Quicksand Fans

"Protestors" from the group Just Stop Oil have thrown tomato soup over Van Gogh"s painting "Sunflowers" in the National Gallery in London.
How this is supposed to persuade the government to stop issuing licences for oil and gas exploration I have no idea. It just looks to me like a pointless act of vandalism.
Fans of the BBC TVprogramme "'Allo! 'Allo!" will be more familiar with the painting as "The Cracked Vase with the Big Daisies".
In which case, the next target for these vandals is most likely to be Van Klomp's "Fallen Madonna (with the Big Boobies)"
This picture should have extra guards posted on it immediately ,
that is. if anyone knows where it is...

Painting is fine. Protective coating/glass in front of it. Either way, nonsense.

Wonder how many gallons of gas they burned driving to the museum.

sigh... i'm in basic agreement that we ought to be pursuing the goal of phasing out our reliance on oil and other fossil fuels, but how does this help? is anyone talking about that issue instead of how stupid this is????

QSMud wrote:Painting is fine. Protective coating/glass in front of it. Either way, nonsense.

Whew!

Did I ever wake up when I saw this! Because -- grrrrrrrrrr -- Van Gogh just happens to be my very favorite artist.

I can't think of a more effective way to get people to hate whatever it is that you stand for, no matter if it's right or wrong.

Nessie

Too much of this going on: https://www.yahoo.com/news/mona-lisa-le ... 48061.html

Nessie wrote:

QSMud wrote:Painting is fine. Protective coating/glass in front of it. Either way, nonsense.

Whew!

Did I ever wake up when I saw this! Because -- grrrrrrrrrr -- Van Gogh just happens to be my very favorite artist.

I can't think of a more effective way to get people to hate whatever it is that you stand for, no matter if it's right or wrong.

Nessie

One of the reasons they chose Van Gogh's Sunflowers for the stunt was precisely because it was covered in protective glass. They knew they'd get lots of attention for "attacking" something famous, but wouldn't actually destroy a masterpiece.

Here in the UK the people elect a Party, not a specific prime minister... And after Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign after too many scandals, the Conservative Party chose a new prime minister themselves, with no election.

Days after coming into power, all previous environmental protection laws and conventions have been scrapped. There was a law against frakking, brought in just a few years ago, but the new Prime Minister has immediately got rid of it and authorised frakking. And started new programs for oil and gas extraction that contravene an environmental treaty we signed up to.

Unless the Conservative Party themselves choose another prime minister or call an election, we might be stuck with them for the next couple of years until the next public election date.

And, in the past couple of years the government made all forms of protest illegal, with measures you'd expect to see in Russia. Not an exaggeration. You can be arrested for causing "a disturbance" to 2 or more people, or an organisation. And a disturbance can include making noise. There is also specifically a "no protest" zone around parliament.

Despite this, there have been loads of environmental protests, and the protestors have been arrested, but it has been getting very little news coverage. People are going to jail in attempts to protect the environment, and nobody knows or cares about it. So protestors are desperate to draw attention to what is happening. They don't care if people hate them or not, what matters is that people are talking about it. It's now international news.

Here's a pretty good newspaper article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... il-tactics

There's a cartoon in the latest edition of the magazine Private Eye in which an eco'-protestor throws Sunflowers at Andy Warhol"s painting of a Campbell soup can; another protestor tells him. "You haven't got the hang of this, have you?..."

I can appreciate the reasons for the protest, but that was no way to go about it.

Vandalism of any sort solves nothing...and it detracts from the genuine issues at hand.