I recently paid a visit to a friend. After an obligatory catch-up, we found ourselves sitting comfortably on a sofa skipping through various international TV channels, absentmindedly staring at the images on the screen, accompanied by the sound of languages we don’t understand. At one point, the rather mundane daytime programs were replaced by a montage of videos set against the backdrop of dramatic music, showing people throwing various things at art: cake at Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; black liquid at Klimt’s Death and Life; red substance at Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. My friend was visibly shocked by the montage. When it became clear that stuff was also thrown at other works of art, and that these events were part of a wider wave of climate protests, my friend’s shock gave way to confusion. “What is the point of doing all of this?” they asked the room. Now, I should stress that my friend is overall supportive of environmentalism, and, like many of us, consciously makes eco-friendly choices on an everyday basis. Yet, despite sharing climate protesters’ cause, they found the targeting of art to be a step too far—a tactic that doesn’t seem to make common sense.
One of the occupational hazards of spending time with a philosopher is that they will unpack your throwaway comments by articulating and challenging their implicit philosophical presuppositions. Thus, to live up to the stereotype, I would like to ask: contrary to my friend’s intuition, could throwing stuff at art in the name of protecting the climate make sense? I believe that the answer is yes.
Let’s begin by considering the opposite point of view. The intuitive rejection of art-damaging protest could express two types of common-sense positions.
First, throwing cake at the Mona Lisa may seem misguided, senseless, or purely destructive because, from the point of view of ethical norms dominant in modern Western societies, destroying art is devoid of any recognizable moral meaning. Even if climate activists believe themselves to be justified by some ethical precepts, these are unavailable to common-sense morality. We may say that the protest appears ethically “empty.” Here, smearing baked goods on a painting would be analogous at best to an avant-garde performance, or at worst to an act of madness, whose destructive logic escapes everyday sensibilities (in fact, the Mona Lisa protester was sent to a police psychiatry unit following the detention). Consequently, throwing stuff at art, insofar as it doesn’t communicate identifiable ethical commitments, fails as an expression of moral outrage against the climate crisis.
The second position underlying the intuitive objection to throwing stuff at art might go something like this: we may find ourselves feeling a degree of sympathy with the art-targeting activists; at the end of the day, they seem like sensitive and principled people, who, in their own way and like so many others before them, exercise the democratic right to protest. However, while pouring black liquid on Klimt’s painting can make some sense (i.e., we “get it”), it can be rejected on commonsensical political grounds as an ineffective tactic. The worker destroying a piece of machinery in a factory, or an animal rights activist releasing minks from fur farms, cause the capitalist and the breeder quantifiable economic damage, which, in turn, can force concessions or reforms. The most famous artworks, however, hang behind glass screens, and so throwing stuff at them makes no real damage; all that happens is that activists make life difficult for the museum staff. In consequence, direct action of this kind, although coherent (if not convincing), cannot put pressure on the powers that be—all it can achieve is to come across as a desperate demand for attention which alienates the public.
Thus, we can suggest that the recent climate protests may appear nonsensical because for many they make either no ethical or no political sense. But is throwing stuff at art nonsensical?
In the remainder of this post, I would like to suggest that both critical positions outlined above—and consequently, the intuitions they give rise to—are incorrect. Throwing stuff at art has an ethical content that can be politically effective.
It seems to me that the first criticism gets half of the story right. Vandalizing works of art in the name of climate protection stands (at least partly) “outside” of common-sense moral norms. However, this does not necessarily mean that there is no ethics behind the action.
Let’s take the van Gogh protest as an example. Two activists from the climate group Just Stop Oil entered the National Gallery in London, approached Sunflowers, and with one swift and synchronized movement emptied a couple of cans of soup onto the painting.
As the impassioned speech of the protesters makes clear, pouring soup at Sunflowers is a self-conscious act of vandalism that, by going against Western moral sensibilities, criticizes these very sensibilities. Today, the activists claim, we care more about protecting art than about protecting the planet. If the veneration of works of art is a privileged example of our culture’s misguided distribution of value and concern, then an attack on van Gogh is really a symbolic attack on Western ethical hierarchies, which prioritize the fate of painted sunflowers over the future of nature outside the museum walls.
While calling our values into question may constitute a starting point for making sense of the ethics orienting throwing stuff at art, it is not obvious that this type of performative moral critique can translate into effective political action. As the second critical position suggests, we may doubt these protests’ ability to stir the powers that be or to galvanize the public.
In response, we can note that an act in which beauty is destroyed and food is wasted—as in the case of the Sunflowers protest—has the ability to visually “summarize” the complex and often ignored structural relations between ecological and economic violence. The van Gogh activists impose on the spectators a scene that forces them to confront the link between the problems of poverty and ecocide, symbolized by the image of the empty can of soup against the backdrop of vandalized flowers. It can be suggested that this “becoming-visible” of structural injustice in an aesthetic experience generated by the protest has the potential to galvanize the audience by producing a political reorientation. And while art-damaging climate activists may not be able to put direct pressure on politicians, the newly re-politicized public could.
Overall, we can say that throwing art at stuff for environmental reasons makes sense because, ultimately, it demands a “transvaluation of values”—a radical revision of our moral and political categories. Furthermore, the ethical logic that governs climate activism—especially in moments where it conflicts the most with our intuitions—may represent fragments of such an alternative normativity. If we were optimistically inclined, and if we gave in to the temptation of clairvoyance, we might speculate that the counterintuitive normative content behind throwing stuff at art could prefigure a more sustainable world—or at least paint a picture necessary for the ethical and political task of constituting such a world.
Jakub Kowalewski
Dr Jakub Kowalewski works at Birkbeck, University of London and St Mary’s University. He is the editor of The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis, and is currently writing a book on the philosophy of climate apocalypticism.
