The statue depicts the mythical figure Khru Kai Kaeo, a winged demon with fangs and crimson talons who is said to be the teacher of Jayavarman VII, a former king of the Khmer empire. Some also regard Khru Kai Kaeo as a god of wealth.

The statue, which was erected in August, drew criticism because some locals found it to be “un-Buddhist and scary,” according to the Nation Thailand. Aside from startling passersby, it spurred online group discussions of devotion to Khru Kai Kaeo.

In response, a group called the Council of Artists Supporting Thai Buddhism urged the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to remove the statue. They claimed that the statue’s worshippers were engaging in practices such as animal sacrifice.

On Thursday, the statue was removed from its place in front of the hotel, the Nation Thailand reported. Instead, it will now be sited at the back of the hotel.

For violating the Building Control Act, the hotel’s operator, Suan Lum Night Bazaar Ratchadaphisek, has also been ordered to pay a fine of 1.3 million baht (approximately $37,793).

In a meeting this week, the New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously to authorize the statue’s removal, according to a report by the Art Newspaper. Because the Roosevelt monument sits on city land, the museum had to request approval from city officials. It had received the go-ahead from the mayor’s office earlier this year, but still needed approval from the Public Design Commission, the agency that manages all architecture and art on city-owned property.

The museum had also received the endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt IV, a trustee and the great-grandson of the former president, for the statue’s removal. In a statement at the time, he said. “The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice.”

[The Roosevelt Statue Controversy, Explained.]

Despite this week’s vote, the museum has still not offered an exact timeline as to when the statue will be removed or where it will go. An AMNH spokesperson told the Art Newspaper, “The statue is intended to be relocated to a cultural institution, or its grounds, dedicated to the life and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Discussions concerning storage and ultimate destination are ongoing.”

The Roosevelt statue shows the former U.S. president mounted on a horse in an elegant and steadfast pose. At his right is an Indigenous man and at his left is a Black man. Both are depicted shirtless while Roosevelt is shown fully clothed. Many critics have called this depiction racist and claimed that it renders two people of color subservient to Roosevelt. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has described the statue’s depiction of these two men as “subjugated and racially inferior.”

The AMNH’s announcement last year came after years of protest calling for the statue’s removal that had been organized by Decolonize This Place each Indigenous Peoples Day since 2016. In 2017, a separate group of protestors, working under the name the Monument Removal Brigade, threw red liquid at the statue to call attention to what they saw as the statue being “bloody at its very foundation.” The calls for the statue’s removal grew louder amid the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd last summer.

The fate of Augustus’s head is one of countless examples of the deliberate destruction of art in human history. Those who come into power erase the art of those who have fallen from power. Hence the iconoclastic destruction of Catholic art by newly legitimized Protestants during the Reformation, or the smashing of aristocratic art during the French Revolution, or the toppling of Communist-era monuments after 1989.

Sometimes, people who lack the power to change a political regime instead attack its symbols. Art historian Martin Warnke called this “iconoclasm from below,” theorizing that these attacks are often disparaged as mere vandalism. The “iconoclasm from above” carried out by the politically powerful often succeeds in disguising its destructive nature through the creation of an aesthetically valuable new work. Victors rewrite history, replacing destroyed monuments with new symbols of power.

In recent weeks, as protests about police brutality grew in magnitude, controversial monuments have been defaced and toppled. In a way, these attacks are as symbolic as the burial of Augustus’s head. Pulling a statue of Columbus off its pedestal will not bring back the Native American lives lost during the colonization, nor will throwing paint on a monument to a slaveholder reverse structural racism.

But there’s practicality alongside the symbolism. Monuments are expensive. A 2018 investigation found that taxpayers spent at least $40 million dollars in the preceding decade to maintain Confederate statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries, cemeteries, and heritage organizations. Meanwhile, significant sites associated with African American and Native American history are crumbling from lack of funding.

The Head of Augustus, ca. 27-25 BCE, bronze, calcite, glass, and plaster, approx. 18 inches tall.

While removing controversial monuments might take only a few minutes during a protest, it can be impossible to achieve using peaceful means. The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that seven Southern states have laws protecting their many Confederate monuments. Alabama prohibits not just removal but even altering or renaming public monuments; in 2017, the majority-Black city of Birmingham was sued for covering its Confederate monument with plywood.

To tear down a monument is to fight for the future by attacking the past. Sometimes, the goals of this destruction are abhorrent, as when ISIS exploded ancient temples, churches, and Sufi shrines. ISIS destroyed this evidence of religious diversity in Syria and Iraq as part of their quest to impose their grim vision of orthodoxy. The destruction also funded their violence against people, by attracting donations and allowing the jihadists to sell looted art.

In 1911, Augustus’s head made another long journey—to the British Museum in London. The National Museum of Sudan holds only a replica. The British Museum, along with many other institutions, has been criticized for holding artworks taken from colonized countries, sometimes as loot during conflict. Protesters have demanded repatriation of these works for decades, often without museums even acknowledging the demands. It’s another reminder that art and violence are intimately intertwined. We should not be surprised by toppling statues; we should be surprised by their preservation, and look long and hard at who has the power to keep them erect.