By Fred Bauer
Thursday, January 23, 2025
I still remember really seeing John Constable’s painting The
Hay Wain for the first time. After many years of viewing it through the
veil of a screen or a book, I was at last standing in front of the painting
itself at the National Gallery in London.
In person, the details come alive. Constable renders the
particulars of the 19th-century British countryside with dazzling care. The
swirls of clouds in the sky seem a ballet of the brush. The grass and trees
show an almost unfathomable range of greens. The shifting surface of the water
has a tremulous glamour. First exhibited in 1821, The Hay Wain is
Constable’s tribute to the deep beauty of nature.
In July 2022, members from a group calling itself “Just
Stop Oil” tried to blot out Constable’s vision. They glued to the painting a
triptych that showed modern technology interrupting Constable’s landscape:
planes flying through the sky as smokestacks fumed in the distance. They also
glued themselves to the frame.
The supposed aim of this protest was to show the harm
that carbon-based technologies cause to the environment — and to demand action.
A blitzkrieg of these art attacks wracked major museums in 2022. Just Stop Oil
activists threw tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London’s
National Gallery, and one activist at the Mauritshuis in The Hague tried to
glue his head to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring while a
compatriot doused him with tomato soup. Letzte Generation protesters tossed
mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s Haystacks in Potsdam, and a pair of
Ultima Generazione compatriots glued themselves to Botticelli’s Primavera
in Florence; both groups are part of a European association of “Last
Generation” activists.
These attacks have continued. After Just Stop Oil
activists were sentenced for their 2022 attack on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in
September 2024, the group retaliated by throwing soup at two Van Gogh
paintings. Climate militants have broadened their efforts to target other
pieces of national heritage. They took a hammer to the case containing a copy
of the Magna Carta in the British Library, and they sprayed Stonehenge with a
kind of orange powder paint in June 2024.
So far, these attacks have not done serious damage to any
of the targeted works. But the group has sent the message that vandalism will
continue until elected governments bend the knee and impose the policies
favored by activists. In a joint letter in October, the groups Just Stop Oil
and Youth Demand called on the leaders of British art museums to partner with
climate activists in demanding the end of fossil fuels. “Politics has failed
us,” they lamented. “Resistance is our only remaining option.”
Climate apocalypticists regularly cite the alleged
failure of politics generally in order to indict the current political order.
In court remarks in September 2024, one of the activists who targeted Van
Gogh’s Sunflowers celebrated efforts to “disrupt a system which is
unjust, dishonest, and murderous.”
Radicalized by a sense of emergency over carbon
emissions, activists have adopted more disruptive tactics. In her recent book Saving
Ourselves: From Climate Shock to Climate Action, sociologist Dana R. Fisher
terms these militants “shockers” and “disruptors.” While eco-vandalism doesn’t
present the same clear and present danger as blocking traffic, it is a more
subtle pollutant of the public square. The performance of putting works of art
at risk endangers our common cultural spaces, and rationalizations for radical
action can be like a radioactive isotope — causing both political and
psychological deformations.
***
‘When there’s no food, what use is art? When there’s no
water, what use is art? And when billions of people are in pain and suffering,
what use, then, is art?” These words from one of the Just Stop Oil activists
echoed through the halls of the National Gallery as he and a partner glued
themselves to The Hay Wain.
Many of these attacks on art include a public apologia
pro vandalismo suo — a defense of one’s own vandalism. The pressure of
ideas shapes the performance of rhetoric, so these justifications for vandalism
can be revealing. While he professed some devotion to art, the activist at the
National Gallery insisted that the urgency of the ecological crisis mattered
more than any good derived from art. Constable’s painting is “an important part
of our cultural history, our heritage,” the activist conceded. “But it’s not
more important than the 3.5 billion people already in danger because of the
climate crisis. And it is not more important than the lives of my siblings and
every generation that we are condemning to an unlivable future.”
The “but” here seems to imply that we shouldn’t think of The
Hay Wain as too important, at least compared with the lives of
billions of people. Of course, defacing Constable’s painting would not do
anything to purify water, cut the cost of food, or provide joy to future
generations.
Beneath the false choice between Constable and Mother
Earth is a deeper point. Many of these activists claim that this kind of
vandalism is a form of consciousness-raising. The goal is not to damage the
paintings but to use cultural transgression to draw attention to the cause.
While seeming to claim that we should not take art too seriously, those who
performatively deface works of art in fact rely on our respect for art. The
shock arises because we care about the artwork.
There might be something a little glib about claims by
eco-vandals and their apologists that such attacks don’t really damage the
artwork or historical artifacts. The electric charge of these attacks comes
precisely from the risk of harm to something unique and precious. After all,
these activists are not throwing soup at reproductions of Vermeer or shredding
cheap photocopies of the Constitution. It would be easy to use artificial
intelligence to create a video of someone attacking the Mona Lisa, but I
doubt that such footage would go viral (at least if people knew that it was
only an AI simulation).
Nor is it clear to what extent these artworks have
escaped damage simply through luck. The Just Stop Oil activists who defaced The
Hay Wain claimed in court that an “art expert” had informed them that they
could use “low-tack tape” to attach their panels to Constable’s painting, and
National Gallery curators say that only the painting’s exterior varnish was
affected. But putting tape on any painting could harm it. Imagine that some
later activist — and eco-vandals say they hope to inspire more such action — is
too rough when affixing a photocopy to a painting’s surface or buys the wrong
kind of tape or smashes too hard with a hammer on a glass cover.
These attacks on paintings defile the civic ecology. The
risks posed by eco-vandalism have caused art institutions to fortify themselves
even more. In October 2024, London’s National Gallery announced that visitors
would no longer be permitted to bring any liquids (except baby formula,
expressed milk, and medication) and that they would have to walk through metal
detectors and undergo bag checks. Just Stop Oil responded to this announcement
with its conventional excuse-via-the-apocalypse: “The year is 2030. Every
public space has banned all liquids, resulting in airport-style security
searching for water bottles. Tipping points are being breached globally after
governments failed to stop oil. People face famine and war.” How petty — how bourgeois
— to fret about the decline of the public square when catastrophe waits around
the corner.
The invocation of disaster can itself be a mask for the
assertion of self-importance. When protesters target a work of art, they
interfere with the ability of others to view it. The middle-class family that
saves for years to visit Italy misses that once-in-a-lifetime chance to see
Botticelli because the painting has been removed from view or its gallery is
suddenly closed. These escalating attacks might eventually cause some of the
great masterpieces — gifts of a common human inheritance — to be removed from
view or so insulated that we are denied their presence. Ever since a maniac
attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer in 1972, the statue has been
hidden behind a thick pane of bulletproof glass. As he assailed Michelangelo’s
statue, that man called himself Jesus Christ — the attacker’s self-idolatry
obscured any sense of duty toward art or other people.
Defenders of such demonstrations might say that this
disruption of others pales in comparison with the existential stakes that the
protesters invoke. How convenient for them.
***
In a recent TED talk celebrating disruptive climate
action, Fisher, the Saving Ourselves author, warned that this activism
“is not going to be peaceful — not because the activists are likely to get
violent, but because those in power often do.” Pitting themselves against “the
powerful” is a common gambit — another self-applied sheen of heroism — of
climate activists.
Yet this might not reflect the realities of the 2020s.
Climate change protesters are not Thoreauvian upstarts but have been welcomed
onto the commanding heights. The citadels of power echo with talking points
about climate change, and billionaires have lavished fortunes on efforts to
“decarbonize” the economy. Luminaries in the global power elite meet at an
annual Conference of the Parties convention to bow before the altar of climate
change.
If anything, these disruptive climate protests are not a
rebuke of the global elite but rather a project of the rich and famous. A
pivotal early financial backer of Just Stop Oil is an organization called the
Climate Emergency Fund (CEF). In April 2022, Margaret Klein Salamon, the
executive director of CEF, claimed that it was the “lead institutional funder”
of Just Stop Oil. On its website, Just Stop Oil claims that CEF provided
“critical seed funding” in the past and that it “continues to contribute” today.
When contacted for comment, CEF refused to say directly whether it was
continuing to fund Just Stop Oil. Salamon also declined to say whether CEF
disapproved of such art attacks. But she did trumpet that CEF “supports
activist organizations that engage in non-violent protest and civil
disobedience worldwide.” She calls it “the fastest way to create transformative
change.”
Aileen Getty, a scion of the family behind Getty Oil,
provided what her foundation calls the “foundational grant to establish the
Climate Emergency Fund.” J. Paul Getty, her grandfather, made billions on oil,
and she now spends millions to fund climate activists. In 2022, Getty took to The
Guardian to applaud the actions of Just Stop Oil. Abigail Disney (yes, that
Disney) is another funder for CEF. The famed director and producer Adam McKay
(best known for, most recently, the apocalyptic comedy Don’t Look Up)
donated millions to CEF and has also contributed to Just Stop Oil. Far from
being a fringe group, CEF is pedigreed by the American establishment.
With a pilot episode directed by none other than McKay,
the HBO series Succession has highlighted the temptation that “social
justice” poses for the wealthy. In that series, as the Roy children maneuver
for influence in the twilight days of their aged media-mogul father, none of
them comes off as admirable. Despite or perhaps because of their fantastic
privilege, they have not fulfilled their innate human aspiration for ethical
nourishment; they have essentially been raised without character, without the
internal fortitude of purpose and self-regulation.
Progressive politics are no salvation for the Roy
children. The sole daughter is actively involved in left-wing politics and
treats those closest to her like trash. The male heir apparent turns to social
justice activism as an expression of the quivering insecurity, frustration, and
envy at his core: the desire to be like Dad and to beat Dad. In this telling,
beta-male sons of billionaires would rather foment a social revolution than go
to therapy — or church.
Like the playacting progressivism in Succession,
the disruptions of Just Stop Oil are a kind of venture capital protest, an
arbitraged civil disobedience. A millionaire can fund idealistic young people
putting themselves on the line without exposing himself or herself to legal
risk or even inconvenience. It’s like hiring private security forces while also
bankrolling “defund the police” efforts. Sacrifice is easiest when someone else
pays the price.
***
La Venus del Espejo (Venus at the mirror), painted
in the mid-1600s by Diego Velázquez, spent much of the first few centuries of
its existence at a relative remove from the public eye. The nude Venus reclines
with her back to the viewer as she looks at herself in a mirror held by Cupid.
Her soft skin glows, and Velázquez cleverly uses the mirror to show her
contemplative face. This is beauty reflecting on beauty. For a long time, the
painting circulated among the houses of Spanish courtiers. In the early 1800s,
it was brought to the country house Rokeby Park in northern England, from which
the painting derives its popular title, the Rokeby Venus. It went on
public display after being acquired by London’s National Gallery in 1906 and
remains part of the museum’s collection.
In November 2023, thunder filled the gallery as two Just
Stop Oil activists smashed the protective glass of the Rokeby Venus with
hammers. “Women did not get the vote by voting. It is time for deeds and not
words,” one of the activists declared. The other added, “Politics is failing
us. Politics failed women in 1914. . . . If we love history, if we love art,
and if we love our families, we must just stop oil.”
Like the suffragette militants of the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU) a century ago, many climate activists have embraced the
motto of “deeds, not words” and often specifically claim the WSPU as a
progenitor. Yet this lineage might reveal the dangers lurking within a politics
of radical urgency. Purporting to advance the cause of women’s suffrage in the
United Kingdom, the WSPU and its allies launched a campaign of terror in the
years leading up to World War I. They initiated a wave of arsons and physically
assaulted their political opponents (one time, whipping a clergyman confused
for Lloyd George). Several of them contemplated assassinating a prime minister.
One of the WSPU’s preferred tactics was bombing. They planted bombs at railway
stations, postboxes, and theaters. A bombing of St. Martin-in-the-Fields blew
out some of the stained glass windows of the famous London church.
Stained glass was not their only target. On March 10,
1914, Mary Richardson attacked the Rokeby Venus — the very same painting
targeted by Just Stop Oil in 2023 — with a cleaver. Her blows shattered the
protective glass and slashed the back of Venus. “I have tried to destroy the
picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history,” she told the press,
“as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the
most beautiful character in modern history.” (Emmeline Pankhurst was the leader
of the WSPU.) Richardson continued, “If there is an outcry against my deed, let
everyone remember that such an outcry is an hypocrisy so long as they allow the
destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women.” In a later
interview, she anticipated later “what use is art?” critiques: “I wanted to
show that the most beautiful woman on canvas was nothing compared with the
death of one woman in prison.”
The trajectory of Richardson’s political activism exposes
the disturbing implications of the conclusion that politics has failed. Laugh
a Defiance, her 1953 autobiography, reveals how even in old age she found
great meaning in the disruptive protests of her youth. When recounting her
anxiety as she prepared to attack the Rokeby Venus, she invokes the
language of high moral purpose: “It was as though the task I had set myself was
bigger than I could accomplish. I hesitated, hedged with myself, tried to say
that someone else would be better able to do such a job than I. It will be difficult
for anyone who has not known service in a great cause to understand my
suffering.” Heavy lies the hand that carries the cleaver, apparently. Those of
more pedestrian bents supposedly cannot understand her turmoil; that sublime
insight is reserved for those who have “known service in a great cause.”
Like some other WSPU veterans, Richardson also became a
fascist. She joined the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and led the
“women’s section” of that group. Richardson ended up leaving the British
fascist movement in part because she doubted the seriousness of its commitment
to feminist principles, but its initial appeal to her can be seen in light of
her apocalyptic tendencies. According to people who knew her, she often
stressed the continuity between her suffragette and fascist organizing. Richardson
herself explained, “I was first attracted to the Blackshirts because I saw in
them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability
to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement.”
Politics has failed us — the motto of radical
climate activists — was also the underlying assumption of those sympathetic to
communism and fascism during the 20th century. The “failure” of representative
democracy meant that radical change was needed, whether through bombing churches,
slashing paintings, or mobilizing the Blackshirts. The same sense of
apocalyptic urgency that can justify attacking works of art to make a point
could also rationalize a revolutionary total state. The aspiration for “service
in a great cause” is a noble one, but — like many higher yearnings — can easily
mutate into revolutionary narcissism. In reality, democratic politics has risen
to the challenges of modernity. Women were granted the right to vote, and
democracies proved able to organize themselves to defeat totalitarian regimes.
Assertions that politics had failed were not only wrong; they were also
exploited to justify horrific alternatives to the status quo.
Nor am I convinced by the contemporary defense of these
tactics mounted by the acclaimed utilitarian philosophy professor Peter Singer.
He justifies hard-edged activism by claiming that current democracies do not
“show sufficient concern for the interests of future generations.” “Ask
yourself who will suffer the most if we fail to prevent catastrophic climate
change,” he urges. “The answer is the young and those yet to be born — both
categories unrepresented in our political systems.” Mashed-potatoing Monet
gives voice to the voiceless.
Yet this rationalization could be adopted by advocates of
almost any cause. Opponents of abortion could say — and they do — that they are
speaking in behalf of “those yet to be born,” who might even miss the chance to
be born under a permissive abortion regime. Advocates for an integralist
religion-based republic could say — and, again, they do — that future
generations will suffer if the United States does not become a confessional
Catholic regime. In both cases, the interests of future Americans might not be
fully respected by a secularizing culture, so to the battlements — and to the
supermarket, to grab a can of Campbell’s!
The protean flexibility of this line of political
argument — flowing easily from one cause to the next — is a sign of its limited
utility for declaring the failure of politics.
Much contemporary climate activism marches under the
cloud of doom. The names themselves — such as Last Generation and Extinction
Rebellion — invoke existential stakes. For these activists, the urgency of
imminent destruction may justify blocking roads and defacing Stonehenge, but it
also fosters a political psychology that is terrifying in its bleakness. Their
doom is so close and sweeping that no normal policies can address it.
One of the activists who attacked Van Gogh’s Sunflowers
in 2022 quoted a claim by the British scientist David King that what “we do in
the next three to four years will determine the future of humanity.” King’s
dire warning is regularly cited by climate apocalypticists. But King made his
prediction of “three to four years” at a conference in February 2021. It has
already been four years. Another speaker at that conference insisted that
Australia had an obligation to be at net-zero carbon emissions by 2025. It’s
nowhere close to that goal.
In 2019, in a famous speech to Britain’s Parliament,
activist Greta Thunberg said that, unless global carbon dioxide emissions are
reduced by at least 50 percent by 2030, humans will “set off an irreversible
chain reaction . . . that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization
as we know it.” Carbon emissions have not declined at all since then, and a 50
percent drop in emissions over the next five years would require unimaginable
economic immiseration, especially for working- and middle-class people. Any
democratic leaders who initiated that kind of sweeping depression would face an
immediate electoral rebuke. No wonder, then, that Last Generation claims that
“representative democracy appears unable to respond adequately to this crisis.”
Taking these claims at face value would inspire a terror
akin to what Jonathan Edwards’s congregation must have felt as they listened to
his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” From this perspective, the
compromises of daily politics are but the prelude to catastrophe. This deep
anxiety about climate is particularly acute in Europe, where secularism has
emptied the churches and instilled a new creed. “As the world burns” is one of
the stock phrases of climate-emergency activists — the secular transmutation of
Christian imagery of divine punishment.
An ideology of permanent emergency is a curious thing.
The sternum-tingling thrill that comes from confronting imminent extinction can
be addictive, and emergency politics can become an all-devouring maw.
Unsurprisingly, many of those who have called for radical action on the climate
have also embraced radicalism on other issues. Much of Thunberg’s activism now
is not about climate but about impugning Israel for its prosecution of the war
with Hamas. In a demonstration in Milan last October, she insisted, “If you as
a climate activist don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to
colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to
call yourself a climate activist.”
***
A politics of the apocalypse sacrifices particulars on
the altar of revolutionary urgency. Many strident activists offer a vision of
politics that poses a bewildering asymmetry between the magnitude of the
climate crisis and the inadequacy of the political order. Defacing works of art
functions as a siren shriek — and an assertion of the importance of the
protesters themselves. The absolutism of a planetary crisis demands the
detonation of the social order and the vandalism of things dear to us.
Compare that ideological politics with an ecology of
care. Stewardship of the environment is a noble and ennobling enterprise. As
Pope Benedict XVI observed in Caritas in Veritate, “The environment is
God’s gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility toward
the poor, toward future generations, and toward humanity as a whole.” Caring
for the environment is in part about fulfilling our obligations to others, ensuring
that they have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe.
The ecology of care is not merely systemic. It is also
particular, rooted in reverence for some particular landscape and obligations
to some particular people. Those particulars nourish and deepen this care. Pope
Francis opens Laudato Si’ with a quotation from Saint Francis of Assisi:
“Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and
governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”
Behind my desk, I have a print of my favorite picture of the mystic: Giovanni
Bellini’s Saint Francis in Ecstasy (or Saint Francis in the Desert).
Saint Francis stands in the sunlight, his hands spread out and his head tilted
back in wonder at the radiant beauty of the world. That is the ecstasy
of care — thoroughly open to the world, seeing in every detail an overwhelming
life.
The transfixed figure of Saint Francis reveals how this
ecology of care entails not just obligation to others but also a sense of
gratitude for what we have inherited. That sense of joyful gratitude is so
often missing from climate doomers. For them, the figures of the world are,
like Velázquez’s Venus, an excuse for a phantasmagoria of destruction. Defacing
art, then, for the sake of the “climate crisis” is not taking environmental
care too far — instead, it expresses a psychological impulse for meaning
and uses the environment as a pretext.
Care returns us to the particulars. With his
discriminating eye for detail, Henry David Thoreau gives us in his collected
journals one of the greatest records of observation in the American tradition.
In March 1858, he saw the warmth of the day registered in the protrusion of
hazel-flower stigmas:
They do not project more than the
thirtieth of an inch, some not the sixtieth. . . . How many accurate
thermometers there are on every hill and in every valley! Measure the length of
the hazel stigmas, and you can tell how much warmth there has been this spring.
How fitly and exactly any season of the year may be described by indicating the
condition of some flower!
Rather than defacing the particular in order to make some
grand statement, Thoreau perceived in the particular some hint of a grander
order.
Far from being at odds with that ecology of care, art
reinforces it. In a letter to a friend, John Constable praised Gilbert White’s Natural
History of Selborne, an immersive observational account of nature in
southeast England. This work “shows what a real love of nature will do,”
Constable wrote. “Surely the serene and blameless life of Mr. White, so
different from the folly and quackery of the world, must have fitted him for
such a clear and intimate view of nature.” White’s clarity of vision reflected,
Constable thought, some kind of inner virtue. How we see testifies
to who we are.
Constable in his own work aspired toward this “clear and
intimate view” of nature. Art is often an embarrassment — even a problem — for
ideology. Its beauty transcends the folly and quackery of the absolute
ideological project. Ideologies strive to efface the particular, while art
renders the intimacies of our lives.
I think that’s part of the power of art: its potential
for inspiring reverence for the world as we find it. That reverence can prompt
us to assume political responsibilities — to care for the world we have been
given, to ensure that later generations can enjoy our natural inheritance.
While terror and despair might counsel some to deface works of art, an ecology
of care can teach us to cherish paintings as well as the planet.
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