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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.
Like, holy fucking shit, I’m not against radical protests or direct action. Take a fucking sledgehammer to someone’s sports’ car for all I give a fuck. Do it to multiple people. I mean, as long as it’s someone relevant, not just some rando. But this? Playing fucking games with human heritage? This kind of infantile shit is why museums and public galleries have to invest heavily in security measures anymore. The Mona Lisa has been damaged multiple times by people doing this kind of bullshit. And, like this, no one fucking remembers it in a few years’ time.
It’s insane that the Solarpunk Climate community is more nuanced on this event that many of the defenders in here. Not because the Solarpunk instance is bad, but because climate change et co is kind of Their Thing.
When this Just Stop Oil group first started getting in the news, a bunch of people were pointing out that they are funded by an oil baroness, which makes their actions seem like they are deliberately stupid and targeting irrelevant targets because they’re meant to make environmentalists look stupid and not actually trying to do anything about big oil.
I might consider more likely that the heiress is just so out of touch with ordinary people that she thinks these kinds of high-profile incidents of petty vandalism are what changes the world, instead of education, politics, green energy investment, decentralization of financial power, etc etc etc.
Not dissimilarly, but from a different root cause (ie probably not obscene wealth), would be those on Lemmy who are so out of touch with ordinary people that they think this is some sort of winning or even contributing move to changing public opinion positively.
When did An Inconvenient Truth come out again? Like, can I get a temperature check on the polite and respectful progress we’ve made since then?
An Inconvenient Truth raised awareness at a time when there wasn’t nearly as much awareness on the issue. Hell, in '04 Climate Change was still barely even mentioned by the Dem candidate. But that part is over - the comparatively easy part, the faces and names part. Now we’re at the part where we have to actually fight for fundamental changes to get anywhere, and ‘raising awareness’ as an excuse just isn’t going to cut it.
It’s also not about ‘polite and respectful’. It’s about making structural changes to an extremely complex and interconnected system, rather than getting some nice-sounding policy pass so backpats can be had.
What did it raise awareness for? Nothing’s happened.
“Raising awareness” and “things happening” aren’t the same thing.
Just do anything as long as you don’t have to be inconvenienced. Got it.
Literally the only demand I made is “Don’t attempt to damage priceless works of art or human heritage”, but I guess that’s too much to ask for the attention-seeking brigade.
There was plexiglass in front of it. JSO has not permanently damaged anything, as far as I know. Quite the contrary, they take precautions to take care not to damage cultural artifacts. You know what doesn’t? Climate change.
For fucks sake, the suffragettes slashed paintings, and there’s more pearl clutching over some easily cleanable soup now than knives back then.
Amazing how many people want to ignore this crucial point - EVERY VALUABLE PAINTING IN A MUSEUM IS BEHIND INCH-THICK PLEXIGLAS. YOU COULD NOT POSSIBLY DAMAGE IT WITH TOMATO SOUP UNLESS YOU BROUGHT A FUCKING THERMAL DRILL.
You should go to the Olympics with the impressive mental gymnastics it required to have this be your takeaway.
What’s more important, an old painting or the people enjoying it?