Three individuals targeted National Gallery paintings an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for similar attack in 2022
Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.
Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.
I know Lemmy has mixed feelings here, but I personally applaud these activists for risking prison time to draw attention to a major existential threat.
I find it quite entertaining to see all the art aficionados coming out so shook by them getting a little bit of soup onto some plexiglass and a picture frame that they probably couldn’t even describe before these incidents. Close your eyes, Is it walnut or cherry? Painted or oil finished? Ornate or simple? 5 or 7 inches wide? Symmetrical or asymmetrical along a horizontal axis?
These protests, which thus far have involved basically zero actual damage of cultural significance have driven significantly more attention (good and bad) to their cause than anything else that has been done. Their protests are non-violent and generally nondestructive.
That said, the real crime here is the judge sentencing 2 years in prison for getting some soup on the frame of a painting - I don’t support violent protests, but I’m pretty sure you could just go around and slap oil CEOs in the face for a fraction of the sentence.
Slapping oil CEOs in the face would be much more relevant, and not be targeting irreplaceable cultural artifacts.
You’re welcome to work on that plan.
Slapping a CEO in the face is assault. That’s a serious offense in most countries, and it would be extremely easy to get sent to jail for years.
Throwing soup at a painting that’s behind Plexiglas is, at most, disturbing the peace and vandalizing a museum’s floor.
I mean it won’t be exactly the same, but I’m pretty sure they can buy more of that plexiglass that got soup’d. Calling plexiglass a cultural artifact feels like a bit of a stretch, but I do think it’s replaceable.
Just so we’re on the same page here, would this act have been acceptable to you or unacceptable if the painting had actually been damaged?
Frame of paintings like that isn’t simply replaceable, by the way, it’s also an artifact that’s generations old. It’s just less important than the painting itself.
Do you condemn the suffragettes?
Only the ones who tried to damage priceless historical artifacts for attention?
Depends on your definition of ‘damage’ - if a drop of soup gets under the plexiglass, I’m not clutching any pearls. If the paintings were completely destroyed, I would not be supportive.
That said its a moot point because these headline grabbing demonstrations have been nondestructive. Stonehenge is fine. The sunflowers will continue to be sunflowery.
I would, personally, but history, human heritage, and art are all precious topics to me. You don’t damage 100+ years of history by an artist so groundbreaking that he is a household name to this day just to get your name in the papers.
So your primary reason for remaining supportive of this is that the security systems worked perfectly. You do not approve of destroying priceless artifacts to raise attention to climate change and/or think that it would be counterproductive, also correct?