Art Rookie: What's Art Got To Do With It, Reflections On The Just Stop Oil Climate Protests

Make it stand out

In an art world news cycle that garners mainstream attention only when a Picasso is sold for a hundred million pounds or when Banksy shreds his own work of art at an auction, activists making headlines for throwing food and glueing body parts to artworks across museums in Europe and North America is an unprecedented but welcome intrusion. 

The activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil target highly popular works of art in response to the government's decision to approve 100 new oil and gas projects in the North Sea, amongst broader environmental concerns regarding climate change. These climate activists have hosed down police headquarters with orange paint, glued themselves to plinths, stormed Silverstone, and spray-painted an Aston Martin showroom, amongst many other tactics. In typical fashion, the discourse surrounding these protests is divisive. 

As expected, one side of the debate is occupied by conservatives and "culture vultures" who have been outraged and "deeply shaken" by the actions of these groups. Clutching their pearls in disbelief, they see these tactics as an insult to the world's great masterpieces and a slap in the face to art and artistic production everywhere. An overzealous reaction, especially since no real damage was done to the paintings targeted, since they were protected by glass. (A detail often notably missed in the social media sharings of these protests.)

The discourse encompassed several points of contention, from one argument that reduced the whole dialogue to the fact that the protests were embarrassing, that they "do not look cool", to another that opposed throwing soup at Van Gogh's paintings by insisting he was a neurodivergent, pansexual artist that deserves our solidarity. Most conservatives also proclaimed with jest, "What does Monet have to do with climate change?" This is a seemingly fair defence, as most people agree that it would make more sense for these protestors to destroy something more specifically linked to fossil fuels or storm the offices of BP. 

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However, the logic behind vandalising artworks has been justified by Just Stop Oil's spokesperson Alex De Koning, who shared in an interview with the Guardian, "We are not trying to make friends here, we are trying to make a change, and unfortunately, this is the way that change happens." Given that before the art-specific protests, environmental groups such as Pipe Busters damaged a building site for a new aviation fuel pipeline and Just Stop Oil themselves vandalised petrol stations and were met with feeble recognition, the decision to begin defacing artworks feels like an inspired one. 

This decision also reflects an age-old tradition of destroying art to protest more significant, abstract issues. Most famously, suffragist protester, Mary Richardson, took to the National Gallery in London in 1914 to slash Diego Velázquez's c.1650 painting Rokeby Venus as part of a larger campaign for women's right to vote but more specifically, the treatment of one of their leaders, Emmeline Pankhurst who was imprisoned for her activism. 

This act of vandalism, as she explained to the press, was to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history. She predicted the public shock over her action and called this outrage hypocritical in the Times. She questioned why the public cared more about a picture of a beautiful woman than of these activists who were imprisoned fighting for their right to vote.

In 1969, when Black artists and activists were protesting the controversial ‘Harlem on My Mind’ exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ten paintings hanging in the museum's permanent galleries were etched with the letter H. While the perpetrators were never caught, it was assumed that the H signified Harlem or Hoving (after Thomas Hoving, former director of the museum). Radical Black newspapers such as Muhammad Speaks embraced and celebrated the idea of these western pieces being damaged, especially considering the way Black visual identity and Harlem were being represented and disrespected in the Met at that very moment. The story argued, "The insult of the 'Harlem on My Mind' exhibit at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art was that it mainly portrayed white minds' attitudes towards Black Harlem. Because of this colonial and condescending attitude, Afro-Americans retaliated by defacing some so-called classical western art in the museum." In mainstream news outlets, the vandalism of these famous Euro-American paintings overshadowed the vocal protest against racial inequity at the Met that was transpiring outside the museum, and while this is indicative of the stories that media outlets choose to highlight, it also reveals an obsession with artworks that exist within the art historical canon. 

Some of the criticism doled out about these climate activists also reflect this obsession with the canon, with journalists describing the defaced work as "treasures of the collection" and "museum masterpieces". 

Language like this reiterates that specific works are more important than others and that their space in museums is sanctified by some higher invisible power or some divine prophecy, not a product of centuries that prioritised Euro-American art. 

This deification of specific works of art (read: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, Claude Monet's Les Meules etc. etc.) makes us the viewers more protective of them and positions them as supposedly unique and untouchable. Something that should be protected at all costs. It also explains, to a certain extent, the polarising reactions to this activism. Would we have cared if Just Stop Oil had vandalised a degree show or lesser-known artworks created by a non-white artist? It wouldn't be pessimistic to assume that, at the very least, those acts would have received less press. 

“The end goal may be different for each of these activists and include policy changes, but what these protests do by damaging these glorified artworks is far from putting people off the climate emergency, as some argue.”

It is frustrating to realise that we still value these archaic ideas of quality. Calls for decolonising art history and museum collections come with an expectation that we seriously re-examine the notions we possess of a "masterpiece". The choice of pelting these masterpieces with paint and potatoes is a conscious one and one that benefits from those preconceived ideas. The argument that these acts devalue art then falls short. 

It isn't a love of art that has elicited public backlash; it's the influence and leverage these specific works of art have in our collective visual consciousness. And anyway, is the backlash really that unfortunate? Isn't that what activism is meant to do? Create contention, raise awareness, and force a response from anyone who would listen. The end goal may be different for each of these activists and include policy changes, but what these protests do by damaging these glorified artworks is far from putting people off the climate emergency, as some argue. Instead, they create and reinforce a sense of urgency that now reverberates through the hallowed halls of the museum.

Words: Zara Afthab