Perhaps you've heard about the action by two young Just Stop Oil activists, who today threw soup onto the glass that covers Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers painting, then glued themselves to the wall below the painting. (video here)
Just Stop Oil followed with messaging that included:
Is art worth more than life? More than food? More than justice?
The cost of living crisis and climate crisis are driven by oil and gas.
They or their allies had verified the painting was protected by glass before the action.
Afterward, a number of people who are also climate activists criticized the action for various reasons, while others defended it. Trolls of unknown provenance attacked, of course.
I know there's a visceral shock initially at what they did, since I felt it as well, but once you know the painting is safe, I see this as a perfectly good metaphor for the point they are trying to make: Fossil fuel companies are literally destroying the civilization-habitable world. And as countries and institutions become destabilized and museums are threatened in various ways, that will include all of the art in the world at some point (or best-case scenario, it will be locked away in the bunkers of billionaires in New Zealand or somewhere). Young people, particularly, are increasingly desperate that not enough
people seem to care to create political will to change these facts.
So it seems better to call attention to the extremity of our circumstances now, while it still might make a difference by provoking discussion and even outrage, as this action did.
These young people are not the ones destroying art and our whole world around it.
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