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.
In Germany, protestors repeatedly shut oil pipelines off and locked themselves to the valves to prevent their reopening, blocking oil flow for several hours every time. I consume a lot of news, both mainstream and in my leftist bubble. That story barely registered anywhere.
The exact same protestors threw mashed potatoes at a Van Gogh. They were the main headline for over a week.
Hell, some guy set himself on fire a few years ago and it was in the news for half a day.
The media blackout is real, but it’s not a huge conspiracy. It’s just that the media reports on what gets them clicks, and nothing generates clicks like outrage. That’s why so much reporting also conveniently forgets to mention that the paintings are protected by plexiglass and nothing ever got damaged. But all the controversy gets people talking, and some people will inevitably question what drives people to do something like that. That is the real objective. If they wanted to be popular, they’d to greenwashed recycling videos on YouTube instead, or whatever else is hip with the neoliberal peddlers of personal responsibility at the moment.
And how will this get corporations to stop drilling for and selling and taking advantage of fossil fuels? How do you get from throwing soup to that?
You stop the problem from being buried under the fact that everyone is struggling to get by, or distracted by whatever the fuck the likes of the Kardashians are up to. You bring it to the forefront and prompt conversations like these - conversations where someone might realise that to stay the course on this one is to roll down the road to the apocalypse, and maybe they’d like to do something about that.
When has it ever been buried? When? Point out a time when climate change was not a major issue being discussed in the last 20 years. And I don’t mean just for a day or two like after January 6th, 2020.