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.
So if throwing paint at a entierly replaceable cover for a dusty old painting is too far gone to be acceptable, what action can we take to stop oil production?
God, I wish someone could actually trace the train of events that would lead to reduced oil production from this other than some bizarre notion that throwing soup at a priceless artifact of human heritage will Energize The Masses™ or suddenly convince people who think climate change is a hoax or overblown that it’s actually a serious problem.
Imagine if these activists spent more time going after companies benefiting from fossil fuel production rather than throwing soup in museums…
They’ve done that too, and have encountered media blackouts.
As nice as it would be if they could simply fix the climate problem with the disruption a handful of protests cause, they can’t, and need to draw public attention to the problem.
These demonstrations open up the conversation in threads like this - you agree there’s a problem, you agree these protests don’t fix the problem, so let’s talk about what will.
I feel like we’re kind of entering an era where direct action and ecology-motivated terrorism are going to start becoming a thing. And I’m honestly not sure that would be a bad thing.
Seems to me that it would be pretty difficult to encounter a media blackout to do this sort of thing at, for example, global climate summits, oil company shareholder meetings, etc.
But I’m not seeing much soup being thrown there.
let’s talk about what will.
Stop throwing soup.
We’re at the point where idiots throwing soup are called sing more environmental damage than backwoods yahoos rolling coal. Shall we protest soup abuse? Because that’s more likely to help the environment
Right? Go throw soup at Darren Woods or one of the oil execs, not at a painting
Remember when famous assholes used to get pies in the face? What happened to that?
We’re not talking about stopping oil production. We’re talking about these nutcases. And when we do get back to the important topic, now it’s harder to get support, harder to stay on topic, environmental concerns are more likely to be dismissed with jokes about throwing soup
We’ve literally been talking about it for decades. An Inconvenient Truth won the Oscar in 2006. What has talking about it accomplished?
I’m sure you’ve never suggested people doing something might be better off spending their time doing something else, but most people have.
Then they wouldn’t get their five minutes of fame, though. And even worse, they couldn’t even claim their five minutes of fame was some self-righteous moment that they should be lionized for. A fate worse than death, basically.
I see shit like this and I think about people like Erin Brockovich and Karen Silkwood…