Opinion:
Soup over Solidarity?
Recently, “Just Stop Oil” protesters threw a can of soup at a glass-covered original Van Gogh painting in the national gallery museum. The response to this event was rampant. Members of my community brought it up several times, with everyone discussing their outrage, distaste, or annoyance for the attack on this priceless work. It feels like the majority of people I’ve heard talk about it deemed this action an incorrect way to protest.
I find it disappointing that this protest seems to have more people’s attention and outrage than the climate activist Wynn Bruce setting himself on fire in front of the supreme court and later dying. Where was your outrage for him? Where is your outrage for things that are actually lost, damaged, and dying? Instead, here we are spending our time and energy engaging in a circular discourse about a painting left undamaged.
Who benefits from your outrage over the painting? While everyone is writing off these activists as disruptive teenagers the real message is slipping away. No one is talking about the oil industry’s wrongs; they’re talking about the soup. When you, a working-class citizen, join in with the talk show hosts, aristocrats, and wealthy liberals and write off these protesters as angsty teens who don’t know how to protest right, you are ignoring your class. You, the working-class individual who is the most affected by climate change. You, the person who chokes on the air outside. You write them off as destructive and bad activists. When you engage in this rhetoric you are ignoring your class.
The offenders in the climate crisis want you to see these protesters as cringe woke leftist teenagers. They want you to see them as ridiculous. Because as long as you are outraged by their action and ignoring their message, the oil companies go on to make more billions unfettered.
You might say, “Why are they taking it out on art?”; They are trying to spread a message. Methods of protest will continue to expand as long as politicians and agencies fail to take action. Activism such as roadblocks and sit-ins don’t get the level of media response that makes people pay attention. Really? Your outrage lies with – of all possibleparties in this scenario – the protesters who threw soup knowing that the painting was protected by glass? The oil industry has money in museums and museum board members across the country and world (Museums that also contain hundreds of stolen art pieces that have been assigned a monetary value and prescribed to a class of people deemed “sophisticated enough” to appreciate it) and you are most angry with teenage activists?
If the activists had knowingly damaged an art piece that was unprotected, then I would feel a different way about it. They chose an artwork that they knew was protected. If future activists try to recreate this event using art that is not protected, or art that is from a marginalized community and/or holds significant cultural value to a marginalized group then I would have a problem with that. I am not pro-destruction of art, but temporary defacement of a work that has been so wide-spread reproduced and commoditized the way Van Gogh has doesn’t upset me.
Van Gogh was never recognized for his art during his lifetime. It wasn’t until after his death that his art was widely acknowledged, appreciated, and appraised for monetary value. His work became a commodity, something to be praised, acquired, and collected. Something to be purchased for millions of dollars by museums and private collectors. Van Gogh’s name and works have become an access point for elitism, treated like a Burken bag. Our society has placed value in things that are limited, exclusive, and that only a few can afford and by that logic, appreciate.
Maybe people should be re-evaluating who they are the most upset by in this moment. When you hop on the bandwagon of anti-activist rhetoric, you’re playing into the hands of the guilty parties in the climate crisis. The media might never be able to put the drama of the action aside and engage in the conversation of climate change that was intended, but that doesn’t mean we in our individual communities cannot. Change happens at the ground level too. Are you going to join in with the outrage? Or are you going to take action?
