Where do my bloggy topics come from?
Sometimes, like today, they are just handed to me on a silver platter, or in this case a Facebook post for a New York Times article.
The article? “Climate Protesters Throw Soup Over van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’”
What? Van Gogh? Where? Soup? Sunflowers? Why?
Wasn’t there another art incident at the Vatican Museum a few weeks ago? What’s going on?
Two young people approached Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers painting at the National Gallery in London. They threw tomato soup onto the painting and then glued themselves to the wall. Here is a video from Twitter of the incident. The two were immediately arrested and charged with criminal damage.
The perpetrators were wearing Just Stop Oil t-shirts which is an organization that per Wikipedia, “is an environmental activist group in the UK using civil resistance with the aim of ensuring the UK Government commits to halting new fossil fuel licensing and production.” It was founded in February of this year. This is their ninth public protest event since their founding and their third in a row in an art museum. I tried to access their website: juststoppoil.org. At first, there was a message that the bandwidth was exceeded which meant a large number of people were trying to access their website. If awareness is part of their objective, dousing Sunflowers with tomato soup was certainly working.
A bit later I did get to their website. It is very professional and very engaging. They seem well organized, and I am guessing well-funded (wonder what conspiracy theory I might be able to conjure up in this regard). They have Zoom calls every Tuesday and Sunday evenings, which I will probably never join. While I might agree with their goal of raising awareness fossil fuels contribution to climate change, I do not agree that we can stop immediately. Nothing so complicated and so integrated into society is so simple, so black and white, to solve. Any transition would take years of effort including a transition to electric cars and perhaps a serious revival of nuclear power generation.
But this is the nature of activism. The playbook seems to be to be big and bold, make demands well beyond what is considered possible, and then claim victory if and when reasonable actions are taken.
Why art? Why Van Gogh? Well, why not. Their stunt made headlines today. They have not seriously damaged any works of art. The Van Gogh painting had a protective glaze over it. The Just Stop Oil people said they knew that and knew the tomato soup would not damage the painting. Their civil disobedience worked. It drove me and many others to their website. Raising awareness to drive action seems to be the plan. It is certainly working on the awareness front.
I would love to see Stop Oil Now take their protests to Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries. Why just Oil? Take similar tactics to Russia to protest their heinous war against Ukraine. No, such activism will stay in Europe and perhaps the US where there is the criminal consequences are less severe.
Yes, there was an attack at the Vatican Museum on October 5th. A crazed American man threw two Roman busts to the ground. Apparently, his rage was due to his not being able to get an audience with the Pope. It was not related to the other climate protests.
I don’t think we have seen the end of these kinds of protests. I am sure art museums around the world are beefing up security and working on plans to make art works less accessible to such protests.
A similar protest in July 2022 at the Royal Academy
Da Vinci's The Last Supper mirror.co.uk
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