Two are heirs (a Getty and a Kennedy) and the third has made a career of advising celebrity philanthropists."
I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all that someone had something nearly bad happen to them (wildfires encroaching on their houses) and that caused them to become attuned to an issue and start taking a form of action to curb it (funding protestors).
Again, not the actions I would take and in my opinion they’re ineffective actions, but we shouldn’t guffaw at people for becoming attuned to something through tragedy or near tragedy.
Someone who smokes cigarettes whose partner dies of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking who then decides to quit smoking and become an anti-tobacco activist should not be written off just because they're "only doing it" because it directly affected them via someone they love. Someone who is extremely rich because their ancestors made a killing selling oil who decides to become an "activist" after their mansion almost burned down due to wildfires should be mocked. Anyone can throw soup at a painting. Only the super rich can influence politicians (in america at least).
How do you know this? It's not exactly and either situation here.
People who do love and adore fine art are not limited to the super-rich (this was after all on public display), but I bet it cuts the super rich who can afford to hang originals on their bedroom walls a little deeper than most.
That said, I do know I'm not normal in many ways, perhaps more people than I assume care about originals.
If the human race goes extinct due to global warming or whatever reason, at least we left these artifacts behind.
They are not doing it "because their mansions ... almost burned down". They are doing it because they know that this will distract people from their real actions. And they look like philantropists now which is far from reality.
I don't support their actions. If straight-forward conversations how the earth is going to become uninhabitable doesn't change people's patterns, then I doubt shock-media will either.
"How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your very eyes?"
Being as they said, "apparently", and that a similar stunt was pulled previously, of which also had protective covering, seems to show that nobody intended (or did) destroy anything.
all it takes is a single copy-cat to ruin a less protected piece.
their message is shocking and attention-grabbing, not responsible.
They won't take responsibility but when Joe-Bob runs into the next museum and legitimately destroys something whilst emulating their antics it will have been their fault for instigating this recent spree.
Or bored kids with crayons will try colouring it in and/or peeling off gold foil[1] if it has any, or well meaning idiots will try to restore it like that Jesus picture, or a hundred other things because the public isn't just the best of us, it's all of us.
If art isn't protected, it will be damaged. Failing to take preemptive defensive measures against predictable threats is not as blame-worthy as the actual proximal causes, of course, but it's still blame-worthy.
[0] I've met someone who had to be sectioned after something similar made them think they were a car and therefore started walking along the middle of a lane.
[1] I've witnessed that.
If you are an activist, or you condone this kind of thing, it is important to realize that the average person is not going to delve any farther into this story in order to give the activists the benefit of the doubt. They are going to be upset that an innocent work of art was vandalized - even if it wasn't actually harmed in any way. They will associate the cause with unhinged and irrational people.
Maybe next time, they should try self-immolation instead. It might spare a painting.
They are doing it for their own good. From a long time.
As long as profits increase nobody gives a damn. See for example "America's most beloved war criminal".
Those kind of protests do one thing : discredit those organizations who made them. Just notice that there are mainly very young people who carry those "protests", who are easily fooled to do such things. Unfortunately for some of them can be a harsh lesson (jail time).
The reason why this doesn't look rational or 'for the cause' is because the target in question really has nothing to do with the petroleum industry. Johannes Vermeer painted this art in 1665 before the industrial revolution. The subject is just a woman with a pearl earring. So neither the painter nor the work of art have any persuasion or symbolism that encourages fossil fuel use. It seems totally illogical to commit an act such as this. I think the public at large sees no connection between what the activists went after and what they are trying to achieve. When that happens, it delegitimizes the movement in peoples eyes.
What picture exactly is of course not important. Any popular picture with a glass plate in front of it could have done the job. I don't they have any ax to grind about Vermeer, nor will the controversy have any connections to him or his art.
I don't think this is true, for most people. People do not generally stop and think in a deep and reflective way after getting angry about something. What these activists did was not inspiring and it did not look like justice. They aren't Rosa Parks 2.0, they're people throwing liquid at valuable inanimate objects which people find beautiful while gluing themselves to surfaces at a museum. There is no powerful symbolism of defiance here, this is not speaking truth to power. They just look like childish weirdos. Childish weirdos do not make me self-reflect and question if I'm actually the one doing something wrong.
This is correct. The target is an irreplaceable piece of art. It's supposed to stand in for the earth (or some subset like nature). That's the point. The stand-in for the petroleum industry is whatever commodity they are throwing at it
It's also pretty logical because it doesn't actually cause permanent damage, but sensationalist headline writers make it seems like it did. So the stories get more virality then they otherwise would.
the Animal Liberation Front didn't ask the public to destroy slaughter-houses. the sea-shepherds didn't ask the public to attack whaling vessels, and to give an example from fiction 'Avalanche' didn't ask the public to attack power stations.
Di Caprio is rich and support nature conservation. Is not really so much difficult if you are rich. You just buy a chunk of land with a unique ecosystem, keep people from entering on it and you save ten species from going extinct. Is as simple as that.
What I would -not- expect is the children of some millionaires convincing poor or dumb people to perform humiliating, illegal and dangerous stunts in public for a small fee.
Lets imagine the outrage if one influencer would be caught paying homeless people to glue their heads and hands to a wall, and videotaping them while claiming, hey! I do it for the environment!.
This is mocking ecologists, manipulating poor people to perform degrading acts in public and endangering invaluable art. Three in one, all in the same stinking package.
This kind of fun is unacceptable, and should have consequences.
Oh do you mean that land in Hawaii that he blocked native caretakers from accessing and has since been taken over by invasive species?
Not. Try again.
Time has disproven these people. I don't see how this is any different.
I don't think most vegans will quote them for their change, but their activism that gave animal welfare attention in a attention economy, when it would otherwise simply not have gotten any.
I often eat at a Nepalese vegan restaurant and the food sure beats McDonald's or burger king. Not to mention they actually believe in veganism, they don't just have a token veggie burger on the menu because the market wants it.
They even prohibit consumption of baby food with meat on the premises :)
As for prohibiting baby food, I would kindly tell them to go fuck themselves. Nobody is going to prohibit a parent from feeding their baby with food already prepared and bought. Its exactly this type of rhetoric which makes moderates skip on vegan community (and I eat vegan dishes on a daily basis!)
I don't want whoever to believe, I want a neat combination of healthy, tasty, and good for environment/animal, but in a spectrum. Not extremes, not any toxic belief systems.
(As for McDs and BK there are better veggie and vegan options available but I prefer BK vegan way over McDs vegan, hands down. That we have these options is a sign of time. When I was full-time vegan it was a nightmare to go out eating. Now we have New York Pizza delivering delicious vegan shoarma pizzas.)
Winter of 2022, half of Europe. PETA can frolic naked in the snow if they want.
Why buy an expensive tablet made of nasty coltan if a brat is just going to assault you and jump over it?, oh wait... in fact they don't do it.
This hypocrites bully grandmas "in the name of ecology" while using all the time products made of materials that destroy the African rainforests and must be replaced each five years occupying entire landfills, and never think twice about it.
And in their totalitarian utopia we all wear plastic replacements. Of course plastic fur is super-ecological. Have you heard of the problem with particles of "micro-leather" or "micro-fox-hair" polluting the oceans for decades?. Me neither.
They are directly responsible of the death of animals and plants. Ruined clothes that would last an entire life otherwise, have now to be replaced at a much faster pace and hidden from sight, so more small carnivores will die for the children paint.
They liberate chimps in the zoos with the results that the chimps must be shoot and killed by the same people that cared for them for years. Great job lads!. This animals could have a long quiet life. Save the chimps! under soil
They blocked fixing the American grey squirrel invasion in Italy when it was possible. Grey is a squirrel species know for eating complete rings of bark and killing entire branches. Now the grey squirrels are killing the young trees and also propagating a virus that kills the native red squirrels. They were told before by the zoologists that the squirrels would be a problem. They just don't care.
They did the same when the first racoons invaded Japan in 90's. Now the rampant coons cause millionaire damages in agriculture, threaten japanese unique biodiversity and scratch and urinate over 800 years old japanese temples damaging invaluable cultural artifacts. They were warned about it. Stupid, stupid people.
They liberate alien carnivores that kill millions of birds. They never apologize by this, or showed the slightest sign of remorse.
In resume, they are poison for a sensible ecological management and always take the wrong side in terms of nature conservation. This is what happens when you put toddlers to do surgery.
But of course the rest of people are not moral enough and not saint enough. Not like them.
I would consider myself a person in favor of the ethical treatment of animals, and PETA campaigns like (the now quite old, but eminently memorable) "rebranding fish as sea kittens" [1] are so far out in la-la land, so ridiculous, and go so far in letting perfect be the enemy of good ("let's go after those unethical pescatarians!") that the organization loses credibility.
It doesn't help that in the intervening years, my main interaction with the organization (as well as Oxfam, ASPCA, etc) has been shady third party donation subscription hawkers trying to earn commissions off of tricking me into acknowledging them on lunch hour.
If there have been improvements in the treatment of animals over time, I'd make my own subjective leap to say they happened in spite of PETA, not because of it.
My point was: Effective activism does not have to be likeable. Going for the opposite seems a viable strategy.
Most people don’t care that deeply about the things that don’t affect them (or their friends/family).