Galleries on alert after vomit attacks

ART galleries across North America are on the alert after an art student, who admitted to vomiting deliberately on two museum paintings, threatened to strike again.

In an article in Toronto's Globe and Mail, Jubal Brown, who attends the Ontario College of Art and Design, said he regurgitated brightly-coloured food on a Raoul Dufy work at the Art Gallery of Ontario and a Piet Mondrian at New York's Museum of Modern Art, as part of a three-part protest. Neither work was badly damaged.

Mr Brown, aged 22, aims "to destroy art, and to liberate individuals and living creatures from its banal, oppressive representation". He is doing this by vomiting one of the three primary colours - red, blue and yellow - on a work that he feels is so bourgeois that it makes him physically ill.

A spokesman from the AGO, in Toronto, said it had taken legal action against Mr Brown. The museum's director is also pushing for the expulsion of the student as well as the suspension of 15 students who witnessed the act and acted as Mr Brown's audience.

Jack Kado, manager of public relations at the Ontario College of Art and Design, said: "We don't see it as artistic. We don't teach things like that."

Mr Kado said the college interviewed Mr Brown after the incident last month at MOMA. Mr Brown told them it was an accident and was prepared to apologise to the New York museum. When the Globe and Mail article appeared, the college was "shocked" to not only find that the AGO had also been hit last May but that the student was planning a third strike.

The college says Mr Brown is facing possible expulsion once they can track him down to face a disciplinary committee.