Art Historian's thoughts on The Thinker

Allen Farber, a fellow student at Case Western Reserve, was an art history major when the real bombing of Rodin's Thinker took place in March 1970. Now a professor of Art History at SUNY Oneonta, he has written about seeing the fallen statue and the damaged entrance on his way to class as part of an on-line essay on Politics and Art. Most interesting to me, he offers a way to understand why people (say, the fictional Ivy Barcelona, who loves art) would participate in the bombing. Ivy's little explanatory note (see below*) is written with the limited vocabulary and reflection of a stressed out 20-year-old in a hurry. Allen Farber discusses (among other things) a selection from Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (a BBC series and THE authoritative text on Western culture, published in 1969).
Some changes in the past forty years: I can't use the word "civilization" (or the British spelling with an s) without putting it in quotation marks. I can't believe I took Kenneth Clark's version of the world for truth.
Here is Prof. Farber's website. Read. http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/art_politics.html

*What Ivy wrote, in the heat of her moment, from page 371 of Riders on the Storm:

Rulers know who they are, and they can no longer deny they are complicit in the oppression of a majority of people throughout the world. The Art Museum, its very size and shape based on centuries of European imperialism, its marble walls, staircases, and statues asserting the insidious principle of white supremacy and the power of the ruling classes, can no longer pretend to be benign. We repudiate cultural elitism.

Did people really write like that in 1968-69? I'm afraid so.