As It Happens7:05Attacking paintings with soup isn’t an effective way to fight climate change, says activist
Hurling soup or some sort of damaging food at famous paintings has a become a popular trend among climate activists hoping for a brighter future, but Lucy Whelan says those demonstrations aren’t actually having the impact those activists would hope.
“It’s a kind of spectacle and nothing has really been harmed,” Whelan, a climate activist herself, told Nil Köksal on As It Happens. “The problem with climate change right now is that so many people know it’s scary, but we’re quite complacent.”
In an interview with As It Happens in October, Plummer said that the action she and Holland took was necessary in the shadow of the climate crises.
“Right now, there’s 33 million people displaced by floods in Pakistan. Thousands of people are dying of starvation in Somalia due to extreme famine from crop failure,” said Plummer.
This photo from Italian news agency Ansa, shows climate activists from Last Generation and a security guard by The Sower, an 1888 painting by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh, after activists threw pea soup at it on Nov. 4. (ANSA/AFP/Getty Images)
“And it took two young people throwing soup at a painting to get more people talking about the climate crisis, [more than] the millions of lives have been destroyed by climate disasters.”
When Whelan first saw what Plummer and Holland had done, she was shocked. But she says, while she wholeheartedly agrees with the intention behind the protest, she feels it’s a lose-lose scenario.
“Either the soup or the acidic liquid that’s chosen is actually going to damage the artworks, in which case, I think that’s the tragedy. It makes the protesters look like hooligans who are not interested in preserving things for the future, which they obviously are,” said Whelan.
“Or it’s not going to damage the work … then what we have is something that looks shocking, but actually it just makes us all go, ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ …[which] is exactly the kind of thinking that we need to stop being quite so good at.”
Making a difference
Other famous pieces of art have been hit as well. In late October, mashed potatoes were chucked Claude Monet’s painting Les Meules, and someone smashed chocolate cake on a waxwork figure of King Charles.
“Her painting Stumps and Sky … is a lament of ecological destruction and her art actually paid attention to Indigenous peoples. She cared about all that binds us to the world. She seemed just the wrong person,” said Whelan.
Protesters said they chose the painting because the fallen trees depicted the kind of environmental destruction they are trying to prevent. But Whelan says that instead, protesters should be more thoughtful about the pieces they target.
This photo provided to media from the group Stop Fracking Around shows Erin Fletcher, left, and Emily Kelsall, right, in front of the Emily Carr painting ‘Stumps and Sky,’ at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Saturday, Nov. 12. (Stop Fracking Around)
“At least think about making some seriously disruptive attacks on art that celebrates consumption and economic growth,” said Whelan.
“I think we need to be more thoughtful, not more art historical, about about what is the target of activism.”
Whelan says she is on the protesters’ side. As a climate activist herself, she’s tried to make meaningful changes and taken part in protests.
She’s spoken to her local politicians in Cambridge, England, and talked with neighbours about how they can do things differently to protect the environment.
“There will be so many people watching attacks like this saying, ‘oh, I support action on climate change. I really do. But just not this not attacks on art.’ And I would encourage anyone who says that to make that real, to translate that into action,” said Whelan.
“If you do support action on climate change, [and] you don’t want to see it like this, contact your counselors, do something you do approve of. Walk the talk.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
