by JEFFREY St. CLAIR
“It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.”
– Seamus Heaney
+On October 14 two protesters for the climate group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on the protective glass covering Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and then glued themselves to the wall at London’s National Gallery. I was dismissive at first. After all, if you’re willing to go to jail for a direct action why not target an oil or coal company? But the intensity of the reaction against them from nearly all quarters–but particularly from putative progressives like Matt Taibbi–has won me over. It proves that even a simulated threat against a piece of art whose value is entirely subjective generates more outrage than the ongoing decimation of the planet.
+ The point of these “stunts” is to generate moronic tweets like this from the self-appointed guardians of High Culture. As an act of political DADA they succeeded behind their wildest expectations. Van Gogh, who hated museum art, which he considered dead, would have likely approved.
+ Like many, Taibbi’s more upset about soup smeared on protective glass than the death and misery inflicted by climate change–proving the point of the protest: where threats (in this case totally benign) to commodified representations of Nature prompt more outrage than real Nature being roasted.
Counterpunch for more