I agree showing other kids touching it (maybe there’s lots of footage of that) and no action by the museum to stop it suggests an ‘attractive nuisance’ issue. [eta sorry to be repetitive on that, simultaneous posts]
Parents aren’t blameless either if their kids run around the neighborhood, fall into somebody’s too easy to access pool and drown. But the pool owner or their insurance is going to pay out in that a case like that generally if it is judged too easy to access. Saying the ‘parents should have supervised’ does not confer blanket immunity from liability involving curious kids getting hurt by stuff. So it logically would not either in case of trying to claim compensation from the parents where the kid happened not to get hurt (no way would anyone with PR sense at the ins co try to make the parents pay if the kid had been seriously hurt, as seems could easily have happened, which wouldn’t really change who was at fault).
You’ve come closest it seems to implying it’s all or almost all the museum/municipality’s fault. I’m mainly with the posts saying there’s fault to go around. But just as a practical matter if I were the parents I’d get a lawyer and explore a countersuit. Not that I’d think I wasn’t at fault, but everyone has a right to defend their finances. And these people have some case I think that their fault shouldn’t be measured at absolute full (and probably then some) list price of the sculpture.
I don’t think an attractive nuisance is “everyone has to lock up everything that children may want to touch,” because that’s literally everything on earth. Libraries would not be allowed to have shelves, for example, because kids loooove climbing shelves.
Sure, people have a responsibility to secure swimming pools and so forth that kids who are wandering around a neighborhood may be attracted to, and tragedy may result.
But this was not a case of having a statute in an area where kids who you’d expect to unsupervised could wander into. If you’re in a community center, it’s reasonable to believe that kids are there for a reason, and the duty to supervise children to prevent unfortunate accidents (IMHO) comes along with that.
Seems like the statute was displayed in a way you’d expect most statutes in a facility like that to be displayed. I can’t reach the conclusion that the facility was negligent by displaying art in the way that pretty much everyone expects.
Tomahawk Community Center is close by. It is named that because that was the name of the former school which was taken over to become a community center.
I live in Overland Park and this is the first I have heard of this. I will see what I can find out?
If I’m associated with an insurance company and a city comes to me saying “Hey, we’d like a policy so that when a 5-year-old kid visits a place where kids are welcome and for a couple of minutes gets slightly out of control, you pony up $132k for the damages” my response would be to quote a very stiff annual premium.
The ‘value’ is just what the artist is asking for it. I’m sure the insurance people will have it appraised and take into consideration any current offers on it as well as what the artist’s other pieces have sold for. I mean, I can ‘value’ my car for $130,000 but when it gets smashed up, the insurance company is probably only going to give me 10k for it.
I thought the actuarial tables/underwriters figure all that out. I don’t know that there’s a whole lot of discretion on the part of the agent/broker to adjust premiums.
I assume the policy spells out very clearly what is and isn’t covered. Since they’re attempting to collect from the family, they likely paid out on the claim.
Pull the other one. The family’s in the room down the corridor (you can see in the video, about 30s, as they’re coming in, they enter past the statue, the kid wants to climb on the plinth, and his dad tells him no)
Then at about 43s the video cuts to the end when, as the mother says in the article, they’re getting ready to leave and the two kids get out in front of the parents on the way back out. Which is completely normal kids-leaving-places-with-their-family behaviour - if I saw a couple of parents say to their young schoolkids “yes, we’re just gathering our stuff, you can go wait by the car, we’ll be out in five” I wouldn’t bat an eyelid in a well-trafficked open area like that.
It’s literally 20 seconds between when the kid leaves the room and disaster. If the standard of ‘supervised’ is ‘must have continuous eye contact on all your children whenever you leave the house’ then this is a standard that has been achieved by no parents in the history of ever.
“Don’t leave artwork so poorly secured that a five year old can knock it down in less than five seconds” seems like a much more achievable standard to hold someone to.
In my view, I don’t think there is a strong case for payment. The owner of the artwork has been compensated, and it is the insurance company that has accepted the risk. This is exactly the risk exposure that the insurer undertakes to indemnify, and the family is under no obligation to pay the bill.
I would assume that insurers routinely try to recover their payouts like this, but I doubt if they have much success. Insurers collect generous premiums against accidental losses, and then find it easy to argue that there is no such thing as an accident, human fault can always be found.
I assume the insurers of art works and the like have knowledgeable investigators who can determine value, based normally on the last price the work sold for, or a realistic asking price for an item offered for sale, or an appraisal from an auction house. Probably also, in advance of the insurance agreement, an itemized list of the inventory and a declared value of each piece.
Kids DO learn that, but are still a part of the natural environment before they do. If a small child can tip over a display, it was not displayed securely enough, and that is the fault of neither the child nor the parents.
I opened this thread all ready to pile onto the parents who let their kids run wild in an art gallery and harm valuable works.
Instead, I find this bullshit. A fragile sculpture in a public room in a community center, with minimal protection, yet supposedly valued at $132K, but nobody bothered to protect it as if it were particularly valuable. And this wasn’t a damn china shop, where a parent would be on notice that s/he would have to keep an eagle eye on the kid every second, or better yet, keep the kid out of there altogether. (I don’t know about your community center, but in ours, kids run about a good bit.)
So I’m on the parents’ side here. A community center is the sort of place where you shouldn’t need to keep an eye on your kid every damn second, and it clearly didn’t take more than a few seconds for a preschooler to break the statue. AFAIAC, it’s between the artist, the community center, and the center’s insurance company. The parents should have every right to tell them to piss up a rope.
I’m a lot less generous to the parents than a lot of people. If your kids breaks something that belongs to someone else, that is a problem, and you should at least be apologetic about and attempt to compensate the other party (at or lease feel bad about not being able to do so). And the bullshit “he was probably trying to hug it because he’s sweet” really irritated me, because he was doing no such thing. He was a kid climbing and playing on something he shouldn’t have been. Normal behavior for a kid, not abominable, but not the crap mom was saying, either.
First, Tomahawk Ridge is a COMMUNITY CENTER. Right next to a public pool and features a gym, childcare area, and fitness center. It is used for all kinds of community events like day camps for kids and birthday parties.
It is NOT, NOT a art museum!
Basically someone donated this piece to the community center to be placed in a room that features artwork but has no real security. A kid got away from his parents and ran up and broke it. From what I can tell it was basically just a foyer.
You know what? Someone could have easily just walked in and stole it! Hey its worth $132,000 isnt it?
So I think the insurance company is out of luck on this one.
The parents should sue the community center saying their child has been traumatized because the statue fell on him. Because he’s so young, this trauma will certainly greatly affect his entire lifetime earning potential. It’s probably the same insurance company who has the liability policy, so it should streamline things. Once the parents win their multi-million dollar settlement, they’ll can just tell the insurance company to deduct the $132k and send them the rest.
If the kid had just bumped into the display, you might have a point. But this kid tried to climb the exhibit. It’s unreasonable to expect that every object in a community center would be stabilized for use as a jungle gym.
The dad should have reamed the kid out the first time he caught him monkeying with the sculpture. Instead, the parents moseyed on down and let the kids out of their line of sight. If you can’t see your kids - then they aren’t being supervised.
I’m glad the child wasn’t hurt but - he broke it. His parents now get to buy it.