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.
My tin hat tingles with these guys they’re either too upper middle-class to actually understand the real world or they’re making sure climate activists are a running joke.
I see your point, I do. But I also see theirs. There will be no one around in the future to enjoy or make art if we continue fucking up the world with fossil fuels the way we are.
Maybe it’d be better to walk around posting little signs on the paintings descriptions with a catch phrase like “like art? Stop fossil fuels” then a little blurb about how there’ll be no art in the future if there is no future.
That’s probably how I’d handle it, maybe even try to work with the museum so the signs wouldnt get taken down. But, that doesn’t get media attention. It’d never end up in the news. Maybe after contacting 50 museums it’d get a small mention, but ultimately no one would care.
Our current news cycles don’t encourage people to act civilly when trying to be heard. So that’s why this sort of extreme behavior keeps happening. It’s a vicious feedback loop and just like climate change we don’t seem to be making any moves to stop it.
No bad publicity.
Here are a few reasons why thats not true
People talking about these guys being dumbasses does not equate to people taking climate change seriously.
There is limited bandwidth for publicity, these morons are taking publicity away from people actively doing the research, enacting changes, building things the help mitigate climate change.
They give the opportunity for climate change deniers to lump all climate change activists together with these idiots, allowing them to replace the message of “Act against climate change” to look at all these dumbass climate change activists.
I’m taking it seriously. Are you not taking it seriously?
And this is being published where?
Here’s my challenge to you: every time you see Just Stop Oil pop up, post these articles. Get people excited about actually doing something.
Deniers are too far gone. You spray paint stone henge, they complain about the lichen. You splash color on a ferrari dealership, they complain about the small business owners. You bomb an oil rig, they say that violence never solves anything. They’re already not on our side.
No, but actions like this will bring more people onto their side.