Just Stop Oil protesters charged for tomato soup on 'Sunflowers' painting
cnn.com
cnn.com
Europe is in the midst of an energy crisis the likes they have never seen. And a fair part of the issue is they have spent the last decade divesting from oil and gas without lining up any viable alternatives.
Europe is now on track to burn more coal this next year than it ever has in the history of the continent.
These groups are throwing a hissy fit because they would rather debate things that don't actually matter than to answer hard questions about why they oppose nuclear energy or carbon taxes.
Then stopp blocking the viable alternatives. New oil andgas while banning new solar is the height of insanity
Personally, I get it. The statement is perfect: “what’s the point of beautiful art if there’s no habitable planet to appreciate it in?” I get that the art wasn’t actually damaged, and a large part of me is thankful for that..
But I would love to see a stream of priceless works of art irreparably damaged by Gen Z’s. It’s too poetically perfect. The statement? “Earth is a priceless work of art, damaged by profiteers from the previous generation. So vandalism is fair game, right?” I think Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” would be quite the statement. And I can’t imagine an artist hanging in the Rijks who wouldn’t agree with this sentiment on some level either.
Besides, if Banksy can do it and suddenly it’s worth even more money…
Art is fundamentally about seeing your human experience reflected in a physical medium, and especially a medium other than your own thoughts. How many people are feeling bitter about how untaxed negative externalities (CO2, plastic, deforestation, water&energy security collapse) were traded for decades at the financial gain of the few? How many view ‘art’ as something primarily owned by the few? I know that “destroying art” is an uncomfortable notion, but guess what else is fundamentally uncomfortable at its core?
Be where? Here, on this planet? Here, on HN? Here, commenting on this particular article?
The third option comes closest to making your question make some kind of sense, but even then it doesn't really work. We might be here commenting on the article because we found the "protest" to be childish vandalism, and given a chance, we want to say so.
I'm sure not here (for any value of "here") because "a lot of people have been living out this hypothetical".
> I think a lot of people have already been living out this hypothetical for at least a decade, both rich and poor.
I’m saying the proposed hypothetical experiment of “making the world a shittier and seeing who wants to save it” is no hypothetical; it’s day to day reality for billions.
> Why else would we be here?
“Here” meaning the here and now of world affairs: the brink of nuclear war, environmental collapse, economic collapse, wildly disproportionate wealth inequality. The day to day symptoms of a shitty place for billions.
I’m saying that the world is already royally fucked, and I can empathize with the viewpoint of “why should the rich get their fine art while the rest of us choke and starve.”
I still don't agree with the protests, but... the elite do have a way of messing up things and leaving everyone else to bear the consequences, don't they?
Ah, because vandalism is fair game?
> maybe your mothers grave should be destroyed?
Makes sense to me. Maybe we could dig up the dead and use them for fertilizer to plant trees. The crazy thing about the dead is they’re a bunch of a freeloaders. in terms utility experienced by the buried per unit of land occupied to do so, they’re still at zero.
https://grist.org/living/mushroom-burial-suit-turns-dead-bod...
Furthermore how is your criterion for trolling formed such that implying to an absolute stranger that their mother’s grave should be destroyed, is not trolling?
They are experiences for many people that could last forever. These attacks are on public paintings.
This shows you care absolutely nothing about the environment and only about hurting people.
And that is 100% the environmentalist movement.
You make absolutely ridiculous statements like "there’s no habitable planet" only to justify the fun in cruelty to others.
> Banksy can do it and suddenly it’s worth even more money
Banksy has made the world a better place. I have never seen him destroy things of large value, even if you think what he does is zero value and has to be painted over his protest doesn't abuse the publics trust and cause large financial harm.
Okay, first of all I genuinely agree with this.
> They are experiences for many people that could last forever. These attacks are on public paintings.
Absolutely agree again. But you still haven’t addressed my core argument: that climate change is an affront on the public’s ability to view art. Like I said: “what’s the point of art if you don’t have a habitable environment to view it in?” Hell, I’ve been saying this next one since 2013: “what’s the point of WAR if there’s no habitable environment to conduct it in or claim victory over afterward?”
> This shows you care absolutely nothing about the environment and only about hurting people.
How incredibly rude.
> I have never seen him destroy things of large value.
I guess $25M isn’t large value.
> even if you think what he does is zero value
Haha. Dude, I love me some Banksy. What?
1. I guess you enjoy living under the specter of a looming nuclear apocaypse?
2. Dunno if you noticed, the planet is literally on fire right now. I currently can’t step outside without putting my respiratory system at risk.
3. The snow crab fishing season was called off. Because 90% of the population is gone.
4. Europe in a literal meltdown because of fears over how they’ll stay warm this winter.
5. Texas about to go into the third year of this same exact problem in a row. Ted Cruz will be in Cancun.
Ay ay ron
But even if it had been destroyed, and even though I quite like Van Gogh, I'm not sure how much sleep I'd lose over it. There are 4 more of them, and when you get down to it it's a still life by an artist with a moving backstory rather than a peak of aesthetic achievement.
The loss of a species, which now happens so often that it's not really newsworthy, troubles me far more. To be sure, some species are tiny worms or bugs whose names I can't pronounce or remember, and whose ecological role I only dimly understand, as opposed to 'charismatic megafauna.' And statistically I know there would always be some level of species extinction going on even if humans weren't around. But with so much evidence of the ecological pressure created by humanity and industry in particular, the loss or damage of a cultural artifact seems like a very minor tragedy.
I don’t genuinely believe that we’ve had a forcing function experience yet as a species that would push us to take true action. Like billions discarding their vehicles action, despite the personal cost. News outlets do too effective a job of virtualizing and down playing disaster. For instance, I had to join the r/Ukraine subreddit to get around the US version of the reporting that did just enough to give you the details but not enough to where the news outlets had to pick up the thought of whether this will scare viewers away from coming back. The real viscera of war is why we have veterans with PTSD, it’s horrifying enough on your smartphone screen for 8 months. That same “real viscera of climate change” is hard to come by. How many people have actually been to an actual forest fire? Even fewer, how many have been to the collapsing ice sheets? How many took physics and environmental science seriously enough to have faith in the impending apocalyptic predictions of “an inconvenient truth”?
And that’s precisely my point. We aren’t “in it” (the real horrors of climate change) as a society yet. I think HN is a selective population that isn’t indicative of the rest. The problem is that I think when it come and scares us to our senses naturally it will be too late. So is throwing soup cans at paintings childish? Ineffective? Yes. But I think it’s indicative of a generation that wants to stimulate action and they’re desperate to find any route.
Certainly, I don't want to see any art get destroyed, but even less do I want to see art museums become the monuments to a species-level murder-suicide. The scale of the environmental destruction that respectable folk are deploring but (mostly) passively accepting is a monstrous crime, and some vandalism that highlights the misallocation of social priorities an extremely gentle kind of communication.
The glaze is a thin shellac coating. You still have to strip it and re-glaze, and it's kind of lucky it didn't do more damage than it did.
Sounds like the mission was accomplished?
Did it? Is the general public concentrating on the topics they intended on bringing to the forefront or that vandalized art?
Is the general public's sentiment that their act makes sense, or that it was petulant, privileged behavior?
In my opinion, they did harm to their cause.
My best guess is that most people have formed opinions on climate change at this point, and these types of protests don't really move anyone's opinion - if you believe in climate change, you still believe in climate change, and you probably don't think climate change is more urgent now that someone threw tomato soup on an old painting. If you don't believe in climate change, you still don't believe in climate change, I can't see soup on a painting affecting that.
I suspect Putin invading Ukraine did more for climate change action than any amount of protests would do.
I think they actually damage the cause they're working towards, it gives opponents of taking action against climate change cheep ammunition for ad hominem attacks against anyone working on climate change similar to how small groups of rioters can be used to paint entire protests as violent.
As if they were so principled before, or went out of their way to take other objections so seriously.
A more objective measure would be to estimate the cost it would take to get the equivalent level of publicity, rather than trying to estimate the positive or negative impact which is necessarily subjective.
We don't know whether pissing people off is really ineffective or actually galvanizes more people to action. I'd contrast actions like this with the worldwide protests against the Iraq war in February 2003. Those are estimated to be the largest single political demonstration in history, involving 6-10 million people in ~600 venues around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
They were huge protests, close to universal. Subsequents events pretty much validated the protesters' concerns. And what did all that peaceful, dignified, disciplined protest achieve? Fuck all. Protests that don't upset anyone are quite useless.