MIAMI — At art museums the world over, the rule for visitors is simple: Please Don’t Touch.

One Miami artist not only ignored that warning, he picked up, threw down and thoroughly smashed a $1 million piece of work at the city’s gleaming new art museum on the bay.

Maximo Caminero said he did it to protest the type of artists showcased at Perez Art Museum Miami. A security guard saw him hoist the pottery on Sunday and asked him to put the piece down, according to a Miami police report. Instead, he tossed it down.

Crash.

The brazen act, which he characterized as a protest to police, shocked the museum and the art world. The smashed vase was one of 16 in a display by celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.

Caminero, a Dominican Republic-born artist whose Caribbean-inspired paintings have been exhibited locally and abroad, was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.

The incident is the first to rattle Miami’s mega-museum, a $131 million complex with 200,000-square-feet of display space at its new building that opened in December near AmericanAirlines Arena.

“The museum is working with the authorities in their investigation,” the museum’s deputy director for external affairs, Leann Standish, said Monday.

The museum, and the exhibit, its first traveling solo retrospective, remains open.

“Ai Weiwei: According To What?” focuses on works by Ai Weiwei and depicts Chinese culture and history. The politically charged exhibit’s ties to Miami and its large refugee community, many of whom lost homes due to shoddy construction in South Miami-Dade during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, is reflected in the Beijing-born artist’s display of rebar culled from buildings that were destroyed in the 2008 earthquake in Szechuan.

Another tie to South Florida is less incendiary. Inside the vast exhibit on the museum’s second floor are photographs of the construction of the Beijing Olympic Stadium for which Ai Weiwei consulted with the architects of Herzog & de Meuron — the same Swiss firm that designed PAMM.