbolic and have wide public support.
Somewhere in the former Soviet Union there is a stockpile of the broken remains of statues of Stalin and Lenin, many of which were pulled down and dismembered after the dissolution of the USSR.
Images of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad were widely disseminated after the ''coalition of the willing'' captured the city in 2003.
Do these represent significant aesthetic losses?
Many will say they don't, although not all the Soviet heroic sculpture was banal and the very type is at least interesting.
More concerning was the 1972 attack on Michaelangelo's famous Pieta, the marble statue of Mary with the body of the dead Christ in her lap in St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
The work is considered a masterpiece, one of the greatest of the Renaissance, and the attacker Laszlo Toth, using a geologist's hammer, succeeded in breaking several pieces off, including Mary's nose.
He was a geologist and mentally disturbed. There were onlookers and he was shouting ''I am Jesus Christ'' as he assaulted the work. Some of the broken pieces were returned but many were souvenired, including the nose.
The work has been repaired but now you see it from a distance behind a bulletproof glass panel. This about all you can do to protect works from such attacks and the loss is the intimacy of viewing the general public formerly had.
There was a similar assault on Michaelangelo's monumental marble statue of David, he of the David and Goliath story. The colossal nude male figure had originally stood in the town square in the centre of Florence but in 1873 was moved to an interior location in the Accademia Gallery, also in that city.
In 1991, Piero Cannata, an unemployed middle-aged Italian, took a hammer he had hidden under his jacket as he entered the museum and struck the figure breaking the second toe of the left foot. Other visitors subdued him and the police later said he was deranged.
His explanation for the attack was that a 16th century Venetian painter's model had ordered him to do it. The David was soon repaired and my recollection is it, too, was protected for a while by a transparent barrier. But it stands on a higher pedestal than the Pieta and so is not at such risk as that work.
Art in places accessible to the public is vulnerable. Art in what we call ''public places'', that is without the screening and security possible for example in a museum, is especially so.
The botanic garden is not as hazardous as, say, Queens Gardens. It is closed at night and is patrolled and Ouroboros will now probably get CCTV protection as well, involving initial and continuing cost to the city.
It will still not be safe from the demented or truly determined or simply the changing turns of history.
But if a city is to have public art, some risks have to be taken and even in peaceful Dunedin, some costs need to be shouldered.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
