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.
This is invalid civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws (see: Rosa Parks disobeying bus segregation). So unless they think laws against throwing soup at paintings are unjust, their point is lost.
You mean like when they blockaded oil terminals and it got not nearly as much attention as this and got them swiftly whisked away?
I do think blockading oil terminals would be much more sympathetic. But it’s hard to blockade enough to have a serious effect on oil usage, hence the lack of attention. A better example is the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which included blocking construction. Public opinion eventually turned against the pipeline.
Is blocking traffic invalid then? Because that was also part of the civil disobedience used in the civil rights movement. Oh wait, they DID claim it invalid then, too!
MLK was brilliant at activism, but not all his actions were created equal. Notably it seems despite his protests, the stall-in never happened. Perhaps everyone realized it was a terrible idea. Then the Civil Rights Act passed without it. How do we know there’s not an alternate history where it did happen, pissed off a bunch of voters, and caused the Civil Rights Act to become too politically toxic to pass?
I’m gonna call bullshit on “too toxic.” There were literal riots over getting civil rights. There were literal murders over getting civil rights. A lot of the reason why MLK looked so good was because there were those who took extreme actions, and his nonviolent protests would sometimes be treated the same as the violent ones. But you think a stall-in would be too far? Should we use the Suffragettes instead, who also vandalized museums (worse than these guys)? Was that too toxic? What a silly argument.
Agreed.