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.
“No art on a dead planet” is a braindead justification and does not in any way outline how vandalism of art is supposed to translate into climate activism, while the four criteria outlined for activism are valid but in no way provide a special justification for vandalism of cultural artifacts, which has a significantly greater backlash from the exact kind of educated people most likely to get involved in climate activism, and very little disruptive potential.
“I understand that we’re pissing people off but there’s no other way to get attention” and “Negative attention is good attention, because maybe it will cause people to become positively engaged with the cause” are not particularly compelling rebuttals in the critics section.
“JSO was central in setting the 2024 Labour agenda” is utterly deluded, while all the cited actions by their sister organizations in Europe are much more traditional instances of civil disobedience that have long-proven track records and a clear and logical progression of action-to-influence.
This really reinforces my view that JSO are terribly naive and have no real idea on how their actions will seriously lead to mass change of opinions on climate change.
