Climate Protesters Throw Soup Over van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’
October 15, 2022 12:59 PM Subscribe

At just after 11 a.m. on Friday, two members of Just Stop Oil, a group that seeks to stop oil and gas extraction in Britain, entered room 43 of the National Gallery in London opened two tins of Heinz cream of tomato soup, and threw them at Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” one of the treasures of the museum’s collection. It is one of six surviving images of sunflowers that van Gogh made in 1888 and 1889.
posted by folklore724 (287 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite

Important context: there was no damage to the painting.
posted by miguelcervantes at 1:06 PM on October 15, 2022 [60 favorites]

Just Stop Oil tag at The Guardian, which also has a non-paywall article about the recent dousing.
posted by user92371 at 1:10 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is not helping.
posted by kickingtheground at 1:11 PM on October 15, 2022 [55 favorites]

I was somewhat disappointed that Sunflowers was targeted merely because it would generate headlines. I wanted it to have some sort of deeper meaning, other than "throwing soup at a famous painting will get us in the news".
posted by selenized at 1:13 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Nowhere is reporting that the painting was covered by glass and it's making me feel crazy.
posted by ominous_paws at 1:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [43 favorites]

well "protestors throw soup at glass in front of painting" doesn't exactly drive engagement now does it
posted by glonous keming at 1:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

I don't get it. Is the tomato soup supposed to mean something? Is the glue supposed to mean something? It's not even ketsup
posted by wotsac at 1:26 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

RE "nowhere is reporting." The Guardian article I linked above: "There were gasps, roars and a shout of “Oh my gosh!” in room 43 of the gallery as two young supporters of the climate protest group threw the liquid over the painting, which is protected by glass, just after 11am."
posted by user92371 at 1:27 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Nowhere is reporting that the painting was covered by glass...

Of course it isn’t. There’s a lot of capital in letting general public believe a beloved masterpiece was trashed by some of those filthy eco-terrists.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [25 favorites]

This is not helping

This has sort of settled my feeling on this sort of comment, fwiw.
posted by ominous_paws at 1:29 PM on October 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

Great news for everyone worried about the painting, in a hundred years civilization will have collapsed, vast swathes of humanity will have died of starvation, and there won't be anyone left who can harm this timeless cultural artifact!

(This was a GREAT protest. Absolutely great. How many other climate protests have made this much news?)
posted by mittens at 1:29 PM on October 15, 2022 [47 favorites]

This is such a shitshow.

(a) It's such a stupid, counter-productive way to protest. Even if their reasons had been coherent and compelling, no one is going to remember them. They're going to remember the time climate activists threw soup at a beloved painting, one with deep meaning for a lot of people.

(b) Some people have been trying to excuse it by saying protest is supposed to make you uncomfortable. Well, yes, but in a targeted way? I don't go around yelling at people that their dogs suck because I'm trying to raise awareness for a bail fund. Just Being A Dick is not a good way to get people to understand or care about your issues. How much of the coverage of this is actually substantial coverage of the climate crisis they are protesting, versus outrage bait?

(c) The fact that the painting wasn't damaged has been downplayed in most of the coverage just so people can feel more outraged. An excellent example of how many news outlets prioritize engagement over informing people. An even more cynical view is that they know this looks bad for climate activism and the interests controlling them view that as good.

I don't buy the conspiracy theory that Just Stop Oil is an industry plant, which has been pretty popular on Twitter since this happened. I don't have enough knowledge to have an opinion. But man, they could hardly do better if they were. (Apart from, I guess, yelling at people's dogs.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [58 favorites]

It says in the article that the choice was symbolic, as many Britons are struggling financially. I fail to see how damaging a painting will help that, considering that it's highlighting a fact that most people are very painfully aware of.

Protests like this are the ones that turn me against the protestors. Not necessarily in favor of the thing they're protesting, but certainly I view the protestors much less favorably afterwards. If that makes me a bad person, I'm prepared to live with that.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:33 PM on October 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

Re: this isn’t helping. We are talking about it… although the disturbing giant burning skeletal koala took a lot more work it wasn’t covered as widely.
posted by andorphin at 1:34 PM on October 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

It's the protest equivalent of an ad hominem. They're being assholes in the hopes that this will somehow convince people to listen to them.

Go blow up a goddamn pipeline. That sort of ecoterrorism I would happily support. Hell, I'd donate to the defense fund.
posted by Scattercat at 1:38 PM on October 15, 2022 [34 favorites]

There's a lot of this kind of direct action protest recently. Perhaps with the recent appeal court ruling that political protest does not in fact justify criminal damage, they might result in convictions.
posted by vincebowdren at 1:45 PM on October 15, 2022

If they sought to damage a priceless piece of cultural history, they should be charged with terrorism. This is Bamiyan-Buddhas territory.
posted by acb at 1:46 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

I was pissed at this one at first, but I came around once it was revealed that there was no damage. Then I became rather impressed.

The kids are desperate for a future that no one in charge seems capable or willing to provide. An escalation in tactics is to be expected. And this action, as opposed to blowing up a pipeline, won't land them in jail forever, or cause an ecological disaster in its own right.

They got more attention with a can of soup than that guy who set himself on fire in front of the supreme court did, and they live to fight another day. I call that a win.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:47 PM on October 15, 2022 [39 favorites]

So what's next? Oil execs throwing sunflowers at Warhol's tomato soup can?
posted by Splunge at 1:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [30 favorites]

Archive link in case anyone hasn't read the article.

Feel like it answers a lot of the questions and assumptions coming up here.

Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” had nothing to do with climate change, she said. It was simply “an iconic painting, by an iconic painter” and an attack on it would generate headlines. But the choice of soup was more symbolic, Carrington said: In Britain, many householders were struggling to pay fuel and food bills because of soaring inflation, and some could not even afford to heat up a can of soup. The government should be helping ordinary people deal with “the cost of living crisis,” rather than enabling fossil fuel extraction, she added.

Carrington said the activists had checked in advance that the work was glazed, so the soupy splattering would cause no damage and could simply be wiped away.

posted by brook horse at 1:53 PM on October 15, 2022 [22 favorites]

Re: the tweet implying that anyone who has problems with this protest is a reactionary - no. It's possible to believe that a strategy is bad while agreeing with the goals. That kind of black-and-white thinking is also counterproductive, driving away potential allies.

If your starting position is "either you already agree with me or fuck you," your attempt to change people's minds, to get them to care, has already failed. At that point what's left to you are actions like sabotage. (To be clear, I think that sabotage is sometimes justified even when it does piss people off.)

If they sought to damage a priceless piece of cultural history, they should be charged with terrorism. This is Bamiyan-Buddhas territory.

And this, I think, is an example of why it's a bad strategy. I bet they knew that the painting is behind glass and wouldn't be damaged; the intent was probably not actually to damage a priceless piece of cultural history but just to get a lot of attention. They certainly succeeded at that, but I do not think they have succeeded at making people care more about climate change.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [29 favorites]

And this action, as opposed to blowing up a pipeline, won't land them in jail forever

A pipeline can be replaced.
posted by acb at 1:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I mean, I learned about how BP's been trying to rehabilitate their image through funding British museums, their logo is a sunflower, the painting itself isn't harmed, you don't even have the "the white working class was inconvenienced & their jobs may be at risk" as an issue...

If we're going to rule out Ministry for the Future style direct action, this seems about as innocuous as it can get while still getting any sort of attention.

Was it effective? What's effective look like, here? No, really, what's the criteria for 'effective, inoffensive protest' that we may measure them by?
posted by CrystalDave at 1:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [27 favorites]

A pipeline can be replaced.

And a pane of glass can be cleaned with a paper towel and some windex?
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:56 PM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]

The protester might research what goes into making her purple hair dye.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:56 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

I bet she has an iphone, too!
posted by ominous_paws at 1:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [41 favorites]

Based on discussion here and elsewhere, the main effect of this protest was to create a bunch of conflicting discourse and bring publicity to their specific protest group. This will almost certainly increase the influence of Just Stop Oil relative to other protest groups, which means it was good for the activists (assuming they don't get a long jail sentence). These kind of protest stunts are popular not because it actually changes anyone's mind, but because it's a great recruitment tactic to build support and excitement for their specific group.

In theory that could actually help their environmental cause, but only if Just Stop Oil takes advantage of the increased publicity to do something that changes the minds of the voting public or important people with decision-making power. This is hard to do, but PETA has found a good way to balance ridiculous stunts with effective campaigning against animal cruelty. It doesn't seem like Greenpeace has been particularly successful at environmental activism over the last 10 years so maybe it's time for some new slogans.
posted by JZig at 1:58 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Can it be proven that they were confident that they would not damage the Van Gogh? If not, they should be prosecuted for attempted destruction of it. Let them serve 20+ years or whatever it is, call themselves martyrs, but really being an object lesson on why you should not be a fuckwit.
posted by acb at 1:59 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

See also the (arguably even more confrontational) recent defacement of a memorial to a centenarian fundraiser by End UK Private Jets.
posted by Hartster at 1:59 PM on October 15, 2022

Can it be proven that they were confident that they would not damage the Van Gogh?

As mentioned upthread, they specifically chose that target because it was glazed and thus wouldn't be harmed. This is the equivalent of a pie in the face, not ISIS. Let's not clamor for 20 year sentences for the crime of insulting a painting.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 2:03 PM on October 15, 2022 [85 favorites]

How much knowedge did they have of the structure of the frame, and that no tomato soup (a highly acidic substance) would leak through a gap damaging it?
posted by acb at 2:04 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's hilarious to me that liberals think if only the symbolism were neat and clever, they could get behind this protest.
posted by bradbane at 2:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [35 favorites]

Can it be proven that they were confident that they would not damage the Van Gogh?

According to the prosecution against them, yes.

Prosecutor Ola Oyedepo said the pair threw the "orange substance" knowing there was a "protective case" over the actual painting, though damage was caused to the frame.

posted by brook horse at 2:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

For attempting to destroy irreplaceable human heritage? 20 years is lenient. Life without parole, I'd say. Let them contemplate the enormity of their actions in a cell until they die.
posted by acb at 2:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Re: this isn’t helping. We are talking about it

We are talking about something, but I don't know if it's helping.

Just because the painting is behind glass doesn't mean it wasn't harmed. Did any liquid seep behind the frame? Would you be 100% confident that throwing soup at a painting behind glass wouldn't cause any damage?

Symbolically this doesn't make any sense to me. I want to be on their side but it just pisses me off instead.
posted by swift at 2:06 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

tomato soup (a highly acidic substance)

Ahahahahaahhaahaaha
posted by ominous_paws at 2:07 PM on October 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

I want to be on these guys' side, but becuase they did not stress test the frame for waterproofing, i am now off to roll coal and campaign for fracking in my neighbourhood. Bring on the climate apocalypse. I am very smart
posted by ominous_paws at 2:09 PM on October 15, 2022 [107 favorites]

Ladies and gentlemen… The Discourse!
(Apologies to The Aristocrats)
posted by andorphin at 2:11 PM on October 15, 2022 [23 favorites]

Re: it is covered by glass and therefore there is no damage.

Have we heard this from the actual curatorial staff that is in charge of making that assesment? Because, you know, cracks and seams exist.

I would much rather they burn oil company headquarters to the ground, but maybe that's just my bourgeois sentimentality for art.
posted by nestor_makhno at 2:12 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

It's fair enough for someone to risk their life on a protest or a stunt (as protesters abseiling from bridges might), but risking the destruction of all humanity's cultural patrimony is not a choice any individual gets to make, no matter how righteous their cause.
posted by acb at 2:14 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Anyone? Anyone read the article?

The National Gallery said in an email statement that the work was unharmed aside from “some minor damage to the frame.”

posted by brook horse at 2:15 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

Or pour tomato juice (or, fuck it, battery acid) over the paintwork of the Shell CEO's Lamborghini or something.
posted by acb at 2:15 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

It seems like a peculiar and slightly irritating attempt to claim moral superiority. Then if the government does something rational, they’ll say ‘it’s not enough, but they would never have done even this if we hadn’t thrown the soup’. And we’ll all nod respectfully.
posted by Phanx at 2:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's easy to say there was no harm done to the canvas, but what if the painting had had a tomato allergy. What then
posted by ominous_paws at 2:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [34 favorites]

Have we heard this from the actual curatorial staff that is in charge of making that assesment?

Yes. No damage to the painting.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

The point is not whether the painting was damaged, it is whether the protestors knew they would not damage it.
posted by swift at 2:18 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is also established, as can be read upthread.
posted by ominous_paws at 2:18 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

one of the activists delivers a speech in which they ask visitors whether they “are more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?”

I mean, will no one think of the children?
posted by Phanx at 2:18 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

i found this pretty funny. destroying art as a protest (or not destroying it, as the case may be) is kind of futile for a lot of reasons. Most people just vaguely think art = good carte blanche and can't see why this makes any sense. And at these big museums most of the people there don't really care about art for the most part, it's just something you do. You go and see the rare and valuable thing. You take a picture of it as proof that you were in its proximity and then you never think about it again. If you set it on fire, there would be some angst, but it would all be about the protestors. On the whole the world would continue on as if it hadn't happened. If you said, for every day that you don't work to reverse the amount of carbon produced, we'll burn another masterpiece, we would just keep on pumping the oil. Compared to the incredible self-sacrifice of the folks who fought to prevent the Keystone XL, this is just kind of silly and weird. Oh well, to be young again.
posted by dis_integration at 2:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

No, really, what's the criteria for 'effective, inoffensive protest' that we may measure them by?

Re-reading the thread, I haven't seen anyone suggest that protest should be inoffensive.

I think the question of what makes an "effective" protest is a very important one - and also one that has a lot of depressing answers, when you're up against forces as powerful as climate activists are. It's an important question regardless of that. I'm not sure that it's possible to have a productive discussion about it unless we actually pay attention to what we each have to say and approach it with nuance, though.

TBH, I think the views in this thread aren't so much "pissing people off is always bad" versus "pissing people off is always good," but "pissing people off is sometimes necessary or good," with different opinions about when that is. We are not as different as we think.

For attempting to destroy irreplaceable human heritage? 20 years is lenient. Life without parole, I'd say. Let them contemplate the enormity of their actions in a cell until they die.

Yikes.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 2:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

C'mon, why stop at calling for life without parole? If we're already at "risking the destruction of all humanity's cultural patrimony", why not execute their families, who clearly mis-taught them? Their teachers, who failed them? Let's keep going, until this bottomless thirst for justice is sated!
posted by CrystalDave at 2:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [22 favorites]

Did they know, or were they just cocksure that their stunt would work out OK? The two are not the same.
posted by acb at 2:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Justice will not be served until the families of those who crafted the slightly-damaged frame are compensated.
posted by mittens at 2:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Well, I'm embarrassed that i pitched in before i realised the painting was undamaged, but if i keep pushing these goalposts along I'll surely get back to the moral high ground sooner or later!"
posted by ominous_paws at 2:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

The worst part of it was hearing that posh kid try to torture her vowel sounds into making it seem like she was from Essex. A terrifying sound that usually means someone is about to get totally screwed.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:24 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

(jokes aside, obviously, yes you should be willing to go to jail if you do this kind of protest, precisely because it dramatizes the value we place on symbols over actual human life.)
posted by mittens at 2:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Well, they did more to raise awareness about climate change today than I did, so kudos to them. But is there really no Campbell's tomato soup over there?
posted by snofoam at 2:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Acb, I would be sincerely interested in what you've done to address the climate crisis that is more effective than what Just Stop Oil has.
posted by Reverend John at 2:26 PM on October 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

"I think these people should be jailed for the rest of their lives for proving to the prosecutor's (but not my personal) satisfaction they intended no long-lasting harm" is certainly a strange viewpoint to hold alongside "why didn't they pour battery acid on a CEO's Lambo instead."
posted by Earthtopus at 2:26 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Ok, the protest itself didn't motivate me to donate to them, but watching people throw absolute fits over it is pushing me in that direction. Call that 4D chess.
posted by brook horse at 2:27 PM on October 15, 2022 [37 favorites]

If only environmental and emissions laws were drafted and monitored to be as robust as the standards used to measure climate activism.

Actual towns and livelihoods and living cultural heritage are being washed away, burnt in wildfires.

Farmers in Pakistan and eastern Australia will struggle to grow actual sunflowers because the ground is so waterlogged that crops won't grow.

Ukraine, the world's largest producer of sunflower derived products is at war with Russia and petrochemical wealth and power is tangled up in that cause and effect.

Seriously? People are concerned about the wellbeing of a painting?
posted by pipstar at 2:27 PM on October 15, 2022 [39 favorites]

A car can be repaired or replaced. A Van Gogh, not. Even putting such a painting at minuscule risk of destruction is a step too far.
posted by acb at 2:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

The point is not whether the painting was damaged, it is whether the protestors knew they would not damage it.

No, the point is that I was responding to a specific question asked by a poster here.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:30 PM on October 15, 2022

Taking a slightly different tack, it is fun to try to imagine the mefi thread about a protest where the vast majority of comments are along the lines of "I thought this was more or less appropriate given the severity of the cause", "even though some people were inconvenienced, this was the right thing to do", "although the symbolism was somewhat jejune those kids' hearts were in the right place", etc
posted by ominous_paws at 2:30 PM on October 15, 2022 [37 favorites]

Vincent Van Gogh would probably approve, since he's no stranger to self-destructive acts.
posted by FJT at 2:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

Here's last month's post on the tyre extinguishers
posted by aniola at 2:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

In the grand scheme of things the artifacts people have produced are lovely but not as important as the people themselves. I don't care what paintings are destroyed in the name of waking us the fuck up.
posted by bleep at 2:33 PM on October 15, 2022 [19 favorites]

Taking a slightly different tack, it is fun to try to imagine the mefi thread about a protest where the vast majority of comments are along the lines of "I thought this was more or less appropriate given the severity of the cause", "even though some people were inconvenienced, this was the right thing to do", "although the symbolism was somewhat jejune those kids' hearts were in the right place", etc

Heh this is the exact thread that lives in my head, it's very nice in here.
posted by bleep at 2:34 PM on October 15, 2022 [27 favorites]

Farmers in Pakistan and eastern Australia will struggle to grow actual sunflowers because the ground is so waterlogged that crops won't grow.

A farmer can be repaired or replaced. A Van Gogh, not.
posted by mittens at 2:36 PM on October 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

Acb, I would be sincerely interested in what you've done to address the climate crisis that is more effective than what Just Stop Oil has.

And what effect has this protest had on addressing the climate crisis?
posted by swift at 2:39 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Just Stop Oil is specifically a youth-led climate group as well. I would be impressed if they nailed the messaging and techniques at 20. At that age I could make a kind of nice poster and that was about it.
posted by brook horse at 2:39 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

And what effect have you had, Swift, on addressing the climate crisis? Have you done something that puts it back in the headlines? Have you gotten major websites talking about what should be done about it?

JSO has.
posted by Reverend John at 2:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Let them serve 20+ years or whatever it is

On average, people sentenced for murder and released in the UK spend about 16.5 years in prison. A 20-year sentence for destruction of property is absurd.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:46 PM on October 15, 2022 [18 favorites]

We're all talking about the same painting, right? The one of some flowers? The one-of-six similar paintings of flowers that a guy made a while ago, even though he couldn't sell anything and died in poverty and obscurity? The one that is only hypervalued now because we have decided to venerate it, and sell it over and over so rich assholes can launder their money?

Van Gogh himself painted over his works to make new ones often. Several pieces doubtlessly as good as his sunflowers have been lost over the years. And yet our culture is somehow still standing?

Even if this group had maliciously set out to destroy the painting, *and succeeded* would it really be as big of a deal as people here are implying? I mean c'mon. It's a painting. Let's have some perspective. The only meaning it has is what we project onto it. These kids projected some soup onto it. I think that re-invigorates the work and gives it new life. And again, there was no harm done.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 2:47 PM on October 15, 2022 [66 favorites]

And what effect have you had, Swift, on addressing the climate crisis? Have you done something that puts it back in the headlines? Have you gotten major websites talking about what should be done about it?

Again, I don't see a lot of talk about the actual climate crisis because of this. At least not here.
posted by swift at 2:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

A 20-year sentence for destruction of property is absurd.

This isn't some guy's yacht, but an irreplaceable part of the cultural heritage of humanity. Dismissing it as property is like equating the Bamiyan Buddhas to a condemned outbuilding.
posted by acb at 2:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I would gladly have them soup up every painting in the world if it would keep climate change on the front page nonstop. Even small changes in the speed of our transition away from fossil fuels could save millions of lives.
posted by snofoam at 2:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

Aside from the media attention, engagement on the mefi tags climatecrisis, climate, climatechange, etc. speaks clearly in favor protests like this. We've seemingly only one "serious" recent climate post with much comment activity, with almost all comments instead landing on Tyre extinguishers, meatposting, etc. We collectively felt 40 million people being becoming homeless in Pakistan warranted only 18 comments (and another 13 on the reparations discussion).

We discussed protest tactics lots in the Tyre extinguishers thread, and danced around what comes after protests, if anyone cares. Also ominous_paws link makes this thread worthwhile, nice. :)
posted by jeffburdges at 2:51 PM on October 15, 2022 [22 favorites]

Even putting such a painting at minuscule risk of destruction is a step too far

Arguably, existential risks like climate change is already putting all paintings at higher risk of destruction by risking general catastrophe. Maybe this sort of protest is worth it (assuming it has a chance of helping)? The next century might be pretty bad for irreplacable works of art if we don't mitigate climate change.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:51 PM on October 15, 2022 [19 favorites]

This action meets precisely zero of the criteria for terrorism. It's fine to disapprove, but words have meaning. This is barely vandalism, let alone terrorism.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 2:51 PM on October 15, 2022 [38 favorites]

The protester might research what goes into making her purple hair dye.

I bet she has an iphone, too!

I can't tell if y'all are joking or serious here.

It's like they might be products of the world they live in. Nobody can do everything all at once. But they're trying to make it a better place.

A farmer can be repaired or replaced. A Van Gogh, not.
How many copies of this painting are there on the internet? How many other paintings of sunflowers are there? How many irl sunflowers are there in this world? How many sunflowers will there be in this world if big oil continues having their way? How many farms have been replaced with machinery with proprietary locked-down devices (no right to repair) and "right to farm" (right to harm) pesticides and herbicides and patented seeds? SEEDS! Farms have been replaced extraction factories complete with patents on life itself.

It sure takes a lot of oil to grow food in that way. There is a better way. Those kids are trying to say something that is clearly very important to them. How do we listen?
posted by aniola at 2:55 PM on October 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

They certainly brought my attention to their platform, which is a simple one I hadn't heard of before but which makes perfect sense and could have significant impact.

Just Stop Oil is a coalition of groups working together to ensure that the government commits to ending all new licenses and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.

posted by brook horse at 2:55 PM on October 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

It could have been worse, they could have wedged it into a scanner and then where would we be!
posted by eirias at 2:55 PM on October 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

I don't get it. Is the tomato soup supposed to mean something? Is the glue supposed to mean something? It's not even ketsup

Someone else already has the throwing ketchup gig.
posted by kirkaracha at 2:56 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Their hearts were in the right place. Not sure if everyone else's is. World's gonna end guys. That includes all the art. And the future art. Better this than laying down and letting it happen without at least doing what little shit you can.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 2:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [20 favorites]

If it would somehow stop climate change, I'd be okay with burning down every museum in the world. We can make more art, if we're still around. If we're not, it hardly matters.

I'm glad these kids did this.
posted by curious nu at 2:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [27 favorites]

Aniola, I think the first person you quoted was not joking but the other two were. But it's so hard to tell on the internet, especially given some people believe these things completely seriously. I was about to make a joke in response to BungaDunga about "but what about the average sentences for terrorism" and refrained, and a moment later acb commented the same idea in full seriousness.

So I try not to make ironic jokes without context any more, because I get depressed by how many people genuinely believe those things.
posted by brook horse at 2:58 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

> And what effect has this protest had on addressing the climate crisis?

aWAreNeSs

> I don't care what paintings are destroyed in the name of waking us the fuck up.

Hate to break it to you, but random acts of vandalism* unrelated to the cause, even when the result is a media shitstorm, awakens nobody and nothing except anti-activist sentiment. Literally zero people take climate change any more seriously following this.

Good protests should be disruptive, sure. I vocally defended Extinction Rebellion road takeovers in Helsinki, for example, because they were actually thematically relevant.

"We need to be constantly reminded of climate change" is a good take. Adding "regardless of the means" makes it an irresponsible zero IQ take.

* yes, I know, not actually in this case, but copycats will no doubt latch onto this without similar care, yet still achieving nothing
posted by jklaiho at 2:58 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

Literally zero people take climate change any more seriously following this.

Their fundraiser went from £18k to £80k overnight, so I think this is factually incorrect. (Whether it's going to be used effectively or whatever is up for debate but it did legitimately do something that wasn't just stirring up "anti-activist sentiment.")
posted by brook horse at 3:02 PM on October 15, 2022 [25 favorites]

random acts of vandalism

Not random, it was an OIL painting.
posted by snofoam at 3:02 PM on October 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

We are now at: even though the painting was protected by a frame, and there were no cracks or leaks in the frame, and the protestors specifically chose this painting because it would be protected - other, future protestors MIGHT throw soup at less well protected paintings, so really the painting may just as well have been unprotected and ruined
posted by ominous_paws at 3:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [17 favorites]

It's a shame no one here's heard about the Just Stop Oil protester who's on remand for sabotaging the kerosene pipeline to Heathrow Airport, nor about the daily traffic blockades they're organising in Central London, nor about the vandalism of (oilfield services company) Schlumberger's HQ in Cambridge (claimed by XR, not Just Stop Oil), nor about the vandalism of the New Scotland Yard sign with paint, in order to protest about Just Stop Oil protesters not being granted bail, but I guess they probably weren't trying hard enough to get attention in those cases, right?
posted by ambrosen at 3:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [56 favorites]

Aside from the media attention, engagement on the mefi tags climatecrisis, climate, climatechange, etc. speaks clearly in favor protests like this. We've seemingly only one "serious" recent climate post with much comment activity, with almost all comments instead landing on Tyre extinguishers, meatposting, etc. We collectively felt 40 million people being becoming homeless in Pakistan warranted only 18 comments (and another 13 on the reparations discussion).

This alludes to an annoying thing I find about activists. They tend to be enamored with the protest to the point of overlooking the issue. Perhaps that's just another way of saying they love a good show. Whether it's throwing soup at at art or owning the libs.
posted by 2N2222 at 3:13 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Remember when people dismissed the mass murder of Black citizens of the United States of America and the large protests and movement that finally erupted because some buildings happened to burn down? Didn't a lot of people point out that it showed how many people valued property over human life?
posted by Jacen at 3:17 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

Now go throw sunflowers at a warhol tomato soup can painting
posted by beesbees at 3:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [12 favorites]

And I find the equation of kids throwing soup at a protected painting with a horribly repressive religious fundamental cult destroying ancient artwork from a different religion to be pretty terrifying. Why not just kill everyone who does actions that you disagree with?
posted by Jacen at 3:23 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Honestly, the part that bothers me most about this isn't the "painting as target" or the gesture itself - it is the fact that they flung soup. Especially since they discussed how many people couldn't AFFORD soup.

All I could think of was, "well, shit, if your point is that people can't afford the soup you just threw at the painting, why'd you waste that soup?" Why not pick something non-edible to throw, like oil itself?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:24 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

random acts of vandalism* unrelated to the cause, even when the result is a media shitstorm, awakens nobody and nothing except anti-activist sentiment

Wasn't that the suffragettes' whole "thing"? Like, I suppose it's arguable how much good that stuff did, but stunts designed entirely around getting publicity has a pretty long pedigree, I think.

I mean, my instinct is definitely to roll my eyes at stuff like this, but you can't say they don't have intellectual forebears.
posted by BungaDunga at 3:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

perhaps two stroke backpack leaf blowers needed an performative response
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 3:29 PM on October 15, 2022

Is it even the real Sunflowers? I would expect it to be a copy, not that that would necessarily be public information
posted by krisjohn at 3:31 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just Stop Oil is funded by big oil billionaires. It's part of the project to make protesters do stupid stuff like this instead of something useful. Wouldn't it be more impactful to throw some, unopened, cans of soup at the actual oil CEOs instead of a painting?
posted by Iax at 3:36 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

everyone in this thread should go to prison
posted by poffin boffin at 3:36 PM on October 15, 2022 [59 favorites]

forever
posted by poffin boffin at 3:36 PM on October 15, 2022 [38 favorites]

Even if their reasons had been coherent and compelling, no one is going to remember them. They're going to remember the time climate activists threw soup at a beloved painting, one with deep meaning for a lot of people.
They certainly succeeded at that, but I do not think they have succeeded at making people care more about climate change.

This is exactly what I've been thinking! It's a stupid protest. I'm glad they didn't damage the painting, but I don't think this helped their cause any. I hate dumb protests. Pick a protest that actually has something to do with climate change. That actually points out the issues with this. That actually causes a pain point for people (I note that SOPA/PIPA was the best and most effective protest I've ever heard of). There has to be a better, more effective idea to protest this than doing something not related and smacks of immaturity.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:39 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

From the Wikipedia page on Van Gough, it says:

To show support for his impoverished congregation, he gave up his comfortable lodgings at a bakery to a homeless person and moved to a small hut, where he slept on straw.[55]

I'd like to think Van Gough would be supportive of this project.
posted by aniola at 3:40 PM on October 15, 2022 [20 favorites]

Given that the painting was behind glass, the protestors checked ahead of time to make sure it was behind glass, the museum folks confirmed the paint and canvas were undamaged and there was only minor frame damage, can we stop the bad-faith "won't someone think of the paintings?"

Yes, the messaging here was poor. Yes, it was likely counter-productive to their cause.

But I saw more headlines about this than about the dude who set himself on fire to protest climate change.
So even if you think these kids should have sacrificed their lives for their cause, please acknowledge that it would not have been as effective as an act which posed no risk to anyone's life and which posed minimal risk to a famous work of art.

I wasn't on board with this protest until I saw the reactions on other sites and here. It looks like yes, people do value objects over other people. I think that's bringing me around to "maybe this protest was a good thing."
posted by ®@ at 3:43 PM on October 15, 2022 [21 favorites]

I dunno, as first my reaction was more "whatever, another climate protest that will likely not change things much" but now I'm impressed by how much this has clearly gotten under people's skin. As someone put it on Twitter, "People had an immediate emotional reaction to the [potential/faux] desecration of art, but we let the daily desecration of our planet slide."

No protest movement should be judged on individual actions. Any effective protest movement in history has had to experiment with different tactics, has had some actions work better than others, has had to deal with an unsupportive press, etc. For those in this thread who found this "stupid" - well, feel free to execute your own climate crisis activism - I'm sure if you do something more effective, plenty of people will take note and follow your lead.

And as others have pointed out upthread, it's been good for Just Stop Oil's fundraising efforts. Frankly, if I lived in the UK, I'd join them. They are clearly committed to being the squeaky wheel, which at this point, I think we need. These days the world is literally on fire, under water, and frozen, often all at the same time.
posted by coffeecat at 3:44 PM on October 15, 2022 [24 favorites]

Just Stop Oil is a coalition of groups working together to ensure that the government commits to ending all new licenses and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK.

This idea is popular at the moment and seems simple enough, but take a moment to think about how it reduces fossil fuel use in practice. The effects of this can't just be limited to the producers of fossil fuels - a whole bunch of fossil fuel consumption that would've happened must not, and the way that this happens in a market economy is that the price of fossil fuels goes up until they're no longer affordable. This requires a huge price rise because fossil fuel and energy demand is inelastic - people are very reluctant to stop heating their houses or buying food, and most non-essential stuff produced using them sells for an awful lot more than the cost of the energy.

We already saw a taste of this last year, with reduced investment causing prices to skyrocket even before Russia turned off the taps, and that was only from a relatively small reduction in supply. Fighting global warming by tackling supply rather than demand would make this even worse. The UK is already at the point where people are having to choose between heating and eating and that still isn't close to the level of supply-induced fossil fuel withdrawal needed to achieve what groups like Just Stop Oil want. Renewable won't save us either - the UK's already years into as aggressive a pathway to net zero through renewable energy as anyone's been able to figure out, the whole point of actions like this is to go beyond that.

I've heard that Just Stop Oil are a bunch of rich kids, and honestly that would explain a lot. They'd never really feel the pinch financially from this - their energy usage and general consumption, even living a life of luxury, is so much smaller than their overall wealth that the really wealthy are at no risk of being forced to cut back. It's ordinary people who'd end up in poverty whilst the rich get to enjoy their expensive beachside homes with less fear they'll end up underwater.
posted by makomk at 3:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Can the funds be seized as proceeds of crime?
posted by acb at 3:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just Stop Oil is getting money from billionaire oil heiresses, their job is to make climate protests look ineffectual and turn public opinion against it.

I'm just saying they could have gotten more positive coverage with the more coherent message of hitting a CEO with some full cans of soup than what this accomplished.
posted by Iax at 3:49 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Also, I know that every time I look at a Van Gough painting in the next couple of years, I'll be reminded of climate change. I'm sure I'm not the only one. That seems pretty effective to me.
posted by coffeecat at 3:52 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

I live in Houston. I've seen the damage done to one of my favorite museums by the eight feet of flood waters that swept through the building, the city. I've seen business damaged by climate change enhanced hurricanes and flooding. The lives lost. Destroyed.

I've seen the droughts and water rationing and burn bans. We lost power for thirty eight hours during the big freeze. It certainly didn't help my handicapped girlfriends health. Nor did it do any good for the hundreds of people who froze to death or died while trying to stay warm.

Throw that soup. Destroy roads. Fuck everyone who thinks any and all protest against climate change is terrorism.
posted by Jacen at 3:52 PM on October 15, 2022 [49 favorites]

It's such a stupid, counter-productive way to protest. Even if their reasons had been coherent and compelling, no one is going to remember them.

In 1996 there was an art student who undertook to vomit primary colours onto art in several museums in Canada and the USA as a statement. In 2008 or 2009, I was at a gallery opening with a woman I knew from my high school; the artist who was briefly notorious from his vomiting a decade-plus earlier was there as well. My high school friend was, as it turns out, a mutual friend of both of us.

She introduced us, and I half-remembered the guy’s name from the news stories in the nineties. As we met, I inquired, “Aren’t you the...?” Even at that point, he knew where the sentence was going and he looked simultaneously defeated and exasperated.

And that was before search engines were ubiquitous. These protesters have fifty years of this ahead of them.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:52 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

It would have been a real shame if the painting itself had been damaged. One might even say it would been a loss to all of humanity.

So if we care so much about protecting this painting, and punishing the people who sort of maybe but not really tried to destroy it, what the fuck should we do to protect the world -- without which, mind you, there's no fucking artwork to see, or museum to house it, or artists to paint it -- and punish those who actively profit from the destruction of life on this planet?

That's the fucking point. I'm sure these protestors would be happy to submit to the fullest punishment possible under the law for criminal vandalism or whatever is applicable for the scale and cost of their crime, if we actually applied that principle to the crime of destroying the environment.

Some of responses in this thread are, frankly, baffling to me. Let them die in prison? Charge them with terrorism? Are you f-ing kidding me?

It reminds me of when Judd Apatow thought people would start murdering stand-up comics because Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. Or when "well-meaning" white liberals said that kneeling during the National Anthem wasn't the appropriate forum for protest. Yes, it is reactionary and a way to silence protest, even if that's not the conscious attempt -- it still kicks the can down the road.

Even stranger are the comments that the choice of painting or material should have been more appropriately symbolic or something. Huh? It's a couple of 20-something activists, not Marina Abramovic. Who cares if the painting itself wasn't subject appropriate? Next time maybe they can find a painting of an oil derrick or something.

Go blow up a goddamn pipeline. That sort of ecoterrorism I would happily support. Hell, I'd donate to the defense fund.

"Hey you posers! Go risk your lives and maybe I'll slide $20 to your GoFundMe, but otherwise, screw off!" Hey, why not just ask them to immolate themselves on the White House lawn? That's what a real environmentalist would do.

Protests like this are the ones that turn me against the protestors.

A few more and you'll be rolling coal and owning the libs with the best of 'em!

This will almost certainly increase the influence of Just Stop Oil relative to other protest groups, which means it was good for the activists

Ah yes, those slick, manipulative activists, always looking for the easy buck, the next hustle! It's also a field famous for its career advancement properties.

And the discussion about "well, was this effective? People are talking about it, but does that have a measurable effect on climate change? Hmm, how could they have made this a more effective message?" are ridiculous. If you want well-thought out strategies aimed at expressing a concise message to a target audience, go watch commercials. This is a protest trying to call attention to our ongoing and probably accelerating self-destruction, evidence of which is all around us. If hurricanes and millions of people flooded out of their homes and wildfires and all the scientists and all the studies haven't moved the dial, why are people talking as if this group had only done more market research and focus groups, maybe they could have come up with a brilliant campaign that would capture the public's hearts and minds.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:53 PM on October 15, 2022 [53 favorites]

So let me get this straight. Committed and dedicated people who want to raise awareness about the urgency of Planetary Extinction throw soup at a pane of glass and all these 'thinkers' and 'pundits' go apeshit and miss the point.
posted by adamvasco at 3:55 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Saxon Kane, I noticed the responses but also noticed that it just means one person here is very upset about this.
posted by Selena777 at 3:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

A car can be repaired or replaced. A Van Gogh, not. Even putting such a painting at minuscule risk of destruction is a step too far.

I'd bomb the louvre to save a single life. To stop climate change? i wouldn't even hestitate to destory the complete works of michaelangelo
posted by dis_integration at 4:00 PM on October 15, 2022 [25 favorites]

Just Stop Oil is getting money from billionaire oil heiresses, their job is to make climate protests look ineffectual and turn public opinion against it.

Climate protests already look ineffectual and have public opinion turned against them. The heiresses would then be wasting their money, because the default response to protest is unhappiness with the protestors, rather than with the object being protested. It is really hard to build public sympathy for the goal of a protest, practically impossible to gain sympathy for protestors themselves. You're pushing against the status quo with these actions, and the whole reason there's a status quo is that we're all complicit in cultural inertia.

I'm not saying it doesn't matter who funds what. But demonizing protestors is shooting fish in a barrel. It doesn't take a billion dollars to make it happen.
posted by mittens at 4:01 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Dismissing it as property is like equating the Bamiyan Buddhas to a condemned outbuilding.

Why are you trying to link this action to the Taliban? This reeks of "the liberals are the REAL fascists!" rhetoric.

To those people who say that this action was counter-productive because it turns people off activists but also say they should do something like blow up a pipeline (which would fit the legal definition of terrorism) or throw soup cans at CEOs (assault & battery) or shut down roads (trespassing, public disturbance, etc.) because those are actually effective or more thematically appropriate -- you do realize those are contradictory? If Joe & Jane Q. Public are so delicate as to be turned off to climate change activism by something very obviously meant not to do harm but to get attention, how are they going to react to 24/7 Fox News coverage of "Terrorists Attack Our Country's Energy Infrastructure" with related story "Obama's College Extremism: New Report Suggest Former President still connected to radical anti-American groups from school"?

Selena777: I mean, only one person has suggested life imprisonment without parole and compared the protestors to the Taliban, but there are several other people who have expressed dismay, anger, irritation, and even mildly condescending amusement at the protest, so, seems like more than 1 person?
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:06 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

I've heard that Just Stop Oil are a bunch of rich kids

Based on what- a rumor? I've just spent some time poking around their website, they have chapters all over Europe, they've already done a variety of mass protests - and based on the photos, many involved are far past the stage of being called "kids"

Just Stop Oil is getting money from billionaire oil heiresses, their job is to make climate protests look ineffectual and turn public opinion against it.

This is a very skewed version (that I guess started on TikTok, land of hard hitting journalism for sure) of what is actually true:

"As mentioned above, Aileen Getty is one of several heirs to the $5.4 billion Getty fortune, which the family acquired through their oil company, founded in 1942. While the company no longer exists today, having been sold in the early 2000s, the money certainly still does, and so people have started questioning if, in reality, Aileen Getty still has active links to the oil industry.

However, unless Getty is investing in oil ventures so secretive that there are no records of them available to the public, the opposite appears to be true. In 2012, she founded the Aileen Getty Foundation, which, according to the foundation's objectives, "supports a wide range of local and global organizations and initiatives that enhance the environment, our communities and the lives of individuals through innovation, preservation, connection and kindness." Source.
posted by coffeecat at 4:06 PM on October 15, 2022 [20 favorites]

When all you have left is soup for your family, you use it.
posted by delfin at 4:08 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

"It's hilarious to me that liberals think if only the symbolism were neat and clever, they could get behind this protest."
posted by bradbane

Andy Warhol and his soup can drab protests Everything covering the protective sheild with life giving soup, encasing/enhancing the sunflower motif sun and earth though not underscoring the dire nature of a world out of balance.

make checks payable to the Schooner and railroad association.

From Rembrandt to Marcel Duchamp: A short history of art vandalism.
"In this way, acts of vandalism can be seen not only as attempts to assert a political, religious or artistic agenda but as responses to the way in which representations of reality come to overtake and define the living world."

The activists, I'm sure, knew of the sheild, I think alot of us have seen a Sun Flower by van Gogh. That is not really malice aforthought, less political, more ecological statement.

Art defacement: Co-creation or destruction?

"As recorded by history, protest can often cut into art, sometimes birthing its own forms of art as well. It usually leads to defacement and sometimes destruction, leaving one with questions about intention and cause, because protest can often be symbolic rather than literal."

If they recieve a penalty, serve it then the action becomes the pasts present to a future which many do not see and I think that's a terrible reality to face in as much to save what can be.
posted by clavdivs at 4:18 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's clearly a wonderful protest of course, but aside from its protest value it's an epic performance art piece, really trounces Banksey's self shredding print, so..

Anyone estimated by how much this increased the value of this or any past painting to which Just Stop Oil glued themselves?
posted by jeffburdges at 4:19 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would be sad if Sunflowers had been damaged or destroyed, and I am glad it wasn't, and kind of horrified at the prospect that it could have been. That said, I didn't think it was a really effective protest until people started telling me they didn't know that BP was funding museums and other details that made it clear that I was wrong.

My feelings about punishment/jail time is that this kind of protest is an act of civil disobedience and that one of the parts of civil disobedience protests is demonstrating that the law is an ass by accepting the unreasonable punishment and demonstrating how wrong it is. I don't know what the offense in this case would be or the sentence attached, but "I did jail time to bring attention to the climate crisis" seems like something protestors might be willing to risk, especially since every hearing can bring more attention to their cause.

Related, with respect to comments about what art various people would see destroyed to resolve our climate crisis, yeah, I'd be willing to destroy a lot of stuff too to fix the climate crisis. But I don't think destroying Sunflowers (if that had happened) would have resolved anything, just made more people mad. We'd have shitty climate and no Sunflowers, and that's suboptimal, and it seems to me that a lot of people are reacting to that likelihood rather than what art (that they don't own) they would sacrifice to definitively save the world. If you think the gesture is futile, the risk of damaging the art carries a different meaning.

I don't have solutions or strong feelings, just observations from watching people get really excited in this thread and on Twitter.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:29 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

I think once everyone calms down and clutches their pearls a little more loosely, we'll remember that at our current rate, Earth will be an uninhabitable hell planet by the end of the century, and *all* art will be meaningless. So relax!

Talk about pearl clutching -- I'm not going to weigh in on whether their method of protest was counterproductive, but I'm damn well going to say it's extremely fucking counterproductive, not to say extremely tiresome, to say "Earth will be an uninhabitable hell planet."

For science sake, the ACTUAL projections of climate change are horrifying enough, we don't need such bombastic exaggeration as to undermine by inference the terrifying reality of the prospects for humanity in the next century.
posted by tclark at 4:33 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

Based on the number of comments on this thread/Twitter I'd say they were pretty fucking effective.

Protest and direct action is a crude tool, which is why people generally resort to it only when everything else fails, like, writing letters, voting and boycotts.

Pretty sure everything else has failed.

And even if they actually had destroyed the painting that would still be true.
posted by emjaybee at 4:35 PM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

poffin boffin: everyone in this thread should go to prison

Jokes on you, nobody can get to prison now that they’ve stopped oil!
posted by dr_dank at 4:41 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Earth is absolutely on track to become an uninhabitable hell planet and I say that with zero hyperbole.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 4:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

The physical thing is not the art. Van Gough painted the painting and it can't be un-painted, erased from the cultural heritage or whatever. Destroying the actual physical painting will prevent some people from seeing it with their own eyeballs, but is that the important part? Some rich people would have lost their trophy.
posted by ctmf at 4:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Earth is absolutely on track to become an uninhabitable hell planet and I say that with zero hyperbole.

That is pure hyperbole, unless you can point to a peer-reviewed projection and analysis in support of your assertion that the entire planet will become uninhabitable.
posted by tclark at 4:49 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

It's clearly a wonderful protest of course, but aside from its protest value it's an epic performance art piece, really trounces Banksey's self shredding print, so..

I don’t care about the protest one way or the other, but this is just nonsense. As art qua art, it’s unnotable.

Some rich people would have lost their trophy.

Worth noting that this painting is publicly owned and is made available to viewing by the public at no cost.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I would be sad for a few minutes in a famous painting was ruined. I would be sad the rest of my life if my children starved to death because of a global drought.
posted by gwydapllew at 4:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Worth noting that this painting is publicly owned

Thanks, didn't know that but it doesn't change my point much. Even had the painting been damaged, it's a simple property crime.
posted by ctmf at 4:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey, why not just ask them to immolate themselves on the White House lawn? That's what a real environmentalist would do.

Wynn Alan Bruce self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court six months ago as a climate change protest and it was barely in the news. Certainly raised fewer hackles and caused much less discussion than this whole Sunflowers situation.
posted by twelve cent archie at 4:56 PM on October 15, 2022 [35 favorites]

Acb, that plan sounds like it hits the kinds of people who can afford millions for art where it hurts. I approve.
posted by Jacen at 4:57 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm willing to bet that the protesters appreciate the immense cultural value of artworks and that throwing soup at a Van Gogh deeply hurt them. That's what makes the protest effective, in my eyes: it is an act of desperation.

It is painful to see an artwork being targeted and put at risk. But is much more painful to see the desperation in the eyes of these young people. I think the goal of the protest is to appeal to a similar feeling of desperation in all of us. Because we should be desperate because only that will cause us to act in the radical way that is necessary.
posted by Desertshore at 5:00 PM on October 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

This thread is surprising to me.

"There is no art on a dead planet."
posted by LooseFilter at 5:01 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

I would be sad the rest of my life if my children starved to death because of a global drought.

One of the key inputs to global agriculture is fossil fuels. The whole point of Just Stop Oil and activism like it is to convince governments to throttle off the supply of those - not just make them unnecessary by replacing them with cleaner energy sources, which is happening already, but to actively cut back the amount available beyond what is needed to keep the world running as normal. There is likely to be a whole lot of starving to death if they succeed (along with civil unrest and wars, and countries turning to coal power even more than they already are due to existing oil and gas shortages).
posted by makomk at 5:05 PM on October 15, 2022

Van Gogh, if he were still living, would be so disgusted by our meek non-response to the murder of civilization by capitalists that he would throw tomato soup on the painting himself.

The vast majority of humans will never see the actual painting, whether it's destroyed by tomato soup or not. An astonishing number of people WILL see reproductions of it, because it's part of our cultural heritage. The only thing that can destroy a painting that's this widely known and reproduced is the destruction of civilization itself, which may well be accomplished by climate change. Being mad that the painting is threatened by tomato soup, but not that it's threatened by climate change, shows a distressing lack of risk-assessment skills.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [23 favorites]

Mother of god, no one is saying “let the planet die, that this painting may live.” Stop hitting that straw man with a stick.

I’m a part-time amateur climate activist who doesn’t think “well, people are talking about climate change now, even if it’s to say activists are crazy and destructive” is helpful.
posted by argybarg at 5:07 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

We're headed for +3.2°C by which point tipping points push us beyond +4°C. We're fairly sure +4°C leaves the tropics uninhabitable by humans, and reduces the earth's maximum carrying capacity below one billion humans.

Anderson showed climate change creates a wet stratosphere that'll destroys our ozone layer, which makes climate change worse than nuclear war in every way. Also, island nations tend towards cannibalism when real famines hit, which maybe impacts London museums.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:09 PM on October 15, 2022 [15 favorites]

Yes! Climate change is a nightmare and a dire emergency!

Every last person in this thread agrees with this point.
posted by argybarg at 5:11 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Every last person in this thread agrees with this point.

No, they don't.
posted by Desertshore at 5:15 PM on October 15, 2022 [19 favorites]

That is pure hyperbole, unless you can point to a peer-reviewed projection and analysis in support of your assertion that the entire planet will become uninhabitable.

It's possible for the earth to be "on track to become an uninhabitable hell planet" and still have parts that are inhabitable. I mean, the earth is already an uninhabitable hell planet for many people, and that's not pure hyperbole. Just look at Pakistan - not only was 1/3 of the country under water, but this ruined their cotton crop (key source of income for many) and it will make it impossible for farmers to plant wheat this cycle - a key crop. Many people there are already in a dire situation, with a very dire future ahead of them.

But since you asked for material referencing peer-reviewed studies showing this here you go.

Yes! Climate change is a nightmare and a dire emergency! Every last person in this thread agrees with this point.

Weirdly, no.
posted by coffeecat at 5:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [21 favorites]

no one is saying “let the planet die, that this painting may live.”

That's the strawman, because no one is saying that anyone is saying that. I'm simply astonished that people are more critical of the way something important and urgent was said, rather than what was actually said in the first place.

Desperate people will continue to do increasingly desperate things, regardless of whether those things make sense or not, or are the most effective ways to be heard or not. This is what desperation looks like. If we keep criticizing imperfect messengers we will never respond to the messages.

Cassandra wasn't cursed, she was just paying attention. Her story isn't a myth, it's an object lesson, and we better start listening to it.
posted by LooseFilter at 5:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [21 favorites]

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread*, but give us roses**.
(*a livable climate/world)
(** sunflower paintings)
posted by gudrun at 5:21 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's possible for the earth to be "on track to become an uninhabitable hell planet" and still have parts that are inhabitable.

That does not track. What part of "For science sake, the ACTUAL projections of climate change are horrifying enough, we don't need such bombastic exaggeration as to undermine by inference the terrifying reality of the prospects for humanity in the next century" was unclear, exactly?

Am I somehow one of the people that doesn't agree that climate change is a dire emergency?

Climate change deniers reject the science that is right in front of them because they are so completely committed to their worldview that they reject the best scientific knowledge available to us. Hyperbole about the extinction of humanity, far beyond the extremely dire predictions of our best scientific knowledge that billions of humans are at risk of dying, is also a denial of climate science, also a commitment to a worldview over the science right before us.
posted by tclark at 5:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't find this action terrible; I just have no patience for the this kind of activism without a solid muscle of policy and follow-up behind it. It's just a god-damned waste — opportunity cost when we can't afford it.

I have a good friend who does all kinds of work with Citizens Climate Lobby (who do focused lobbying on a single legislative proposal). She remembered talking to a Washington state legislator just after a big "kayaktivist" flotilla. He told her not one representative from the kayaktivists called his office to say what they wanted. He was ready to back them! Just radio silence.

I'm lucky enough to work with a skilled local activist group that went to state-level hearings of our Utilities and Transportation Commission and testified, in adjudication after adjudication, in favor of our regional utility scrapping its coal-powered plant early. At our first meeting a few people who were new to our meeting offered to go to the steps of the building where the adjudication was happening and throw red paint on themselves. No thank you, we said. We're just going to talk.

And we did. We got a lot of what we wanted, too.

Street-theatre activism is mostly bullshit.
posted by argybarg at 5:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

As art qua art, it’s unnotable.

Glad we settled that debate.

You know what? I'm convinced. I was wrong. In fact, we should go further. We should seize and destroy one priceless artwork every week until all oil exploration and extraction ends and society is zero-carbon.

Talk about strawmen. The purpose of the protestors was manifestly not to destroy the artwork, nor was it to blackmail the oil industry by threatening priceless artworks.

The people in this thread who have stated "I would destroy every work of art in the world if it would stop climate change" or whatever are also clearly not literally advocating for that, nor does anyone think that such a plan would be at all successful. They are engaging in hyperbole to point out the absurdity of getting upset about an act of performative non-vandalism because it doesn't have mainstream appeal while at the same time claiming to be in agreement with its message about the dire urgency of climate change.

The negative reactions to the protest action in this thread and elsewhere only prove their point: people do not want to deal with climate change, will do anything to avoid dealing with it, even when it is staring them in the face. We are more concerned with maintaining the appearance of a nice neat polite consumer society and are willing to burn ourselves to death as long as we die still believing in the fantasy.

Wynn Alan Bruce self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court six months ago as a climate change protest and it was barely in the news. Certainly raised fewer hackles and caused much less discussion than this whole Sunflowers situation.

That was sort of my point.

Here's the thing: there's no way to know what is going to work, or how long it is going to take. That's not how protests or revolutions or change happens. It is only in retrospect that we can say, oh, yeah, storming the Bastille, assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, Mahsa Amini not "properly" covering her hair, whatever, that's where it started. So activists act, because only with continuous repeated actions is there a possibility of something happening. It cannot be planned, it is not programmatic. Organization can increase the pressure, multiply the force of the action, as can media coverage, etc., but ultimately there has to be a probably completely aleatory event.
posted by Saxon Kane at 5:33 PM on October 15, 2022 [20 favorites]

(This was a GREAT protest. Absolutely great. How many other climate protests have made this much news

There is actually such a thing as bad publicity, and this is that. It doesn’t make anyone more aware of climate change, it just convinces a bunch of fusty pearl-clutchers that climate change activists are hapless dummies, while lacking any sort of poignant symbolism that might convince the lazy or uninformed to actually think about climate change. I’m fully on their side and I nonetheless think this was a stupid and ineffective act; it’s frankly shitty marketing.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:43 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Ctrl+f 9/11: no results
Ctrl+f WTC: no results

The biggest protest event in my lifetime was when a bunch of dedicated people drove some airplanes into buildings. Terrorism? Absolutely. But boy howdy did that get people's attention.

What it feels like people are missing about this one is the drama. This was a dramatic thing to do: it was in a popular place, with a famous work, by an artist everyone knew. It had the added bonus of not actually doing any real damage, to people or property. But it's the drama of it that makes everybody sit up and take notice.

I think this was a good protest.
posted by nushustu at 5:48 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread*, but give us roses**.
(*a livable climate/world)
(** sunflower paintings)

The "us" with the sunflower painting was an oil company. Pretty sure they aren't starving.
posted by aniola at 5:49 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Can we at least agree that the people in this thread who think this was a good protest do not therefore care more about climate change than the people in this thread who think it was not?
posted by argybarg at 5:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Argybarg...I don't see why that's a question or is necessary?
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:54 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is actually such a thing as bad publicity, and this is that.

posted by aspersioncast at 9:43 PM on October 15 [+] [!]

Eponysterical?
posted by snofoam at 5:58 PM on October 15, 2022

Like...if I think this is a good protest and say so, I am stating that only. Not claiming any superiority of caring about climate change.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:58 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Can we at least agree [...]

argybarg, I acknowledge that it sounds like you care quite a bit about climate change even though you disagree with this particular protest.
posted by aniola at 6:02 PM on October 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ahem. Web 3 fixes this. *exits*
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 6:02 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm certainly willing to agree that the people who did the protest probably care more about climate change than anyone in this thread, myself included, because at least they are putting their asses on the line.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:04 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

(those people here who also put their asses on the line, of course, are exempted from that statement)
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:05 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

tclark, I can't tell if you're confused by my typo (it should have been "still have parts that are habitable") or something else.

But yes, I think it's denying the science if you think it's "bombastic exaggeration" to suggest that the planet is on track to be inhabitable. And you don't have to take my word for it, some scientists agree. The fact is, it's hard to model for what will happen when the scale of disasters increase and food becomes more scarce, in terms of geopolitics.

I think too it's worth considering how old these protestors are. I'm just going to guess that they were 18. If so, and they live to 80, they will die in 2102. If they have kids at age 30, and those kids have kids at 30, then that means their grandchildren will be born in 2064. That means their grandchildren, if they live to 80, could see 2144.

My point is that the projections for 2050 look awful enough, the projects for 2100 are even worse, most projections don't even bother much past that, but that's a time period that's far more tangible for Gen-Z. Like, if they have a desire to reproduce like most people, there is a very real chance they will love dearly people who will be facing what the world is like post 2100. I don't blame them for being terrified and desperate - and I think we should try to take that terror/desperation seriously.

Can we at least agree that the people in this thread who think this was a good protest do not therefore care more about climate change than the people in this thread who think it was not?

I'm OK with people deciding this protest wasn't for them, but it strikes me as misplaced energy to get so upset about it. I am genuinely surprised by how up in arms and angry some people seem to be about it - in this thread and elsewhere online. And this doesn't apply to you argybarg, but some in this thread have been circulating misinformation about the group to discredit them - which is more than just not agreeing with the tactics. Some of us are responding to the inclination of some here to smear these young activists (they must be rich brats! funded by an oil heiress so it's a false flag op! how can we be sure they really knew the artwork wouldn't be damaged!).
posted by coffeecat at 6:08 PM on October 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

No one can truly know what someone else thinks, but some in the thread seem to be motivated by their passion for the artwork, which can read as caring more for white man’s canon than global survival. A critique of methods could be genuine. At the same time, it would be unrealistic to ignore the fact that nitpicking the exact method of protest is a time-honored way of undermining causes. Personally, I would be most open to critiques from people who are doing more for this cause, and with more success.
posted by snofoam at 6:11 PM on October 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

The biggest protest event in my lifetime was when a bunch of dedicated people drove some airplanes into buildings. Terrorism? Absolutely. But boy howdy did that get people's attention.

It's a nice example to illustrate that not all publicity is good publicity, and that sometimes making enemies (even ones that definitely weren't your friends before) can be a bad idea.

Like, the situation at hand isn't really on the same scale, a difference of degree sufficiently large as to become a difference in kind, but the idea that all attention is good is just so nakedly false that it's weird to see it trotted out here. Like, there are limits. This might not be over them, or even anywhere near them, but there are limits. Not all publicity is good publicity.
posted by Dysk at 6:14 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

No one can truly know what someone else thinks, but some in the thread seem to be motivated by their passion for the artwork, which can read as caring more for white man’s canon than global survival.

Probably more charitable to see it as a passion for artwork in general than this painting very specifically, unless you have some reason to see a pattern of it only applying to the white man's canon. Assume good faith and all that.
posted by Dysk at 6:16 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Dysk, I find that difficult after reviewing some of the comments in question, which appear (imo) very much in bad faith.
posted by ®@ at 6:20 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

A couple of indigenous perspectives from NZ which I fully respect -
I'm not sacrificing a movement for white nihilism and white climate anxiety. Do you see our Pasifika whanaunga carrying on in the same way when they are already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and Many climate justice activists have concerns with these kinds of direct actions bc they make it harder for those of us on the ground, especially BIPOC. They are often privileged white people who want a channel for their panic but who are not...
And a very different 'punk rock' (albeit now a privileged white-guy) take which I can appreciate but, as above, its unlikely to bring lasting change (which is addressed in the same twitter thread) People are dunking on these absurdist demonstrations but I think they're kinda cool. The point they're making is that your most priceless shit is worthless on a dead planet, and while they're not going to change any minds it's a way to get that idea into the discourse..
posted by phigmov at 6:26 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

That'd probably be a flag-it-and-move-on or metatalk situation, but even if you think it's bad faith, there is a gulf between "I cannot assume there arguments are entirely in good faith" and "this person is defending an artwork so they must be a white supremacist".
posted by Dysk at 6:28 PM on October 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Good faith, sure, but they didn’t choose a piece of art from Bangladesh or Vanuatu. They picked a piece that was valorized by the same Western culture that is responsible for the overwhelming share of climate change, particularly on a per capital basis. The piece at stake was not one of the wonders of the world, it was a piece that is important in a certain cultural context. To even put it on par with something like the buddhas of Bamiyan seems very odd to me and very western-centric.
posted by snofoam at 6:30 PM on October 15, 2022 [10 favorites]

JSO didn't throw paint at an artwork from Vanuatu or Bangladesh? This thread is specifically about that incidents? Like, I don't agree with the comparison to to Bamiyan Buddhas is particularly great either, but I can see that sort of hyperbole coming from a position of viewing cultural heritage writ large as important. You see similar vehemence and (to my mind) out-of-proportion comparisons whenever book burnings of any kind come up, for example.
posted by Dysk at 6:38 PM on October 15, 2022

Yeah, your advice is good. I had flagged it already and I am failing to move on. White supremacy never entered my mind, but re-reading now, I didn't fully parse the bit about "white man's canon." Fair point. The bad faith I was talking about was strawmanning "throw soup at protective glass" as "attempting to destroy pricelesd artwork," stating that life without parole would be a reasonable punishment, yet also suggesting that a more reasonable form of protest would be attacking infrastructure.
posted by ®@ at 6:38 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

To add a little bit of context, there are still almost 900 Van Gogh paintings surviving today. I am not saying that anyone is racist for valuing that painting, but I do think the value is tied to a particular cultural value system. And it’s one that was determined by white men and prioritized the work of white men.
posted by snofoam at 6:43 PM on October 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sure, climate change is bad but property damage??
posted by Reyturner at 7:35 PM on October 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Guys, please try to show other MeFites some charity and assume we are all on the same side w/r/t climate change being a disaster.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 7:45 PM on October 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Go blow up a goddamn pipeline. That sort of ecoterrorism I would happily support. Hell, I'd donate to the defense fund.

Ummm, if you support this, why aren't you doing it already.

Is that you, Vova?
posted by eustatic at 8:19 PM on October 15, 2022

Wasn't that the suffragettes' whole "thing"?

I thought of this 1913 suffragette action as soon as I saw this.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:25 PM on October 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

In fact, there is a good case that 9/11 achieved its immediate goals, Dysk, but its long term goals were delusional, making further success impossible.

We've faced real "bad publicity" in the climate movement before, like say Sanjay Gandhi's idiotic sterilization campaign in 1975, but really this protest looks like good publicity..

We all encounter this story through the fallacious "protestors damage famous painting" narrative, at which point most people wonder off, maybe impressed by the activists resolve. Anyone who reads or discusses further witnesses this narrative collapse though, at which point non-dogmatic people feel their news source lied to make climate protestors look bad (or simply to pump sales).

At a high level, I'd expect mild "bad publicity" becomes progressively less problematic for the climate movement, due to more visible climate consequences, and discrediting of climate minimizers like neo-classical economists.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:31 PM on October 15, 2022

This really is a surprising thread! My own knee-jeek reaction was "what?!" and "not Sunflowers!!" and "how pointless". Once my knee settled down, my thought was "makes sense actually" - it's a pretty strong statement that destroying precious things is terrible, and yet we're ignoring the constant destruction of precious things around us (lives, land, property - even art). How many people's lives have to be destroyed for there to be as much consensus that that's not acceptable as there is that destroying a much-reproduced painting is not acceptable? It seems very clear, not muddled, and the opposite of nihilistic to me.
posted by trig at 8:46 PM on October 15, 2022 [19 favorites]

This came off to me as "trust fund babies who didn't get enough attention
at home as children act like a bunch of edgelords".
posted by Chocomog at 8:53 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Guys, please try to show other MeFites some charity and assume we are all on the same side w/r/t climate change being a disaster.

It seems super weird to use a mod comment to ask people to pretend that everyone agrees about something that is clearly not the case (??).
posted by dusty potato at 8:56 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

Lots of people say that if they had a time-machine they would kill Hitler ( or Stalin etc) Yet we have proof that they would not.

No time machine is required to avenge/pre-emp the slaughter of 100s of millions of fossil fuel victims and yet the monsters live. We can barely agree if non-destruction of one copy of an image is a bridge too far.

Legal things to do:
If you own a fossil mine/well/lease - close it.

Direct your companies to source their power and their raw material inputs from fossils to renewables/recycleables.

Convert your armed forces to renewable fuels.

End the subsidies for pollution and habitst destruction and instead criminalize pollution and habitat destruction

etc.

The climate crisis doesnt need more awareness or public support it needs the behavior of powerful greedy psychopaths to change or be ended.

This thread could be a list of things yo do aside from:

Die or Die Trying.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 9:26 PM on October 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

THE GALLERY HAS REPORTED THAT THE PAINTING IS FINE AND UNDAMAGED. IT HAD A PANE OF GLASS OVER IT, WHICH IS WHY THE ACTIVISTS CHOSE IT TO THROW SOUP ON.

Mainstream media buries this detail because they want to portray the protesters as art-destroying vandals rather than media savvy activists.

Meanwhile, the world's largest fossil fuel services company Schlumberger had the windows at their Cambridge research center smashed but no large outlets are reporting on it. That's a story they can't spin, so they bury it.

As for the "trust fund babies" comment; I'd like to know when any armchair commenters here have put their physical and legal safety at risk for an important cause.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:33 PM on October 15, 2022 [13 favorites]

The inchoate rage some people have displayed over this is probably enough to increase global average temperature at least as much as a year's worth of carbon dioxide emissions.
posted by wierdo at 9:39 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

This thread could be a list of things yo do aside from:

Die or Die Trying.

Things that can have a big impact on climate change (personal, policy, and/or both, this needs all sorts!) / Habits to assess/reassess:

- Transportation (how to get around)
- Eating (animals aren't products)
- Spending (reduce reuse repair)
posted by aniola at 9:50 PM on October 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ummm, if you support this, why aren't you doing it already.

If they were actually doing something like that, would they tell you?
posted by atoxyl at 10:27 PM on October 15, 2022

I'm disheartened by how incredibly conservative and reactionary so many of these comments are.

I thought metafilter people understood that effective protest is never polite and convenient.

That effective protest is not always about changing minds, especially not the minds of the establishment (which I am now, sadly seeing, so many of you are part of)

Protesors like these express rage and grief to show others like them who feel voiceless and powerless, that they are not alone.

I think it's an absolute tragedy that these young people know that they are more likely to get the attention of the world by appearing to deface a valuable object, than by setting themselves on fire.

I'm really shocked and shaken by the complacent, defensive, knee jerk responses I see here.

I thought you understood.
posted by Zumbador at 10:39 PM on October 15, 2022 [45 favorites]

Most of this thread has focused on judging this act of protest as if we were commentating on a figure skating routine. It's terrorism, or it's unsympathetic, or these kids are rich privileged white kids, or it's shooting the movement in the foot, or it's great and I love it, or I appreciate what they're going for but I have to dock a couple points for their failure to choose a really incisive target, or they should have done XYZ instead.

Loosefilter pointed out that desperate people do desperate things. What these kids did was a desperate thing. Maybe it's ugly, maybe it's not a perfect protest, maybe it's stupid and misguided, maybe they -- personally -- are not ideal protesters because they are not climate refugees. But the water we're all swimming in is getting very, very hot, and these 20 year old kids are going to keep seeing it get hotter long after some of the people in this thread have died of old age, and they know that, and they know that we all know that, and they know that a lot of very powerful people know that, but somehow it's still not moving the needle, and every day the water just keeps getting hotter.

The world is convulsing right now. The biosphere, I mean. All of it. It's not just the CO2 -- it's deforestation, it's wildfires, it's ocean acidification, it's eutrophication, it's rampant overfishing, it's agriculture fueled by fertilizer and neonicotinoid pesticides. It's all of it at once.

Two days ago, a report was released saying that the global population of vertebrate animals has declined 70% in the last 50 years. For context, Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh has existed for about 135 years.

The global insect population appears to be dropping about 1% per year, on average. If you'd taken away 1% of Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh every year since it was painted, it would be gone now.

Fifty percent of coral reefs -- hotspots of marine biodiversity -- have died off since 1950. Take away 50 percent of Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh every 70 years and as we speak it would be down to its last shred.

I study carbon cycling and other biogeochemical cycles as part of my job. I will try to provide a little bit of a zoomed out context for what is happening to the Earth. To start with, we're changing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere more abruptly than anything since the asteroid that killed the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And remember, that's just the CO2. It does not account for the overfishing, the fertilizer synthesis (which has more than doubled the amount of fixed nitrogen entering the ocean since preindustrial times), the agriculture, the deforestation, et cetera. Speaking of overfishing, it's targeting large marine animals in a way that has no known precedent in the history of life on Earth. In 540 million years, it appears that no mass extinction has ever attacked the marine food chain from the top down as we are doing. It's uncharted territory. To compare our current situation to the most severe mass extinction in the fossil record, the Permian-Triassic extinction, which eliminated over 90% of all the species in the ocean, it is worth noting that that particular event most likely took between 12,000 years and 110,000 years to play out. Most of human civilization as we know it fits into the last 12,000 years. The amount of carbon released at the PT boundary was maybe as much as 22000 gigatons, at a peak rate of 0.4 to 1.5 gigatons per year. We have not released nearly as much carbon as that, but we are currently releasing something like 10 gigatons per year -- 6 to 25 times faster than the biggest extinction that ever happened on Earth. (And again, that's just the CO2.)

What do I do about this? What do you do about this? I believe very strongly in applying the concept of harm reduction to the global biosphere. Stopping the damage is impossible, but slowing the rate of the damage -- even infinitesimally -- gives ecosystems a greater chance to adapt and rebound than they would have had if nothing had slowed down. It's a good thought, and it's a true thought, but what do I DO about it? The scale of this stuff is mind boggling. Frankly, anything I do feels like pissing in the wind, even though every action -- even the smallest action -- that is taken to slow down the destruction is still important. I get why people take actions that look stupid or desperate or absurd in the face of this, because everything I do to take action against the wrecking of the planet also feels stupid and desperate and absurd. Even when it's the right thing to do.

I have a little theory. Maybe it's wrong, but I keep thinking about it. The theory is this: the reason this thing, this incredibly silly and stupid thing, this throwing FUCKING SOUP on a painting of flowers, gets under our skin the way it does is that we could do it too. I'm a 90 minute drive from the only da Vinci painting in the Americas. I could do it too. Honestly, it's a little enticing. Why? Probably because it's such a stupid silly petty act of protest against all the stupid silly petty decisions that have brought the world to this point, and an acknowledgment of my own stupid silly petty impotence as the water keeps heating up. Burn yourself to death in front of the Supreme Court, and people shrug and forget it. Why? Because it's frankly too awful to really think about for long. It's awful; it's tragic; I wish we could do something about all this; oh well. Talk about actually blowing up an oil pipeline and you've lost me. But fucking SOUP on a fucking painting? I could do that tomorrow if I wanted. Would it mean anything at all? Would it help stop the burning? I don't know, probably not. But there are moments, a great many moments, when a stunt like this doesn't feel any more stupid or useless than anything else I can realistically do. And you know what, somehow it's gotten people's attention in a way that self-immolation didn't.
posted by cubeb at 11:06 PM on October 15, 2022 [110 favorites]

folks in the Sinéad O’Connor thread who couldn't understand or imagine the backlash from her 1992 SNL appearance, take note of how this thread unraveled
posted by glonous keming at 11:35 PM on October 15, 2022 [29 favorites]

I thought metafilter people understood that effective protest is never polite and convenient.

It's possible to address with this statement and disagree that this was effective protest. Effective protest is never polite or convenient, but that doesn't mean everything that is impolite or inconvenient is effective protest.
posted by Dysk at 11:49 PM on October 15, 2022 [16 favorites]

“Life has no remote, get up and change it yourself.”

-Charlie Brown
posted by clavdivs at 12:25 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

cubeb, thank you. I was initially on the "these idiot kids are doing dumb things!" side. I'm going to be thinking about the points you brought up for awhile
posted by treepour at 12:43 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wow! that took off.
I wonder why art defacement is having a moment right now? I read the good articles claudivs posted above, but I'm not sure I feel enlightened. Or maybe: activists see how people react to the totally meaningful and relevant removal of statues in the context of BLM, and get out to see if it will work in other contexts as well?

IMO the action was a bit silly/meaningless, and I strongly prefer NOT performing destructive activism in museums. Something could go wrong that one didn't anticipate. But I have to acknowledge that people are very agitated about it in this very thread, and I suppose that is something.

That said, I always find it sad when people indicate that art is something extra, something less important than something else, like money or climate change or social issues, something we can do without. Art is at the core of what humanity is, for good and bad. Art is an important human activity with which we can discuss money, or climate change or social issues. We need to save the world so we can continue making art. And while I somewhat subscribe to Marcel Duchamp's comment that art over 50 years old is dead, I think we need to keep the dead art, for inspiration and insight, however limited that insight may be. For instant, I think there was a social dimension to van Gogh's artworks, but I am not sure I can see it now, in the way it was seen when the paintings were made. I can be told, and try to see.

It must be frightening to be a young person today. Usually in climate-threads, I list up all the good things that are happening, but I have to admit the pace is tectonic and this stupid war is slowing down everything (but also speeding up the awareness that we have to get rid of fossil fuels). And if you have no access to the political level and no knowledge of how to create change, it is natural to be terrified.
I go to meetings that are like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, and then I go to meetings that are like: let's go! We can do it! I have a feeling that in Tory UK, there are more of the former, and thus the kids are even more angry and desperate. I look at the Friday strikes here, and they are so small, the kids must feel so lonely.
posted by mumimor at 3:17 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm willing to bet that the protesters appreciate the immense cultural value of artworks and that throwing soup at a Van Gogh deeply hurt them. That's what makes the protest effective, in my eyes: it is an act of desperation.

To me, the important takeaway from this for anyone in a position to do anything should be that young. People. Are. PISSED. And afraid. And that there is a distinct possibility that future actions might not stop at beloved paintings; that since we've basically sold their future out from under them, their risk/benefit analysis on civil disobedience etc is going to look MIGHTY different than it did for similar activists in generations past; so maybe, just maybe, the grownups should start fucking paying attention if we want to maintain any semblance of public order (insofar as that's going to be possible as our ecosystem continues to spiral).

To me the relevance of this particular action shouldn't be measured by whether it changes the general populace's attitude to climate crisis, but by whether leaders manage to understand it as the implied threat that it is (whether or not that was the protesters' intention).
posted by TinyChicken at 4:18 AM on October 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

It'd be great to do a survey where people had to choose, "Would you rather allow all Van Gogh's paintings be destroyed, or have X people thrown into a meat grinder?", and see what value of X led a majority to choose people over the paintings.

Personally I think Van Gogh's work is overrated and overpriced. He did a few nice pictures but also plenty of rubbish ones. Maybe Sunflowers is good, but it's not as good as it's made out to be. No painting is good enough to be worth more than a few thousand dollars.

Maybe these people who threw the soup didn't care about changing anything, maybe they were just really angry that they have to breathe in poisonous fumes every time they walk down the street and that if they grew up in London their lungs were probably stunted by illegal levels of pollution. Cars and air pollution kill so many people, and climate change kills so many people, isn't is understandable for someone to just be furious and want to lash out, pointlessly or not? If my lungs had been stunted I'd be angry. How can anyone defend the painting, when the world is being made unlivable, wildlife is disappearing, and forests are disappearing? I don't want to live in a tar-pit, thanks all the same car drivers.
posted by mokey at 4:55 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel like a lot of people in this thread are collapsing four discrete opinions into two supersets of opinions. Some of the comments here are reactions to the actual protest, and some of the comments here are reactions to those reactions.

My own stance is that, while I don't have any strong opinions about this choice of protest in either direction—this is, in fact, a protest you can feel ambivalent and apathetic about; my reaction was basically "oh huh!"—I'm irritated by the behaviors of both the pro- and anti- camps in different ways. Turns out there are ways you can be for and against this specific act that strike me as kinda dumb, and ways you can approve and disapprove of this specific act that feel nuanced and considered. (I think the absolute dumbest comments were of the "consider the death sentence" variety, but the spectrum of "dumb" extended to both sides of the debate.)

I feel like, partway into this thread, the conversation became a lot of meta-reaction: people having opinions about other people's opinions. A lot of the super-intense "let's talk about just how fucked the Earth is" came up as a way of trying to drive concessions out of the "let's talk about just how much I like Van Gogh" camp—its rhetoric was being deployed, not just pro-protest, but anti-anti-protest. And I feel (along with a lot of other people ITT, it seems) that that rhetoric got extreme in ways that verged on hostile towards quite a few of the reasonable not-entirely-on-board-with-this folks.

I think it's both reasonable to say that this particular action doesn't feel like it was effective, or that it may have been counterproductive, and to say that, like Saxon Kane said in their great comment, this kind of activism literally consists of trying to throw things at the wall to see what sticks. That doesn't mean you can't look at the aftermath of the protest and decide whether or not this particular experiment succeeded—and it doesn't mean that we can't have differing opinions about that—but it also means that it's important to separate our feelings about this particular protest, or its results, from the individuals who undertook it. While my feelings are mixed about whether or not things like this do good—mixed, though, not flat-out opposed—I think the actual people that did this mean well, and bravo to them for doing more for a profoundly meaningful cause than most people do.

"If you think this protest was ineffective, you must care less about climate change than I do" strikes me as a really misanthropic and hyperbolic take, but no less so than "these kids deserve life sentences for throwing soup at some glass." But these aren't reactions to the same thing: the latter is a hyperbolic reaction to the protest itself, and the former is a reaction to reactions to the protest. And I think that what happens is, because some of the initial reactions were ill-considered and extreme, the meta-reaction leaps to a similarly extreme register, which leads to the kinda gross thing where the argument as a whole has become about defining "uninhabitable hell planet" to make a point about a similar argument defining what "hyperbole" is and isn't.

Which, to complete the ouroboros, is why I feel ambivalent about this protest. Yes, it's created a conversation, but I'm wholly unconvinced that "create a conversation" is meaningful—not after a lifetime of seeing where Occupy Wall Street or the George Floyd protests led. I think that, if something meaningful ensues from this, it will likely be something that virtually none of us pick up on, because the only reactions that matter will come from a dozen or two anonymous individuals, each of whom finds this gesture profoundly impactful in ways that lead to them doing something tremendous a decade and a half from now, long past the point that all the rest of us have all forgotten that this ever happened. Protests like this serve to up the entropy in the room, in other words, in the hope that that will lead to something changing. At which point, the question becomes whether entropy is the most important consideration here, and I legitimately don't know how to begin to go about answering that. Partly because a lot of my most meaningful experiences in life happened while I was staring at paintings on the wall, whereas none of my life or inner thoughts have been affected by acts of protest in any particular way, so in conclusion: ymmv, I guess.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:01 AM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

*eyeroll intensifies*

If you think that throwing soup on some glass is terrorism but systematically destroying the planet with fossil fuel emissions and lying about it for decades isn't, well let's just say that we have a difference of opinion, and yours is ridiculous.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:16 AM on October 16, 2022 [16 favorites]

At the risk of further derail, after reflection I just want to clarify: all of the arguments in my previous comment relate essentially to the kind of comfortable, white activists we seem to see in the soup-throwing video. Indiginous peoples, for example, as the thread linked in this comment succinctly points out, have already had their futures ripped away, multiple times, and have been doing this work in a much more deeply-considered way, for much longer and with far more serious potential consequences for disruption and disobedience. This is kind of what I was driving at by specifying "similar activists" but I should have been more explicit, sorry.
posted by TinyChicken at 5:17 AM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

“Terrorist” is not a moral judgment that their cause is evil, but a description of acts of force where the target is chosen to demonstrate a point and send a warning.
posted by acb at 5:21 AM on October 16, 2022

It's impossible to claim that using the word "terrorism" doesn't imply a moral judgement.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:29 AM on October 16, 2022 [10 favorites]

That definition of 'terrorism' oddly leaves out the 'inspire terror' part. All protest is meant to demonstrate a point, all protest by its nature sends a warning, if only a moral one.

I don't know. Our sense of ethics evolved during a very cheerful time on earth, climate-wise. People had to learn to get along together, but their bigger existential thoughts had little or nothing to do with the real fate of the world around them, because there wasn't much they could really do to the world. Now here we are at the extremes, and our ethics ties us into knots. Our usual view of crime, of sin--particular acts done by particular people--is useless when we're up against a system that billions of people have participated in.

I say to myself, well, terrorism may be the only way forward, because we need to inspire terror in--but then I catch myself, inspire terror in whom? A set of CEOs? The class of people from which CEOs arise? Everyone who drives a car, everyone who uses plastic, everyone who eats corn or soy or beef or pork? Who do we need to terrorize to save the world?

And if a protest is not meant to inspire just a bit of terror, what's it meant for? To inspire a little sympathy? Among whom? To what end? Do we imagine at some point building enough sympathy, among enough people, that we all rise up and demand-- Well, demand what? And how long do we picture all this sympathy-building taking?

I've appreciated the comments that refer to this protest as a kind of desperation. Because we don't know what to do, we don't know what works--nothing so far has worked, if by 'work' we mean 'make a substantial and meaningful decrease in emissions.' If there is no way forward, if there's no one to convince, if there's no one we can scare into acting ethically, if persuasion, sympathy and terror have all shown themselves to be useless, then what do we have left?
posted by mittens at 5:44 AM on October 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

It'd be great to do a survey where people had to choose, "Would you rather allow all Van Gogh's paintings be destroyed, or have X people thrown into a meat grinder?", and see what value of X led a majority to choose people over the paintings.

Luckily, we don't have to do either!

If you think that throwing soup on some glass is terrorism but systematically destroying the planet with fossil fuel emissions and lying about it for decades isn't

I don't think anybody has said that, though? Like, I don't agree that this is terrorism (nor that polluting is - it's repugnant and, in a non-technical sense, criminal, but it's not this particular crime), but it is entirely possible to view both as terrorism, and endorse neither.

Being opposed to this particular protest is not the same as being in favour of environmental destruction.
posted by Dysk at 5:50 AM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

That's a fair point, and I concur. My point is that referring to a harmless non-violent action such as this as "terrorism" is needlessly inflammatory and does a disservice to both these activists, and the concept of language.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:02 AM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I totally agree with that.

(Oddly, I think I'd liekly be more in favour of a protest that could legitimately be described as terrorism.)
posted by Dysk at 6:08 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think this was Schrödinger's Protest, in the sense that it went simultaneously Too Far and nowhere near far enough. Did it fix anything? Clearly not. Did it cut through the noise and draw attention to their cause? Clearly yes.

I don't know what it would actually take to mobilize humanity to deal with climate change. I thought for a minute the pandemic might, back when everything was shut down and gas prices were plummeting. Now I'm more depressed than ever about it.

This protest, while imperfect, is *something* at least. We're all fucking grasping at straws, here.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:26 AM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ironically maybe, I am literally right now working for change. Practically, I am writing a letter to an organisation on the behalf of my own organisation, basically saying they need to get their heads out of their buts. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it is a letter that will be read and embraced by agents of change over there, and they will be able to use it in their work.

I don't know why I don't give up hope, but I think one thing is that nothing now is as depressing as the first two decades of this century, specially the aughts. When Al Gore had the election stolen, I had a terrible premonition, and then when 9-11 happened I instantly felt (rather than knew) what would happen next. I've been depressed since. Good friends of mine who were originally on the side of change got caught up in all the money and shit. At each of the different jobs I've had during that period I've felt sidelined, people have said to my face that I was out of touch, that my hope for a future was a hippie dream, that SUVs and skyscrapers are cool and I should calm down. Most of what appeared to be environmentally sustainable has been greenwashing. I've trudged along, finding a few friends and allies in the corners, since I had no other ideas.

And now I feel something is finally happening. I've had conversations with politicians across the spectrum and none are climate deniers. At work, climate change is at the top of the mind, and changes are being made to make sure it is taken seriously, rather than the empty rhetoric we've seen in the last decade. Our students are enthusiastic because they are learning how to be the change we need. It's too slow, I know, and I'm in a tiny progressive bubble. But I've seen before how small experiments can inspire much larger solutions. I have hope.
posted by mumimor at 7:25 AM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I just finished Our Missing Hearts by Celese Ng and there is a LOT in it about activism, art installations that are activist, things like spilling red paint down a bunch of city streets from a big heart, so it looks like blood (hearts are a theme throughout the book as you might guess from the title), making a big heart that blocks a path in a park out of yarn, painting hearts on crosswalks, (the most amazing example would spoil the ending of the book). They are dramatic and very public so people talk about them on social media so it gets around the draconian censorship of the state in the story, and so this happening at the same time has me thinking a lot about what sorts of activism the characters in that story would do around climate change. No answers yet but something I am mulling over.
posted by joannemerriam at 7:58 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Outraged at two kids & painting? Maybe you’re missing the bigger picture of where we’re at with protesting for action commensurate to the climate emergency - here’s a useful update, just in time for the next COP: From N. Klein, Blah blah blah to Blood blood blood - Holding the COP27 in Egypt’s Police State Creates a Moral Crisis for the Climate Movement.
posted by progosk at 8:39 AM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

It's not always true, but before anyone deploys the "comfortable white activist" tropes, they should think very hard about who the use of that language generally benefits. There are definitely times when the implicit critique is relevant, but coming out of white mouths, at least, it's often of the same class as "virtue signaling." I don't know how privileged these kids are or aren't, but they symbolically/nominally "defaced" a work of art out of the white Western tradition in protest of an issue that indeed affects them themselves personally and intimately, and they, not others, are going to take the consequences. I do not see the value of that critique here.

I am a dedicated lover of what used to be called high culture, but the overwhelmingly bourgeois nature of much of the response here is truly disheartening. Art exists for humanity, not humanity for art. And if you know the effective way to stop climate change, please go ahead and implement it.
posted by praemunire at 9:28 AM on October 16, 2022 [13 favorites]

I imagine that soon everyone waiting in the line to get frisked before they enter the National Gallery will have ample time to consider their personal failure to fix climate change.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:14 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

If there is no way forward, if there's no one to convince, if there's no one we can scare into acting ethically, if persuasion, sympathy and terror have all shown themselves to be useless, then what do we have left?

Yes, it's about desperation and what that tells us as a symptom of what's really going on. To the degree that this conversation has fallen into a variety of false dilemmas about this specific act of protest (is this effective protest or not? do you really care about the climate or not? Are you doing anything yourself or not?), I think it's missing that primary point: this act was less specific protest than it was desperate grasping to be heard. And it's because young people are freaking the fuck out, rightly so. They all have to live with this for a lot longer than the rest of us, and that perspective must be the framing of any conversation about their actions.

Personally, I don't like people using art or any creative work as proxy for more serious conversations, but we do that all the time about everything anyway, because unlike governance, people actually like paying attention to art. And my opinion about how they said the thing really is substantially less important than listening to what some obviously desperate people are trying to say.

Pay attention to where the arrow is pointing, not the quality of its design.
posted by LooseFilter at 10:48 AM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think that anything goes in order to save the climate, but there’s something inherently absurd about young people screaming in front of old oil paintings and franticly gluing themselves to a wall.

And tomato soup. It sounds a bit like art actually… I think I changed my mind
posted by beesbees at 11:12 AM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

My reaction was: gosh I hate they did this, but so proud of them for taking a stand. Moreso, with the trembling, obvious fear and adrenaline and they still did this.

The kids today are alright in my book.

Subsequently learning that the painting was fine, I’m even more proud of them.

But I’ve always been someone who would rather rock the boat than accept business as usual.

I’m also nursing a theory as to why people pearl clutch protests methods, because If there is a protest and it has a chance of being effective, people will argue the methods are bad. Like clockwork.

I’m still trying to work out the details, but I believe it has more to do with protest potentially causing disruptions and social upset that can be dangerous and violent, so the social instinct from the majority is to restore balance and normalcy to prevent that. And thus why you see people who generally agree with protestors, those that might even hypothesize more drastic action is needed, becoming critical once that action is taken in a way that would lead to bigger recognition and more widespread protests.

It’s all a hunch, but it’s based off a trend I’ve noticed since at least Occupy Wall Street, where so many people that agreed with the protestors argued how the protesters were, in essence “doing it wrong”. And I noticed it happens every protest movement since. (I think I actually noticed with protests of the Iraq war, but it didn’t stand out the same so didn’t think much until Occupy.)

The criticisms are almost always varied, the ways protesters are doing it wrong and why it’s wrong aren’t consistent between critics. In some cases are in direct denial of historical precedent of how successful protests have worked. The most obvious being that of protesting in the streets: “this isn’t how you attract supporters” when it historically is very effective in that regard, to the point that sometimes those protests will literally attract people in the moment they see the protests happening.

It’s still an idea I’ve been turning around in the back of my head, dunno if there is any validity to it. But the reaction to protests, the specific and varied criticisms from those politically aligned with the protestors never seem to actually make a lot of sense. It often involves declaring a protest’s lack of effectiveness in direct opposition to the actual evidence.

I have seen it so often that I think there has to be an underlying reason, and so far that’s what I got.

I probably need to dig into some research and see if this phenomenon has been studied; I can’t be the only one that has noticed it.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:13 AM on October 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

Did it cut through the noise and draw attention to their cause? Clearly yes.

No one is going to remember what they were protesting about. It’s going to be the painting and the soup.
posted by Galvanic at 2:14 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I noticed the "comfortable white activist" trope up thread too, praemunire. It's actually a much dumber critique since typically the "implied threat" actually comes not from these activists not anyone like them, but instead takes the form "we care this much so once others care you'll face real trouble."

Asking activists be in "meaningful relationship with climate justice activists from communities most affected by climate change" denies that the movement could ever be broad based, and hence denies that the movement could ever be effective.

Dysk> (Oddly, I think I'd liekly be more in favour of a protest that could legitimately be described as terrorism.)

We should not criticize non-violent direct actions for being ineffective by not being violent enough, because activists doing non-violent direct action are often incapable of real violence, due to temperament, world view, and skill set.

I've once watched an interview in which the African American interviewee mentioned asking her dad why he never marched with MLK, and he said he felt incapable of responding non-violently to the police brutality, so the converse exists too.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:15 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's not always true, but before anyone deploys the "comfortable white activist" tropes, they should think very hard about who the use of that language generally benefits.

That. It may have been a very ineffective protest. It may have only reached, let's say arbitrarily, 1%. There may be better methods. Still, don't comfort that 1%, tell them everything's going to be all right, we condemn the protest too, go back to what you were doing. Every little bit helps, until we start reaching the tipping point.

Or maybe we never will, or at least not in time. But the very least any of us can do is stop pushing back and obstructing the people who are trying.
posted by ctmf at 2:31 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Or are trying by a different method than we are. Or are using a method that is not our favorite. Same team, stop undermining.
posted by ctmf at 2:36 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

We should not criticize non-violent direct actions for being ineffective by not being violent enough

I can totally see how what I wrote reads that way, but while there are types of terrorism that I would be more on board with, I favour non-violent direct action. I'm not generally a fan of violence.
posted by Dysk at 3:39 PM on October 16, 2022

Talk here reminds me of how much more money was raised for the repair of the Notre Dame cathedral roof than for the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan.
posted by subdee at 4:33 PM on October 16, 2022 [13 favorites]

I think this protest was fun and effective, once you get past the outrage-generating headlines.
posted by subdee at 4:34 PM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

As is only too usual it seems it is easier to shoot the messenger than accept the message.
posted by adamvasco at 5:00 PM on October 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

I wonder how those who observed this action felt? Not everyone likes to be a background player in another’s drama.
posted by Ideefixe at 6:13 PM on October 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I remember the stores in March when Covid started shutting things down and a man was escorted from the store because no bottled water, made a scene, drama but in a city with well water, it was more...accute.
But I watched. During the Flint water crises when bottled water was literally rolling in the streets, alot of art folks did public displays, protests.
It wasn't the message but the presentation and what is a disconnect is you fell like an art critic then a participant. I stenciled " Did anyone read the emergency manual"
cricket's. It felt as if no amount of art or protest would fix a poisoned city. But it drew attention. A democratic debate and in the crowd, it's citizens. how that go?
D$&qsld Trjunp came to town, saw his bus, a buddy and I saw a friend in the no trump crowd and ambled over, bus trumbles by and I just point the other way. so he goes to a press thing, starts shewing and was cut the fuck off, no, not here.
He promptly left town, the same way.
Protest is not the soup or the signs or the Weathermen. It's a prefix when portents fail.
But this isn't a war, a brutal killing or generalized strike.
It's everything at once were now is an instant History with a future that out paces itself.
posted by clavdivs at 7:31 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I wonder how those who observed this action felt? Not everyone likes to be a background player in another’s drama.

Who cares?
posted by rhymedirective at 7:37 PM on October 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Visiting Hours, a poem by Essex Hemphill.
posted by Literaryhero at 10:44 PM on October 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

before anyone deploys the "comfortable white activist" tropes

I noticed the "comfortable white activist" trope up thread too

I don't know if the last couple comments in this vein are specifically in reference to my second comment, or if they're responding to a broader attitude that their authors are detecting in the thread, but since they directly quote me I'm going to respond: that comment is not a criticism of the Van Gogh Soup protest based on the identities of the protesters, or even of the protest itself, and I think that's pretty clear, especially if you read my first comment. It was specifically about how protesters who DO meet the "comfortable, white" description can expect different treatment--from the press, from law enforcement, from courts--than those who don't, which gives them greater latitude to engage in the type of escalating public actions I talked about. It was meant to be an acknowledgement, missing in that original comment, that not everyone has the same avenues of protest available to them, at least not at the same potential cost.

Maybe for the Van Gogh Soup protestors this won't be true--as praemunire points out we don't know yet. But I don't think it's a stretch, nor is it "virtue signalling"(?) or playing into the hands of the FF industry, to acknowledge a hole in my own initial analysis, which is:
- that recent experiences indicate that public protests can be met with very different reactions depending on who's carrying them out, which can in turn impact the risk/reward calculus I mentioned,
- and that the feelings of rage and grief young folks are experiencing are not new to people, including Indigenous people like the author of the linked Twitter thread (whose critique of the action itself one may or may not agree with) who have been doing this work for a long time.
posted by TinyChicken at 2:15 AM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Does it bother anyone else that Just Stop Oil accepts payments in cryptocurrency, which has a very harmful effect on the environment? How about the protestor Phoebe Plummer, who made the white power salute as the police led her away?
posted by pxe2000 at 3:42 AM on October 17, 2022

Where is the white power salute? That link doesn't show or mention it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:15 AM on October 17, 2022

I also know nothing about crypto, but the Just Stop Oil's donation page says this, with a link:

Donate with Cryptocurrency

We’re now accepting donations via Ethereum. Ethereum’s new upgrade has lowered carbon emissions by 99%.

I don't know if that makes any difference in how horrible crypto is but they do seem aware of the optics anyway. Maybe Ethereum still has 500% to go as far as I know.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:18 AM on October 17, 2022

Where is the white power salute?

She's doing that "OK" thing with her right hand behind her back, in that photo, FWIW.

Are these Insulate Britain in different t-shirts?
posted by Grangousier at 5:21 AM on October 17, 2022

Ah now I see, sorry. That is troubling.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:23 AM on October 17, 2022

Did anyone else notice she's got a skull on her shirt and her hair is pink-- basically call signs for satanism? Did anyone else notice her last name is Plummer, same as Christopher Plummer, who was in a famous movie about Nazis (The Sound of Music)? Did anyone else notice that the initials for Just Stop Oil is JSO which could also stand for Jesus Stinks (like) Onions?

Open your eyes sheeple.
posted by gwint at 5:30 AM on October 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

She's doing that "OK" thing with her right hand behind her back, in that photo, FWIW.

I just put my hand behind my back and it went into that shape naturally, so can we stop with this Kremlinology nonsense?
posted by rhymedirective at 6:56 AM on October 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

Just Stop Oil's most recent protest. I like this a lot better than the painting one referenced in this post.
posted by gudrun at 8:08 AM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

She's doing that "OK" thing with her right hand behind her back, in that photo, FWIW.

This is some really desperate shit

Last time around with the tyre deflation, ok, look, you're messing with people's cars, i can see the path to the reaction against the protest even if i don't agree with it.

This time, it's not getting soup on a painting, and the urgency to discredit the protest is so wildly, stupendously disproportionate that I'm honestly at a loss. Is it just a discomfort caused by seeing someone actually doing something, and realising that you could be too - and yet you aren't? So if you can just prove that they are actually bad, the discomfort will be soothed?
posted by ominous_paws at 11:00 AM on October 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

I can excuse ~~racism~~ fossil fuel burning, but I draw the line at ~~animal cruelty~~ throwing soup!
posted by axiom at 12:06 PM on October 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've searched and searched but can find no white supremacist leanings or reporting about this person. Also out of curiosity tried to put my hands behind my back and they do make that shape...so I'm inclined to be skeptical of this white power interpretation too.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:14 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can excuse ~~racism~~ fossil fuel burning

Literally nobody here is doing that. Not one person.
posted by Dysk at 12:57 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

OK let me start by saying that this is not terrorism and nothing should happen to the activists. But it was an ineffective protest in my opinion, and here's why:

It is one thing to say that a protest is not about changing the minds of those who disagree with you -- I think that's wrong, but I at least understand the reasoning. The reason why this protest was ineffective is that, not only is it highly unlikely that it will change the minds of anyone who is not already working to avert a climate disaster, it seems like it will make those people more entrenched in their view that climate activists are overreacting. The most likely reaction of climate deniers is going to be "oh those stupid privileged kids have nothing better to do."

It reminds me of the outcry when PETA was going to Lincoln Center and handing pamphlets to small children of people in fur coats that said things like "do you know your mommy kills animals?" - even when the fur coats were fake. It totally backfired and only made people angry at PETA for potentially traumatizing children and just being generally awful.

I totally get that we've reached a desperation level with the climate crisis and people just want to do something. But in order to get results, we need to smarter about it. With actual measurable climate effects happening right now between the hurricanes, flooding, and fires, we should be focusing on educating the uneducated rather than pulling stunts that are just going to make people less receptive.

Just my opinion.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 2:47 PM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just my opinion.

Ok, yeah, it's rational and I like it. But also:

highly unlikely that it will change the minds of anyone who is not already working to avert a climate disaster

ok, but could it encourage and embolden someone who is already working to avert a climate disaster? Could it prevent someone doing good, important work from saying "fuck it, nobody cares"? Or will all those people say oh jeez, I don't want to do this if there's going to be soup?
posted by ctmf at 2:55 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

it seems like it will make those people more entrenched in their view that climate activists are overreacting

Let's assume this is true, though we can't really test it (I'm not saying it's not true, just that it's hard to measure empirically). Well...OK? These kinds of protests are generally not aimed at persuading people who are already passionately against you. Those folks are unlikely to change. You want to reach the indifferent and the undecided.
posted by praemunire at 4:03 PM on October 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Just How Safe Is Great Art?, an interview with Steve Keller, a museum security expert. Fairly long, and not just about the soup protest. I've pulled out some of the bits that address the soup protest directly below:

Nyce: The climate protester was talking about how you should care as much about protecting the planet as you do about protecting a work of art. What’s your reaction to using art in that way, to make that kind of statement?

Keller: They’ve made their statement now. I think they need to move on and give the museum some relief. If I had to guess at the political attitude of your typical museum worker, they’re environmentalists. They’re more liberal in their thinking. They’re more supportive of the cause. And environmental activists are not winning many friends by doing this to museums. They made their point, and now move on.

Nyce: Why do you think people target art?

Keller: I think the environmentalists feel that we’re running out of time and they need to get as dramatic as they can possibly be. And I think they target museums because they’re soft targets. They know that they’re not going to get shot by a cop or something like that. The event will be over with and calmed down by the time the police arrive. And so they think the security guards aren’t going to overreact with them.

Nyce: Is there anything that you wish people better understood about what you do? Or that you wish I had asked you about?

Keller: We try to be sympathetic and understanding. We’re all on this Earth with them. I wish the protesters would understand that—they may not see it as doing harm, but they’re doing harm to museums that are actually an ally of theirs. For example, a museum might have to add $100,000 worth of additional security now for the next 20 years because it had this incident. And that’s money out of the educational program, which may not be as important to them as saving the Earth. But it is pretty important to saving the country. I wish they would recognize that.
posted by gudrun at 5:49 PM on October 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

@JoanieLemercier:

Arles, France

Left: paintings by Van Gogh in 1888
Right: droughts and fires in 2022
posted by gwint at 6:11 PM on October 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't know that "museums will lose money on security" is a slam dunk counter point I find convincing
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:44 PM on October 17, 2022

(Especially how many problematic issues museums should reckon with anyway)
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:45 PM on October 17, 2022

Nor is "they're trying not to provoke state violence."
posted by praemunire at 7:07 PM on October 17, 2022

It's worth considering that this took place in Britain, and the protestors were white, and don't read as poor - they weren't likely to get shot anyway, unless they really tried to make that happen by attacking a military base or something.

It's also worth considering that we're teetering on the edge of recession with a useless Tory government, and cultural/arts spending in the UK is already hilariously low.

Especially when, no matter how much people in this thread want it to be the case, it is not a choice between climate change and this protest. You can oppose climate change and be in favour of other forms of protest and direct action, and think that this particular protest does more harm than good (which, if you don't think this kind of protest does much good, isn't hard and doesn't mean that the harm is seen as more significant than climate change, before somebody decides that that is clearly what I mean).
posted by Dysk at 8:14 PM on October 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

On a more positive note, JSO are currently disrupting London traffic to add another protest to the one gudrun mentioned. JSO clearly do good things. I just don't think the van Gogh soup incident was one of them.
posted by Dysk at 8:47 PM on October 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's worth considering that this took place in Britain, and the protestors were white, and don't read as poor - they weren't likely to get shot anyway, unless they really tried to make that happen by attacking a military base or something.

Worth considering in what sense? Does it somehow devalue their action?

You can oppose climate change and be in favour of other forms of protest and direct action, and think that this particular protest does more harm than good

*sigh* It's always some other form of protest that would be the right one. When you're talking about something as horrific as self-immolation, okay. But the harm directly done by the protestors here is having to clean tomato soup off some glass, and disturbing the comfort of some people who took their values for granted.
posted by praemunire at 10:31 PM on October 17, 2022

*sigh* It's always some other form of protest that would be the right one. When you're talking about something as horrific as self-immolation, okay.

Other forms of protest like literally every other JSO protest, including the other ones mentioned in this thread! So no, it isn't always some other form. Just this one time. I do not understand why everyone it's acting like it is literally impossible to oppose just this one protest as counterproductive.

Worth considering in what sense? Does it somehow devalue their action?

It means that logic based in a US context ("avoiding state violence" for a bunch of white, middle class appearing kids) just doesn't apply quite as cleanly.
posted by Dysk at 1:41 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

You can oppose it as counterproductive, no problem here. I simply don't agree.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:58 AM on October 18, 2022

It's worth considering that this took place in Britain where the Home Secretary Suella Braverman is to reveal plans to grant police new powers to counter tactics favoured by Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
posted by adamvasco at 5:55 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

You can oppose it as counterproductive, no problem here. I simply don't agree.

Which is completely fair! What I was reacting against was the commenters doing their damnedest to equate any kind of criticism of this protest as being equal to being in favour of rolling coal, opposing any kind of protest, and denying the impacts of climate change altogether, even in the face of people acknowledging the other JSO protests as much better, we're being made it like we're concern trolls where no activism will ever be good enough.
posted by Dysk at 6:06 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

The other Just Stop Oil protests only have any effect because of the huge success of this protest, though.
posted by ambrosen at 6:51 AM on October 18, 2022

What I was reacting against was the commenters doing their damnedest to equate any kind of criticism of this protest as being equal to being in favour of rolling coal, opposing any kind of protest, and denying the impacts of climate change altogether, even in the face of people acknowledging the other JSO protests as much better, we're being made it like we're concern trolls where no activism will ever be good enough.

Where in this thread is this happening, though? Especially in the bottom half? This is just a giant strawman that I don't think anyone actually asserted (maaaaybe way up in thread early, but that's long been sorted out). With whom are you arguing on this?
posted by LooseFilter at 6:59 AM on October 18, 2022

Here, right before the comment I made.
posted by Dysk at 7:09 AM on October 18, 2022

That comment does not say what your description asserts, though, at all. That short comment is about pearl-clutching over a method of protest and asserts nothing about the presumed values of anyone criticizing the protest beyond saying maybe they're just reacting to having a comfortable status quo disturbed. There is nothing there saying that all who criticize this protest action must therefore also hate the planet and want it to die. Your reading is hyperbolic and unfair to my eyes, but I think we're reading comments through two very different lenses, here, so maybe best to talk past each other and leave it be.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:26 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

You clearly interpret "*sigh* It's always some other form of protest that would be the right one." right after links to other JSO protests that we do approve of, treasurer differently to me.

It isn't always some other form. We have literally pointed to other actions JSO after taking right now as good alternatives. There's very much an implication of concern trolling here.

And yes, that same comment didn't say that we want to excuse burning all the fossil fuels. That comment didn't. But you don't have to scroll up very far...
posted by Dysk at 7:56 AM on October 18, 2022

I can excuse ~~racism~~ fossil fuel burning, but I draw the line at ~~animal cruelty~~ throwing soup!

^ That comment is a specific Community reference, to be clear, and to my eyes is commenting on the pearl-clutching nature of agreeing with the message of the protest but not its means. It's not saying that those who disapprove of this protest thus want Earth to burn.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:02 AM on October 18, 2022

I'm not familiar with Community, but reference or not, that literally is what it is saying, and it is far from the first comment in this thread to do so. If that comment stood without the broader context of the thread, that would be one thing. But it doesn't.
posted by Dysk at 8:12 AM on October 18, 2022

that literally is what it is saying

Yes, I understand that, but was providing context to elucidate that the literal, face-value of the statement was likely not its intended meaning, as the context of that very specific cultural reference makes clear. It is an ironic statement, not a literal one. (But if you don't know the reference, then the face-value of the statement is obviously misleading.)

But I'm definitely not arguing that criticizing any protest is equivalent to hating the Earth, so I'm gonna just stop explaining other people's words here.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:34 AM on October 18, 2022

I'm not familiar with Community

As they say on another 2000s sitcom, it's never too late for now. It's streaming on Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu (wait, is that right?) Here's some guy's top-ten episodes (and, conversely, someone else's list of episodes that 'fans only watch once'). Here it is on FanFare.

They're working on a movie for Peacock. Alison Brie, Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Gillian Jacobs, and Ken Jeong are all on board. Yvette Nicole Brown and Donald Glover are not off the table, but Chevy Chase seems to be.
posted by box at 8:49 AM on October 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

It means that logic based in a US context ("avoiding state violence" for a bunch of white, middle class appearing kids) just doesn't apply quite as cleanly.

Well, yes, but I was responding to the quote from the museum employee who seemed to feel it was some kind of a critique to point out that museum guards aren't (usually) going to react the way the cops are ("soft targets"). It's not. I don't think there's a place in the world where reducing the likelihood that the cops are going to show up at your (peaceful, ofc) protest isn't a good, rather than a bad or cowardly, thing.
posted by praemunire at 9:34 AM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

damn i was on the kids' side when i didn't know there was glass there. it's a painting. how much culture has been made invisible by colonizing nations? how much culture will climate change destroy? really don't get some of y'all
posted by angrycat at 9:37 AM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'd like to point out two things:

1. Every time there is any protest anywhere about anything there will be a large backlash of concern trolling that it is not an effective way to protest. Every time.

2.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:22 AM on October 18, 2022 [6 favorites]

I was waffling on this whole thing till I saw this thread and now I'm firmly in team toss soup on old paintings.
posted by zenon at 3:56 PM on October 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Do we really care more about Van Gogh’s sunflowers than real ones? George Monbiot.
Who are the criminals here? Those seeking to prevent the vandalism of the living planet, or those facilitating it?
The soup-throwing and similar outrageous-but-harmless actions generate such fury because they force us not to stop listening, but to start.
posted by adamvasco at 3:37 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't care more about the painting than I do about real sunflowers. I care as much about wanting culture to survive as I do about wanting the environment to survive. Does that mean I want aliens to show up some day and find the planet an empty hellscape with only a few surviving art museums - of course not! What I do care about is that too many people seem to be buying in to the relentless attack on arts and culture that the right wing has been engaged in for a number of years, which partly has been doing an (apparently really good job) of equating the arts with the elite to devalue them and say they deserve no support.

There is a reason that some of the things Putin and his goons are destroying and looting in Ukraine are monuments, art museums and culture, because those are part of what make a people themselves. There is a reason they steal Ukrainian children to take them away to be "educated" away from their language and culture. Culture matters.

And Van Gogh, this was a man who once wrote his brother: You are kind to painters, and I tell you, the more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. So yes, I care that his sunflower paintings survive, just like I want the planet he lived in and I live in and my niece lives in to survive.
posted by gudrun at 6:46 AM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's still mad to me that people cannot grok that it is possible to care about more than one thing! That there isn't done dichotomy where we have to choose between tackling climate change and van Gogh. Er don't. We have to choose between tackling climate change (and local air pollution, which electrifying vehicle fleets will not address) and the convenience of personal transport, of burning oil and gas for heating and power.

That's why protests that highlight that actual, real, meaningful dichotomy are the preference of some of us, and good thing that by far most of what JSO is doing (climbing up road bridges forcing police to choose them for days, gluing themselves to tarmac in traffic hotspots, etc) and what a lot of other, more direct action than demonstration focused groups like Tire Extinguishers are doing.

But the vehemence reserved for people disapproving of this protest is massive compared to what we saw in the Tire Extinguishers thread. Maybe people identify more with being be a driver than with 'fine art' but to actually get somewhere we need rid of the cars, not the paintings.
posted by Dysk at 7:05 AM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

That there isn't done dichotomy where we have to choose between tackling climate change and van Gogh.

The protest was not against the existence of van Gogh, or even of museums.
posted by praemunire at 7:35 AM on October 19, 2022

The protest was not against the existence of van Gogh, or even of museums. praemunire, those of us who did not like the nature of this particular form of protest get that. We still don't like that a painting was targeted, and since this thread was highlighting that particular protest, this seems the logical place to express that. Some people in this thread are turning around and reading motives into our dislike of this form of protest that imply we don't care about the climate. That is what we have responded to.
posted by gudrun at 7:44 AM on October 19, 2022

That George Monbiot op-ed is worth reading.

Between the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that the former home secretary Priti Patel rushed through parliament, and the public order bill over which Cruella Braverman presides, the government is carefully criminalising every effective means of protest in England and Wales, leaving us with nothing but authorised processions conducted in near silence and letters to our MPs, which are universally ignored by both media and legislators.

The public order bill is the kind of legislation you might expect to see in Russia, Iran or Egypt. Illegal protest is defined by the bill as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. Given that the Police Act redefined “serious disruption” to include noise, this means, in effect, all meaningful protest.

For locking or glueing yourself to another protester, or to the railings or any other object, you can be sentenced to 51 weeks in prison – in other words, twice the maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting in the road, or obstructing fracking machinery, pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, airports or printing presses (Rupert says thanks) can get you a year. For digging a tunnel as part of a protest, you can be sent down for three years.

Even more sinister are the “serious disruption prevention orders” in the bill. Anyone who has taken part in a protest in England or Wales in the previous five years, whether or not they have been convicted of an offence, can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests. Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at ... particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.

And of course these measures are consistently applied.

Even for those who don't like this particular protest, or don't think it's effective, maybe the takeaway should still be "I don't personally like it but I will speak up for their right and ability to do it."
posted by trig at 8:23 AM on October 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

The protest was not against the existence of van Gogh, or even of museums.

But yet, we keep seeing people talk about it as if there is a choice we have to make between art and tackling climate change, whether it's Monbiot asking if we care more about van Gogh's sunflowers than the real ones, or a number of comments in this thread. We can care about both! We can care more about tackling climate change, and still think it's stupid to attack artworks (even symbolically) because the two things have nothing to do with each other.

I feel like there are parallels to Wæver's theory of securitisation in the way this is handled. This issue has become "climatised" in a similar way, and now any objection to this protest is fondness for van Gogh's paintings is equated to opposition to any kind of action on climate change.
posted by Dysk at 9:06 AM on October 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

It is tiring to see so much objection to young people doing something, I think that's part of it. I'm still seeing news stories about how "useless" these people are in their protest and it does sting.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:04 AM on October 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

But yet, we keep seeing people talk about it as if there is a choice we have to make between art and tackling climate change

why not? some of us think exactly that. Want me to share the list of things I will never do again? enjoy or experience again (or ever, to be precise)? I'm guessing quite a few people entering their 20s are able to figure this out and I cannot judge any one of them for how they come to terms with that. One day soon the soup thrown at a Van Gogh will seem quaint.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:33 PM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

why not? some of us think exactly that.

Really? Why?
I believe the arts can play a huge role in the world as it is now. Perhaps by showing us other visions for the future, or by providing joys that do not damage the atmosphere or other species. I don't think art has to be an instrument of change, but that doesn't mean it can't be.
posted by mumimor at 1:53 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

why not? some of us think exactly that.

Really? Why?

We seem to have been running out of time for a while. The failure of the US to pass a transformational climate bill, because of a coal Senator, is the most depressing thing I can think of. The ongoing war will not have helped matters. So, yes, much is ashes in our mouth.
posted by eustatic at 9:01 AM on October 23, 2022

I totally agree that we are running out of time and I am very worried. But I don't really get why it would ever be art or climate.
I don't know what would be appropriate, but I feel going at cars and goods that are shipped across the world are more appropriate than art.
posted by mumimor at 9:17 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

German group Letzte Generation splashes a Monet with mashed potatoes at Museum Barberini in Potsdam. The Guardian article mentions in paragraph 6 that the painting is protected by glass.
posted by gwint at 11:15 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Twitter video (15s) of the German protest. For those who didn't read the Guardian article, the protestors are gluing themselves to the floor.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 12:15 PM on October 23, 2022

Lol, it's kind of funny that after all the hand-wringing, this is going from "a" protest tactic to "the" trendy tactic. I don't get the symbolism of mashed potatoes, but I like the variation on the theme, clear nod to JSO. Total missed opportunity to be grilled cheese sandwiches, though.

In the suggested stories: "Just Stop Oil says only threat of death sentence would stop its protests". Well, treating it as simple property crime might put a dent in operations if you did damage one of those paintings. 30 days or whatever in jail, no problem. Monetary restitution judgment, uh oh.
posted by ctmf at 1:05 PM on October 23, 2022

one to the floor, one to the wall. The article supplies some context of other internationally coordinated actions, Botticelli at the Uffizi in July (sans projectile food) and a Leonardo-school Last Supper at the Royal Academy (glued to the frame and with words spraypainted on the wall) a week before.

Probably worth studying how the Van Gogh action broke through where the others hadn’t yet. So: apart from the single actions, let’s give it some time to compound/coagulate reactions. (Would love to know more about the backstory of the organising behind this, whether they’ve managed to secure funding à la XR, or otherwise. From what I’d heard on the ground, the Italian chapter of LastGeneration were a pretty extemporaneous bunch, but that may have evolved meantime.)
posted by progosk at 1:07 PM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Today: Just Stop Oil — it’s a piece of cake.
posted by gwint at 4:44 PM on October 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

won't somebody please think of the mannequins?

Would love to know more about the backstory of the organising behind this

Having looked into it a little further, the coordination seems to have started in April this year, and is drawing resources from the CEF.
posted by progosk at 3:03 AM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

Today: Just Stop Oil - Fossil Fuel Lobbyist HQ Sprayed with Paint

I guess I'll just keep posting these until comments are locked on this thread.
posted by gwint at 9:34 AM on October 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thank you, these don't often make the headlines (as discussed above)
posted by trig at 10:22 AM on October 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

new post
posted by tiny frying pan at 11:59 AM on October 25, 2022

« Older Let's go shopping at NIST! | The social media equivalent of Trump Steaks? Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

Climate Protesters Throw Soup Over van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’
October 15, 2022 12:59 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Climate Protesters Throw Soup Over van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ October 15, 2022 12:59 PM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Climate Protesters Throw Soup Over van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’
October 15, 2022 12:59 PM Subscribe