By Harriet Cash

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The news of the vandalism of a Mark Rothko painting in the Tate Modern seems to have been met mostly with frothing outrage and indignation – and rightly so, you might well argue. Down the ages, works of art have fallen victim to sabotage and defacement for more or less artistic reasons; from Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed (a performance piece in its own right), to pissing in Duchamp’s Fountain, via the firing of a shotgun at a Da Vinci painting, ...