Three individuals targeted National Gallery paintings an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for similar attack in 2022
Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.
Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.
🌍 > 🖼️
That sort of comment could be used to justify an unbelievable amount of vandalism and terror and is just not productive
We should value the Earth more than art. If vandalism of paintings bothers people more than the destruction of the Earth then they should reexamine their priorities. No to mention, the vandalism of the art is imagined, the painting is undamaged, but the damage to the planet is real. On top of that, if we do nothing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions then the damage to the planet will continue to worsen.
There is no reason to compare the earth and art given that destroying art does not in any way benefit earth.
Well destroying the Earth does not in anyway benefit art, either, but we’re still doing that one.
You created your own argument here though, right? I can be an advocate for any of one million serious problems that our societies have. Should everyone go destroy art galleries? Housing crisis = art destruction? Unliveable minimal wage = art destruction? Car centric societies = art destruction? Local store increased prices = art destruction? You have to agree that at a certain point this becomes indistinguishable from vandalism.
At what level then is this threshold? Or do you propose a hierarchy of ideas, which are suitable to protest in an art gallery, versus those that aren’t?
Do you not agree? Over half a million homeless are without homes. People are dying, and the homeless are largely being dehumanized or ignored. There is a very real human cost far beyond a piece of art or the barrier protecting it.
If you’re looking for objective quantifiable criteria on right vs wrong, you’ll never find it. Morality often falls into a grey area involving tradeoffs, but bringing attention to a societal issue with huge human costs just for splashing soup on a plastic barrier seems pretty effective to me.
Condering that the art is unharmed, and they glue themselves to the gallery waiting for the police while explaining what their goals are so that passersby film them to spread the message, I’d say that they are, frankly, pretty distinguishable from vandals, or do you know of other vandals that do that?
There is literally no vandalism nor terrorism here apart from the planet being destroyed.