‘What is worth more, art or life?’ If protesters force thinking people in galleries to think harder, they did the right thing

The consensus appears to be that attacking art like Sunflowers or Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague is vandalism that merely alienates people from climate change campaigns.

A typical comment came from a witness to the Sunflowers attack, quoted in The Guardian. He said, “they may be trying to get people to think about the issues but all they end up doing is getting people really annoyed and angry.”

He added, “The typical unthinking individual who doesn’t think about the big issues of the planet is not the kind of person who walks around the National Gallery.”

Except maybe that’s why the protestors were right. I think about big issues and love walking around art galleries.

But where has thinking got us? ‘Thinking people’ on mini-breaks to see famous paintings show little inclination to sacrifice any part of their thinking lives to save the planet. Meanwhile, the victims of climate change caused by western industrialisation who never heard of Van Gogh and will never see Sunflowers are probably thinking life’s unfair as their child is swept away in a flood.

In that respect, a can of tomato soup has made a very good point.

Importantly, the paintings are covered by glass and were unharmed, although the Sunflowers’ frame might have been slightly damaged. If the paintings were harmed, I’d take a different view. But the goal was to get attention. It worked.

But that’s just me, so I did a sanity check with two art-expert friends. Were the protests reckless and counter-productive?

Oliver Sears owns an art gallery in Dublin and Arran Henderson is a history of art expert whose Dublin Decoded tours of the National Art Gallery are a regular sell-out. They had similar opinions, which Henderson described as “complex and conflicted”. It’s a relief to know there are still people in the world who believe in nuance.

Henderson says he “understands the immense frustration as society, corporations and governments sleepwalk us all into Armageddon”; while Sears observes that “a world that permits individuals to amass billions for no other purpose than the accumulation of wealth while hundreds of millions are tottering on the brink of starvation is morally repugnant.”

That being so, each tried to square the obvious success of the protests in drawing attention to these issues with the terrible risk to the paintings.

Sears says the works represent the high point of western art, even though poor Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life. Henderson believes “the world’s great art belongs to all of us, and has much to teach us about the past and the present.”

So they agreed any risk is unacceptable.

Sears preferred the protests where individuals glued themselves next to works of art rather than throwing material at them: “They gained the same attention without risking damage.” But Henderson worried another protestor might do something stupid and damage a painting, which would be a travesty.

Peaceful protest represents a foundational pillar of modern democracy but it’s noisy out there. Is there a better way to get attention?

Other Just Stop Oil protestors have blocked traffic, but apparently, that alienates people too. How do you draw a line between direct action that gets people talking without making them angry? Sears suggested super yachts and private jets are more obvious symbols of societal imbalance. But it’s harder to get at Kim Kardashian’s jet, and would anyone care anyway?

The guy tracking private jet ghost flights this summer did a good job shaming the rich. More of that would be good, though I doubt Kardashians will be checking in with the plebs at the airport soon. The other problem with targeting the super-rich is it lets our middle-class, consumerist, carbon-guzzling lives off the hook.

Henderson wondered if urban SUVs, which unlike paintings are not unique and do real damage to the environment, would be a fairer target. I considered briefly the response to slashed tyres on SUVs in D4.
Would that pierce the sense of entitlement people have to their own luxury? I imagine they’d prefer to go on a feel-good march.

Meanwhile, the Irish Banking Payments Federation revealed this week that the main driver of energy-saving home improvements is financial efficiency.

People took action to save money, not the planet. This means high energy costs are not a crisis, but what behavioural economists call a “nudge”, or more accurately, a shove. Governments were reluctant to impose carbon taxes. The Russians have done it for us instead.

​It’s terrible it has taken a war to concentrate the minds of individuals and governments. No protest has been as effective as the war’s impact on gas prices.

Thinking people might want to think about that.

“What is worth more, art or life?” Phoebe Plummer asked. Ah, but whose life? An African life? A Pakistani life? Our grandchildren’s lives? If Plummer forced thinking people in art galleries to think a little bit harder about the answers, she did the right thing.