Just Stop Oil soups two more van Goghs hours after sentencing of earlier souping
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Let us remember that these paintings are behind protective glass, meaning the actual item is not affected. This is a shock tactic protest and to also send a message regarding the recent excessive custodial sentence (2 years!) for the previous protestors.
I'd be more inclined towards leniency if they were, say, actively putting soup in people's petrol tanks than this utterly irrelevant stupidity, as at least the property destruction would be tangentially related to the pursuit of an arguably noble goal.
Try throwing that soup on a politician or a billionaire. Everyone will love that.
But you're saying that they should stop with the victimless crimes and start on the actual assaults already.
They didn't ruin _this_ painting. /s
Nobody is getting in the way of extinction. These are just some clowns desperate to get attention.
Pitcher: We need the public engaged so that we can change policy to help mitigate climate change. So I suggest we vandalize beloved historical works of art. This will prove to the general public not only the value of our cause, but also enamor them to us. They will see that, by vandalizing art pieces, we are the most sensible and trustworthy to lead the way.
Protestor: I get it, so we vandalize art owned by the wealthy oil oligarchs hidden away in their giant mansions to highlight the disparities between them and those that actually have to suffer the consequences of climate change.
Pitcher: Nope. We go after the ones in open art galleries routinely viewed and appreciated by huge swaths of the general public. Also, we're going to use soup.
Adverb?: two more
Verb: Van goghs
Object: hours after sentencing of earlier souping
And in spite of my support for both civil disobedience in general and climate change activism in particular, I have to admit, as a van Gogh fan, my first question was whether the paintings were damaged (also no).
My third question, as yet unanswered: why van Gogh paintings rather than a target directly related to the oil industry or climate change?
Where would they get their soup from if all use of oil and fertilizer suddenly stopped? Why are they wasting food?
No disrespect, but I support what they are campaigning for and the need for attention - but it's not working. As you've so clearly shown.
They need to change their tactics.
> I hate these people. Van Gogh is my favorite artist. I feel like going out and buying a Hummer.
I have to say, I believe in climate change and that we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and the life on it. But what this group is doing is frankly evil and should be opposed.
Logically, they've done no significant physical damage.
However, the damage is in the minds of the message recipients.
So one of the causes of climate change was a Van Gogh painting, wasn't it ?
Considering the injustice of the sentence given out (relative to what others have gotten for far worse crimes), I'm considering having a go myself.
Everyone get a soup tin ...
In other news, the incoming new government have had to release many small time prisoners because of the prison overcrowding crisis in the UK.
Why would you want a society that has to lock up art, has to have expensive security, has to search people entering a museum, etc.?
You're never going to make me sympathetic towards the goal of such terrorism, quite the reverse.
I don't agree that priceless art is above the importance of our planet or the lives of people.
But I do disagree with their tactics. But only because they are not working. They are getting attention, but at the expense of the logical failure of the recipients of the message through their outrage.
What I can (and in fact did) say with a high level of certainty is that they aren't choosing their tactics based on effectiveness. They're choosing their tactics based on maximising attention on themselves. This is consistent with narcissism.
Of course we don't have to read minds in order to judge someone's actions. If someone says they want <A>, and they continuously persist in doing a thing which has no plausible pathway of ever achieving <A>, but is reliably and consistently achieving <B>, it's reasonable to infer that what they actually care about is <B>.
This is just a false dichotomy. You don't, in general, have to choose between priceless art and the importance of our planet.
You'll never believe what our current levels of CO2 does to society.
There's a reason why businesses do not market their products that way.
There is no reliable evidence[0] that CO2 has an effect on human cognition or on "society." High indoor CO2 levels aren't bad because of the CO2, it's bad because it's a marker of poor ventilation. And poor ventilation has many consequences for the chemical makeup of that air.
Last time I checked the methods of measuring temperature via satellites was not percise enough to even account for that scenario. It's like stealing ten people's drinking water so that you can put out a big forest fire. Knowing it will not at all impact the forest fire but it will sure as hell make the ten people angry. And then celebrating yourself for doing something. It's beyond stupid.
They're almost as bad as the ones in Germany who glued themselves to the streets and then couldn't show up to court because they flew to Bali. These people are seriously something.
> Given a choice between a Stuttgart court date or a sandy, balmy beach in Bali, it’s clear how most people would decide.
> Now Luisa and Yannick, two young radical German climate activists, are learning to their cost that they may have made the wrong choice.
> Last September in Stuttgart the two participated in a climate protest by the group Last Generation, gluing their hands to a city street and blocking traffic beneath a banner reading: “Save oil don’t drill.”
[…]
> A Last Generation spokesperson told Bild: “They booked the flight as private persons, not as climate protectionists. That must be kept separate.”
* https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2023/02/03/german-cl...
1. Vandalism of art does nothing to advance dealing with high CO2 levels. The problems with CO2 have been widely reported. It is a major issue in most major democracies that comes up for debate in most major elections. So it is not going to do anything measurable to raise awareness of the issue.
2. The same argument works for anything that does less harm than our current CO2 levels. If I protested CO2 levels by going around slapping babies, would that be an acceptable form of protest? Slapping a few babies, even hard enough to cause some brain damage, causes less harm than CO2 levels being too high.
To what extent this can be considered a work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, I don't have a clear answer to that yet.
Although it was the second performance of the play, as far as it is known no Heinz' soups were harmed this time. I will have to ask some LLM on this later after feeding it with the works of Walter Benjamin.