I had planned to refrain from commenting on the tomato soup-flinging and mashed potato-smearing that’s recently been creating messes in art museums. To my mind, these are illogical, misdirected attacks, whose intended targets were not van Gogh, Monet and Vermeer (whose perches were besmirched in London, Potsdam and the Hague, respectively), but the fossil-fuel companies that are now regarded as climate-change culprits. (If you don’t get the logic of the connection between attacking art and protecting the environment, welcome to my club.)
I had resisted being co-opted into giving the art-attackers the attention that they crave and revel in. But when I was contacted last week by NPR’s Chloe Veltman (with whom I had previously spoken, when she was doing a story for Southern California’s KPCC), I ambivalently agreed to be interviewed for “All Things Considered.”
As it turned out, NPR didn’t air any of my comments. I could speculate as to why what I said may not have been the soundbite that NPR was looking for, but Chloe did agree to let me have the full audio from our 12-minute conversation.
UPDATE 1: After this was posted, Veltman called me to say that I didn’t have permission to post her photo (which you can see in her online bio) or the soundbar with an audio excerpt of our conversation. She said that I could post the text of my own comments. I will update this post with that when time permits. My title for this post—“Messy Messaging”—turned out to be truer than I knew!
UPDATE 2: You can read my follow-up post with a transcript of my un-aired comments, HERE.
The commentary by Aileen Getty that we briefly mentioned was from an Oct. 22 opinion piece in the UK-based Guardian—I fund climate activism—and I applaud the Van Gogh protest.
Aileen Getty wrote this:
I am the daughter of a famous family who built their fortune on fossil fuels—but we now know that the extraction and use of fossil fuels is killing life on our planet. Our family sold that company four decades ago, and I instead vowed to use my resources to take every means to protect life on Earth….My support of climate activism is a values statement that disruptive activism is the fastest route to transformative change, and that we are out of time for anything other than rapid, comprehensive climate action.
If you view the Guardian‘s video of the attack on the van Gogh “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery, London (posted on the Smithsonian Magazine’s website), you’ll see that the protesters violently flung the soup at the painting and that the soup’s metal can came very close to hitting the van Gogh. Luckily, it missed. But the soup was dripping down the glass covering the painting, over the edge of the frame, and down to the floor. Did none of the tomato glop get under the edge of the glass and onto the painting? And what about the potential damage to the frame? Only the National Gallery’s conservators know for sure.
Image: Courtesy National Gallery, London
What we all know from watching the video is there was a breakdown of security. To me, that’s the main takeaway from this distressing episode. The two perpetrators (who want this attention, so I will decline to name them) managed to step behind the rope that, as you can see, is supposed to protect the painting from visitors’ getting too close. They stayed there, plying their soup and making their political pronouncements, for at least a minute, after which the video stops. After 13 seconds, someone in the gallery had called out, “Security?” but the activists still had sufficient time to get some out glue that they had stored in their pockets and affix their hands to the wall. (We never get to see how their hands were dislodged.)
Similarly, the video of the attack on Monet’s “Grainstacks” (aka “Wheatstacks”) at the Museum Barbarini, Potsdam, shows the two potato-protesters nimbly stepping over the rope intended to separate visitors from the art. They also glued their hands to the wall behind them. Again, no one intervened to stop them.
As I said in the above NPR un-aired segment, the museums’ spokespersons stated that the targeted artworks were unharmed and “I hope that’s true” (my words). I’m not the only one who wondered whether the paint surface may have been disturbed, notwithstanding the protective glass. Here’s what Victoria Reed, the senior curator for provenance at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, tweeted about the condition conundrums:
Clearly, museums urgently need to beef up their security and put an end to these attacks. This may mean instituting more rigorous (and onerous) inspections of bags (and pockets?) and increasing the number of guards whose job it is to keep visitors at a safe distance from the art—a detriment to those of us who like to indulge in close looking. On a positive note: Guards apparently did succeed in foiling a potential attack on a Gauguin at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
For our part, opinion influencers need to promulgate a counter-message: Asking “What is worth more: art or life?” (the question with which the London protesters kicked off their diatribe) is positing a false dichotomy, plain and simple. No one lives his or her life focused on one burning issue, to the exclusion of all other concerns and interests. For some of us, art is life, or at least a crucial part of it. As much as we want to (and need to) save the planet, we cannot devote all our thoughts and actions to countering grim realities.
For what it’s worth, here’s the protester-friendly NPR segment that did air last week:
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