Today, Explained - Throwing soup at art

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Tensions are simmering in London as climate protesters turn up the heat on their soup-flinging activism. Rishi Sunak’s government is attempting to keep the situation from boiling over. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The police must have all the powers that they need to stop the protesters who use guerrilla tactics and bring chaos and misery. That's Britain's Home Secretary Suella Braverman warning that the UK government is going to crack down on climate activists. A group called Just Stop Oil has been disrupting British society. There was anger when a group blocked the busy A4, an arterial route west of the city. Blocking traffic, blocking oil terminals. But the move that got this group the most attention? A protest at London's National Gallery of Art. Climate activists throwing what authorities say appeared to be tomato soup on Van Gogh's famous sunflowers painting, then gluing their hands to the wall. Coming up, does endangering priceless art help save the planet or does it just make people hate

you? School me. I don't know. How is pouring two cans of tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting a protest? The all new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Emma Brown is an artist and a spokesperson for the group that's caused all of this ruckus in the UK. The group is called Just Stop Oil, and it started its campaign in April of this year. Among the tactics, blocking oil terminals, a move that did not get the kind of media attention the group wanted. Blocking traffic, a move that annoyed a lot of people. Disrupting sporting events and also throwing soup on a painting, a move that got them a lot of attention, even though the painting was protected by glass and was not itself damaged.

Just Stop Oil is demanding that the UK government stop issuing new licenses for fossil fuel exploration in the UK. And they've promised that in the days leading up to Christmas that we will see many more actions from them. They're demanding that the UK government immediately halts all licenses and consents for new fossil fuel exploration and development in the UK. We already have plenty of oil and gas projects, oil rigs in the North Sea. So what we're asking right now, and what we're demanding is that the government stops giving licenses to private companies to explore for more oil and gas in the North Sea to open new oil and gas projects. And

we're saying we need an eight-year transition, but we need an end date and we cannot give out any more licenses for new oil and gas and coal. We're in an extreme energy crisis where millions and millions of people are being plunged into poverty in this country because they can't afford their energy bill. So it makes sense on a lot of levels that we need to transition. In the six to eight years during which the UK is transitioning off of oil, what will happen? The country will transfer to renewables? Like what is the ideal situation, I suppose, is what I'm trying to get out. We would argue that renewable energy, just because of the amount of time it takes to come online and the amount of potential that we have as an island nation with plenty of wind, plenty of tidal power and even solar power.

We would argue that is where we need to be focused. So these are the kind of solutions that we need to drastically invest in to bring down our carbon output and to bring down our bills so that like British families aren't starving to death this winter. All right, so you've got a solution. Let's talk about how you're addressing the problem. Two members of Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Van Gogh's sunflowers. Can you tell me how that transpired? We knew that we needed some more higher profile actions to break through and to get the message out there. And one of those actions was going to be throwing soup at a painting. The reason why we chose the soup is because we're in a position in the UK now where we have more food banks than McDonald's. That's never been the case here before.

And people are going to food banks and saying we don't want soup because we can't afford the energy to heat it up so that's one reason why we were using soup because we wanted to make those parallels food work more than justice are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people artists love to interpret why why sunflowers there's a few reasons we chose that painting first of all it's very famous and much loved you really really want to take advantage of the value and the profile of a work of art. Another reason we wanted that dramatic, slightly bizarre protest, because by targeting something that is precious and valuable, people feel a sense of shock and discomfort when they see that being threatened. That is really the

emotion that we need to be feeling when we're seeing the decisions our governments are making and the sort of devastation being wreaked by the climate catastrophe. What do you say to people who love art and agree that you have a very important cause, that you are doing a very important thing, but you're also endangering priceless art. There was a letter, I think, by hundreds of museums, and they were sort of, what I would say, pearl-clutching about these fragile works of art and how they have a duty to protect them for future generations.

But do you not see the irony in that? Protecting objects for a future that currently doesn't exist, the trajectory that we are on, there's going to be no place for walking around an art gallery, that's for sure, if there's not enough food to eat, if we're wracked by devastating floods and wildfires and heat waves that kill millions of people. That's not the place where we get to go around an art gallery

and enjoy a nice cup of tea in the cafe. So I would say to them and to everyone listening, I studied art myself. I'm an artist. I love art. But art has always been quite radical. Many artists have been socially progressive and even outrageous in their time.

And if we can use art in any way to get more coverage for this, to challenge people's perceptions of what has value, then I think it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. It's appropriate for us to use as tools anything that we can to get some action on this huge problem. Emma, earlier this year, I interviewed a man whose husband was despairing over climate change. And he set himself on fire in a park in New York, in Brooklyn, to draw attention to the problem. He died, of course. And, you know, this gentleman's husband essentially said it didn't work. People paid attention for 15 minutes, and the news cycle moved on. We have climate marches now where hundreds of thousands of people show up and it doesn't change anything.

Why does your group think that throwing soup on paintings will change anything if actions as extreme as, unfortunately, the taking of one's own life do nothing. I heard about him and my heart broke because I thought, it is devastating that someone can make that sacrifice and it doesn't achieve anything. And I think that our group is not just throwing soup on a painting. They also scaled the Dartford Bridge hundreds of feet into the air and shut that bridge. They stopped the motorway around London. They roadblock every day. They throw paint at buildings. They stopped traffic on the Abbey Road crossing like the Beatles.

The way I see it is like there's a brick wall that is the current system. And it seems completely immovable, completely impenetrable. We've got the fossil fuel industry against us. We've got, especially in the UK, the mainstream media funded by Rupert Murdoch against us. And it feels impossible to change. And we're just here throwing stones at that wall. And people have been throwing stones at that wall for decades.

And maybe they're weakening it, but you just can't see it yet. And we don't know what the stone is going to be that we throw and that is going to finally make a chink in that wall and allow us to dismantle it and build something else. But we have to keep throwing those stones. We have to use every stone that we have, whether it's a small one, whether it's a big one.

And we just keep going. Because the thing that is more likely to defeat us than anything else is hopelessness or giving up on ourselves. We cannot afford to do that. Emma, let me ask you about public reaction. A researcher and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania here in the U.S. polled the public, and their polling found that overall, the public disapproves of these types of protests, nonviolent but disruptive.

46% of people they polled said these kind of tactics decrease their support for efforts to address climate change. 40% of people told the researcher and the professor it does nothing either way. Just Stop Oil actually did their own polling on Twitter. You asked people, what should we target next, more or less, and only 11.5% of people wanted you to target great artworks. What I'm seeing in these numbers is that the public does not like what you are doing. And in fact, you are turning them off, in a sense. Are you seeing something different or do you guys not care?

I would hugely disagree after seeing the 40 degree heat in the UK that however many percent of people sulkily said that they now don't support climate action. I mean, people don't want to see their kids die because they're annoyed that they were stuck in a traffic jam. So I think we need to kind of take that with a pinch of salt. And you have to remember that it's a very big ask to want people to approve of being disrupted, you know, and disruptive protest movements throughout history have never been popular at the time. So just because people don't like being disrupted doesn't mean that it's not working. So it's not always down to what people think of us. It's down to

what they think of the demand and down to what they think about the issue. And if we can increase support and bring people along with that, that's a lot more important than whether they like us personally. Let me ask you about a threat, if I can put it that way. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says he's going to crack down on what you guys are doing. When he says crack down, do you know what he means? Yeah, so they want to increase prison sentences. They want to increase monitoring of activists and protesters, increase tagging, make it an illegal offence to lock on, which is a very old protest tactic where you fix yourself to a gate or whatever.

Right. Well, criminalise locking on. So they're just they're being very reactionary, which is ridiculous. Obviously, it's a worrying sign for our democracy, but it's also revealing to the British public that the government would rather imprison peaceful protesters than take action on what the British public can see is definitely a climate emergency. So I think the Conservative government are in trouble and I think they're doing what any kind of group of people do

when they're in trouble and they see no way out. And that is they just keep digging themselves into that hole. So it's unfortunate, but we're going to keep going because we've obviously reached a point where they think what we're doing is effective and they want to stop us doing it. The UK government's response to that? A spokesperson tells Today Explained, quote, the right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy.

But those protesters that disrupt public life, delay our emergency services and drain police resources, cost the taxpayer millions and must face proper penalties, end quote. Coming up, what are we to think about all of this? Are loving art and wanting a livable planet mutually exclusive? A professor of art history wrestles with his own thoughts. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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It's Today Explained. We're back with David Friedberg. He's a professor of art history at Columbia University. And we called him because in 1989, he wrote an important book and a book that is still relevant, according to many Goodreads reviewers, called The Power of Images. That dealt with the whole gamut of psychological responses to art, from emotional responses of all kinds, from the use of images for propaganda, for also the ways in which it aroused distress, pleasure, and the impulse to destroy. How effective is the destruction of art in the advancement of a political or social cause? Well, I'm afraid to say it's usually very effective. All acts of rebellion against power,

all acts of insults to power are effective at the start. Whether they actually end up affecting regime change is another matter. It's there from the beginning of time. We have the destruction of images of hated rulers in ancient Babylon. Here where Nero rules today, Christ shall rule forever. We've had image destruction in the late Roman Empire when Christianity came on the scene. He said Christ would replace me.

And we shouldn't forget that some acts of destruction are simply ways of replacing the symbols of a hated past, of the ancien regime, of old regimes, as took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. People pulled down images of hated leaders because they never wanted to see them again. Anti-government protesters toppled Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary. With sledgehammers, they smashed to pieces this symbol of Russian influence over Ukraine. That actually fell into an old class of image destruction, which was the so-called damnatio memoriae,

the damnation of memory. The instances can go on and on. When the Shah of Persia was replaced, images in Tehran came down. There was the famous removal of the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A U.S. Marine tank with a large chain has pulled the statue of Saddam Hussein down. It's a giant statue crumbled at the knee and toppled over.

It was supposed to be an outbreak of popular resistance to Saddam, but actually we discovered later that it was orchestrated by the American troops. And then, of course, you know, the Islamic State was, as you know, radically Islamist, and Islamic State took this to its extreme by its actual performances of image destruction.

Militants knock statues to the floor, even employ a jackhammer to reduce a work to rubble. Released through social media Thursday, the five-minute video uses music and slow motion to dramatize the destruction at northern Iraq's Mosul Museum. When you saw these acts of destruction, you shook in your bones. When you see them attacking these, you realize that these were accompanied by assaults on real human bodies that, of course, caused this great drama and tragedy of the regime of Islamic State. Let me say something about what is the history of attacking images for the sake of publicity,

into which class, obviously, the actions by Just Stop Oil falls. People have always attempted to break images for the sake of publicity, either personal publicity or for a political cause. The Irish Republican Army, from its beginnings, pulled down images or defaced images of English heroes. This is a well-known strategy. This is not a new thing at all. We talked to a spokeswoman from Just Stop Oil. Her name is Emma Brown. And she told us that the group did not get much attention from blockading oil terminals, which is an action that is explicitly tied to their goals. But they got a lot of attention when they threw tomato soup on a

painting, a thing that is not explicitly tied to their goals. Why do you think that is? Any assault on a loved object gains attention. You know, one of the interesting things about great paintings is that they're housed in museums, which are the equivalent of the ancient temples. You know, people go and stand in front of them in hushed silence. And there's another issue. People don't love oil terminals. As far as people are concerned, I think what you don't want to forget is that most people have some kind of aesthetic sense. People like the sunflowers not only because it's a famous picture, but because they're moved by the paintings.

It means a great deal to them. Our fellow human beings across the board, whatever class, race, country, have some kind of basic aesthetic capacity, and they appreciate these works. So who the hell cares about what an oil terminal looks like? It's too complicated. They have to start thinking about, you know, what will happen if we lose our oil? They have to make an analysis. But when you see a beautiful thing destroyed, it's upsetting. When you ask Just Stop Oil members, why are you doing this? They will say very openly, it is ridiculous to protect art and museums and not protect the earth.

What do you think about that? I would respond by saying it's ridiculous to invest so much in oil. We should stop oil. But what's the connection with allowing people to go on enjoying works of art that they love, which means something to them? There's no conceivable connection between the two claims. It's a kind of logical absurdity. You know, to do away with one great salvation of civilization for the sake of saving civilization from climate change seems to me a confusion of aims. I'm not a determined conservative in search of protecting everything that goes under the

name of art. You know, I think a lot of the problem now in our society is not only climate change, but the disparity between rich and poor and the fact that works of art are now sold for absurd amounts of money. And that has led to a devaluation of the very notion of art in our society. And I think, unwittingly, Just Stop Oil by these attacks may be aiding in this. For example, there is the famous case, quite recently, of Banksy's Girl with a Balloon, which was put up for sale at Sotheby's.

It had just sold for that 1.4 mil. And as soon as it did, an alarm sounds. Banksy very cleverly had installed a paper shredder in the frame of the painting. A remote-controlled shredder began chewing its way through the canvas, a shock to everyone. What happened? Banksy's now infamous shredded work of art is going up for auction again, and it could be worth much more than $1.4 million.

The painting was sold for a higher price. For a new world record, sold to you, 16 million pounds. Because of the fame, I suppose, which this attack would bring to the picture, which was then bought at a higher price than it would otherwise have been. So all these things are kind of linked, and my aim as an art historian is to insist on the value

of the masterworks of humankind over the ages from whatever culture that bring pleasure to people. And these we need to treasure, you know, with our lives and with our bones. And we have to defend with our lives, of course, and our bones as well, the planet from the destructive effects of oil. But I think there are other ways of doing it. I'd be very happy to talk to Emma about this. One gets the impression that Just Stop Oil is betting that artists would understand their actions in some sense,

or that at least artists would work to try to interpret what they are doing. She said the group picked tomato soup specifically because it's an allusion to Britain's high cost of living, people cooking soup in cans. Is there any way to look at these protests as art themselves, or is that a bridge too far for you? There's no doubt that many artists are radical. Artists are supposed to be radical. Thank God they're radical, and they're radical in their political views. And I'm sure there are plenty of artists, I'm not surprised, who are not especially opposed to the throwing of tomato soup on sunflowers of Van Gogh.

I do think that the question of, you know, somehow drawing attention to, I mean, bringing in sympathizers from a group in our society who are reduced to having to make meals that consist of tomato soup. I think that's the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard, because these are people who are reduced to such straits that they are really not going to be worried about Van Gogh or anything at all in the context of such an attack. I think that's one of the most spurious connections you can imagine. I mean, it appeals to intellectuals and artists, maybe, but that's a small section of our society. And I think we should leave things in our museums alone for the most part, so that precisely

the people, I mean, Britain after all is a society which until very recently had museums that were free for everybody to attend. And that was one of the great things about Britain, because it made it clear that art was available for all. And to distract people from the pleasures of art by throwing, as I speak, I'm becoming stronger in my feelings about this that I anticipated, to deprive people of those chances of pleasures which, you know, now has become increasingly only available to the rich would be a great shame. Today's show was produced by Halima Shah and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.