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October 22, 2022“What is worth more, art or life?”
This question — and what would normally be an obvious answer — got a lot more complicated on October 14 when two protesters for the climate activism group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery. Immediately after the stunt, the protesters challenged onlookers with this query.
“Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice?” the protester continued. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?”
Just Stop Oil made international headlines for this incident, with the onslaught of publicity leading to more attention than the group had ever before received. Yet much of the media and public attention was negative, with many questioning the efficacy of the protest and criticizing the protesters for hurting their own cause. By jeopardizing one of the most beloved works of art in the world, the group had obscured and overshadowed its actual message. True, millions of people were hearing about Just Stop Oil for the first time, but it was now likely in the context that reckless protesters had ruined van Gogh’s Sunflowers just to make a point.
But the protesters hadn’t ruined van Gogh’s Sunflowers. The painting, enclosed by glass, was completely unharmed; the National Gallery later confirmed that only the frame had been slightly damaged and that the protesters had been arrested.
Still, the real damage — to the urgent cause of battling the oil industry in the fight to save the planet — seemed to have been done. “Throwing soup at paintings won’t save the climate,” ran a typical media response, while TikTok immediately memed conspiracy theories that the protesters were actually hired by the oil industry to turn the public against oil protests. Multiple friends I spoke with following the incident had only heard that Sunflowers had been targeted, not that the painting was just fine. And few media write-ups even bothered to mention Just Stop Oil’s ultimate goal: to halt new oil licensing across Great Britain. So: Was it a successful protest?
When I heard that the painting was unharmed, my reaction rapidly shifted from “This is horrifying” to “This might be the best protest ever.” At least, it’s one I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.
There’s a huge difference between a climate protest that destroys art in the name of saving the planet and a climate protest that threatens the destruction of art but doesn’t actually go through with it. The former treats the art and the cultural value we ascribe to it as incidental in the fight to save the planet, ignoring that a civilization without art is an incredible loss.
The second kind of protest, however, raises all kinds of questions in the absence of actual destruction. What would it have meant if we had lost Sunflowers? Such an act would have generated a period of international collective mourning, a unified sense of loss that no amount of urgency over the climate crisis has been able to equal. But what could the loss of one great painting — the reported $81 million value of which derives not only from its beauty and historical import but from the deeply subjective and often-fraught methods of the art market — mean to a civilization that doesn’t exist? The prospect of that loss, averted, allows us to seriously confront the degree to which we as a society collectively dismiss and downplay climate change.
