Earlier this month, two young men who visited Room 43 of the National Gallery in London shed their overcoats to reveal T-shirts bearing the names of activist groups. just turn off the oil.then they pour tomato soup I looked back across one of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflower paintings and glued my hand to the wall. “Which is more valuable, art or life?” asked one of the activists. “Are you more concerned with protecting paintings or protecting the planet and its people?”
Then it happened again and again. Last weekend, two of his activists from the German climate activist group Letzte His Generation sprinkled mashed potatoes over Claude’s Monet painting of a haystack on display at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam. , stuck his hand to the wall.This morning in The Hague, another of Just Stop Oil’s two sets of protesters jumbled it up: one activist put his head on Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earringand another poured him tomato soup.
If these protests make you angry or upset, that’s the point. As one German activist said, “We are facing a climate catastrophe. All you have is tomato soup and mashed potatoes in a painting.” Protesters want to piss you off. Because why aren’t you just as angry about the climate crisis? Climate action has entered an era of shocks.
But let’s put aside the sociopathic logic for a moment. There’s something poignant and undeniably resonant about his two cases, especially the first of which saw an activist raised in the 21st century attack some of his 19th century’s most famous cultural heritage. Ultimately, climate change has to do with a certain vision of a prosperous middle class of paved roads, bustling factories, and coal-fired power plants that shaped the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And standing in a sunlit field or on a Parisian balcony, capturing the sensation of industrial modernity encroaching upon the world like egg yolk is born from a seashell, the Impressionists are as bound to that vision as the automobile. . No wonder climate activists, the rebels of the century, are targeting them.
It does not justify vandalism. Nor does it resemble what the activists themselves have said about their actions. The purpose of Just Stop Oil and Lettte Generation was to piss off those who care less about the climate crisis. But even if they tended to defend their tactics, claiming, for example, that activists had shown admirable restraint by choosing to deface a glass-protected painting, the protests were still on their own terms. will fail with
Researcher James Osden, who runs the Social Change Lab in London, is one of the protest movement’s most prominent early supporters.of Widely shared substack posts, he argues that empirical evidence supports this approach. A more radical faction can increase support for a more moderate faction.” He cites several studies showing that the radical side can increase donations, mobilization, and political support for the movement’s moderates.
But a closer look at these studies didn’t seem to have much to do with the soup protest. one of the studies As Osden notes, the researchers asked online respondents for their views on animal cruelty, read descriptions of the views and protest tactics of “radical” and “moderate” activist groups, and then We re-examined their views. The accounts of moderate groups described campaigns of peaceful mass protests against factory agriculture, while those of extremist groups described something much more destructive. : Vegans blocked traffic and “wet the streets and meat delivery trucks with the blood and entrails of the animals they killed. Factory farms…and in some cases, advocated violence against livestock farmers.” Respondents online said: , said that after reading about radicals, he began to think more about moderate factions. (Note that this is not an enthusiastic endorsement of radical tactics.)
Ozden also mentions last year’s research, which included an experiment comparing the effects of two different protests against racist police. Second, a “majority of the African American community” refused to pay police tickets and fines. The study found that whites who identified strongly as white were more likely to support concessions to the movement after reading about the latter’s protests. According to Osden, the lesson to be learned from both studies is that a combination of destructive, conventional protest tactics is more supportive of a broader cause than the standard activist repertoire of demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches. It means that it may work well in the sense of increasing. 1 person.
But even as we stipulate that finicky social science experiments teach us something about politics, Osden does not claim what he thinks so. and nearly all other experiments cited in his blog post), “extremist” activists directed aggressive and violent tactics at the group to provoke dissatisfaction.. Animal rights groups, for example, targeted meat and leather producers instead of primary schools. Black activists went on ticketing strikes against the police, not the IRS. And in another experiment, radical climate change activists advocated violence and vandalism against fossil fuel companies as opposed to Impressionist painters, museum curators, or art viewers. (Even before the Monet mashed potato incident, Osden wrote follow up post The first protest was “action logic”—a harmony of tactics and targets that helps bystanders understand their nature and purpose. “Whether that was good or bad for the climate movement as a whole, I’m not sure,” he wrote.
This lack of connective logic has frustrated many sympathetic climate advocates. “Whether or not such protests are effective, as a climate scientist I spent 30 years working on this issue, so of course I sympathize with the protesters, but I don’t want museums or non-profits. I think it’s crazy to target it. It helps us all,” Jonathan Foley, executive director of the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown, told me. influential environmental scientist He has studied the Earth’s ecological boundaries and deforestation, but he also knows something about museums. From 2014 until 2018, he headed the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, one of the largest science museums in the world. And protests worry him.
It is true that the targeted painting was protected by a glass plate, but the glass plate not designed to protect To the seeping liquid (or whatever the mashed potato is), said Foley. Protects against UV rays and dust. Also, security at the museum his staff are ill-equipped for the challenge of dabbing every potential visitor for the whimsical appetizer insurance companies would now be asking for, he said. Additionally, following several protests at museums, he said: every day For museums, insurance and security costs can increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars.Museums may also put paintings and even sculptures behind Box type case type Today, we only protect world-famous works. Mona Lisa.
“You are often indebted and often hurting financially distressed organizations,” he said. made Between the art world and wealth inequality that fuels climate change, “People say, ‘That’s fancy art for billionaires.’ I keep my art at home and have it insured.You’re not hurting them by doing this.You’re hurting the public.” Climate activists and museum workers “are on the same team.” there is,” he claimed. “I can’t understand it in the name of protecting what’s important to us and hurting what’s important to us.”
So I don’t know if the protest is effective. I also know that it will likely cause financial problems for many museums. Activists look so ridiculous. The food poisoning victims at the target museum had their bodies glued to the walls beneath the paintings and to the paintings themselves. This required anatomical logistics. Each activist had to retrieve a tube of superglue hidden from a pocket or bra, grab it with one hand, twist the lid with the other, and carefully squirt the glue out. It’s awkward to explain. It’s even more embarrassing to watch. There is no dignified way to squeeze a tiny bottle of superglue. Aesthetics matter in politics. Consider that Che has her T-shirt facing up and to the left. A black-and-white photo of a civil rights protester’s head held high against a police dog. Or maybe even an arc of Molotov cocktails flying through the air. The soup and superglue movement is failing the crucial test of youthful radical politics. it doesn’t look cool.
Equally awkward are the activists’ claims that they are calling on the public to care more about the arts than the climate. If you and I were standing next to, say, a sedated horse and punched it, you’d probably say, “Stop hitting that horse!” They may try to stop you. “Why do you care more about this horse than climate change?” is a very anomalous answer. The answer is, Me We care about climate change, but now you’re hitting the horse. The Left sometimes resents mainstream economists for imagining trade-offs that don’t really exist. But that’s exactly what they did here.
And yet, children are well-intentioned, right? When you think about a problem as big as climate change, you want to appreciate your efforts. Well, these activists really care about climate change and it’s a very important issue… shouldn’t we listen to them? But the story of the last four decades that activists say they are outraged is that politicians have been claiming to fight climate change for decades, with only occasional success. It’s easy to get angry about climate change. It’s another thing to actually find ways to reduce carbon emissions and disrupt the fossil fuel-powered economy that has ruled since Monet. Soup’s protests make no sense, are clearly unjustified in the big-dollar social sciences, and, worst of all, look bad. doing. No special help required.