Three individuals targeted National Gallery paintings an hour after Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were jailed for similar attack in 2022
Climate activists have thrown tomato soup over two Sunflowers paintings by Vincent van Gogh, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest action in 2022.
Three supporters of Just Stop Oil walked into the National Gallery in London, where an exhibition of Van Gogh’s collected works is on display, at 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, and threw Heinz soup over Sunflowers 1889 and Sunflowers 1888.
The latter was the same work targeted by Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland in 2022. That pair are now among 25 supporters of Just Stop Oil in jail for climate protests.
Condering that the art is unharmed, and they glue themselves to the gallery waiting for the police while explaining what their goals are so that passersby film them to spread the message, I’d say that they are, frankly, pretty distinguishable from vandals, or do you know of other vandals that do that?
The gallery still has to be closed, has to dedicate cleaners, invest into security measures etc. Vandalism can be as simple as spitting on the street. But that’s not my point, in general.
My point is why mess with a place what has nothing to do with climate change, and not mess with places that absolutely do have something to do with it?
They did. They do. They probably will in the future as well.
But, it seems as though people care more about art being faux-vandalized than they do about the planet dying, so those don’t make the front pages, or you would’ve known this.