Soup on art maybe arty way to save climate

You would not associate mashed potatoes and soup with great works of art, would you? But an army of climate crusaders has a newfound weapon in cheap food to “Save the planet”. This radical wave of protests, almost bordering on its symbolic “attack of art”, has come to stay. Last fortnight, two protestors hurled tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s timeless ‘Sunflowers’ at the National Gallery in London. Part of Just Stop Oil’s campaign against former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss issuing licenses to 100 companies to extract oil and gas in the North Sea, the activists asserted it was a way of forcing governments to choose their priorities—art or life. 

Their act soon found its echoes in Australia, where protestors glued themselves to a Pablo Picasso painting with signage that equated climate chaos with war and famine. It has since travelled to Germany’s Potsdam, where Claude Monet’s ‘Haystacks’ saw mashed potatoes smeared all over it. Make no mistake, this wave will travel the globe in the days to come as the climate crisis rages and calls for course correction get louder in the wake of the superheating of the Blue Planet.

This new form of activism, understandably, has received a divided response. Organisations like Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation stand their ground and say if such stunts make governments sit up and listen, then why not. Millions will starve in the coming years; hence, ‘cheap food’ is the weapon of mass attention here. No artworks targeted were damaged, say the activists. Others do not agree.

They find these antics steeped in the “woke culture” and are outraged that art is targeted for a subject as urgent and sensitive as climate change. All his life, Dutch maestro Van Gogh felt deeply for nature and humanity, which shone through his paintings. Attacking his art—or anyone’s, for that matter—is a violation of everything such superlative creative expressions stand for, they say. Since time immemorial, artists have carried the burden of social revolution, transformation and change, many times at great personal costs. The climate crisis, no one would dare dispute, is at a point of no return, and collective government actions will shape the planet’s future. But choosing such means of desecrating art that has fought for a better society is ill-thought of and would do more harm than good to the climate movement.