Should art live as the Earth dies?

‘Unknown to one another, a group of painters have come to the common conclusion that the most banal and even vulgar trappings of modern civilization can, when transposed literally to canvas, become art.” This was printed in Time Magazine in 1962, profiling a series of artists, including 30-year-old Andy Warhol who was working on his series of screen printed portraits of Campbell’s soup cans. The soup was mocked as the enemy of serious art, and 60 years later we can only speculate on what the late Time art editor Bruce Barton, Jr. would have made of soup being even more literally transposed onto canvas.

The thick orange splat was seen across the internet on Oct. 14, dripping down Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers when two young female climate activists threw tomato soup at the painting hung in the National Gallery museum in London. Sealed behind protective glass, the van Gogh was undamaged.

The day the soup hit the glass, New York Magazine art critic and Pulitzer Prize Winner Jerry Saltz took to his Twitter to write his immediate reaction. “I find this nightmarish iconoclasm Taliban-like in its sick certitude & imperious self-righteousness & implied hatred of any other idea of beauty. The art world needs to stand up to this. I love beauty & hate the destruction of the earth. Paradox.”

The demonstration was part of a series committed by Just Stop Oil, an environmental activist group that have received criticism, and even online conspiratorial speculation of being a hoax, due to their funding being tied to the American oil heiress Aileen Getty. The group also invites supporters to donate to their cause via cryptocurrency — a digital form of payment that uses vast amounts of energy to produce and is responsible for, as Business Insider reported in March, 40 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emission in the United States.

Just Stop Oil’s sights are set on the United Kingdom’s government ceasing the issue of new oil and gas licenses, in line with the widely reported data that fossil fuels are the leading cause of the Earth’s global warming, leading to air and water pollution, sea levels rising, heat waves and wildfires. The demonstration at the National Gallery, filmed and quickly uploaded to the internet, has been followed by copycat  stunts done in solidarity but not directly connected to Just Stop Oil.  These have included mashed potatoes hurled at Claude Monet’s “Haystacks” at The Museum Barberini in Germany and two Dutch men who were arrested and sentenced to time in prison for targeting Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” with a can of soup. Both paintings were framed behind glass and were declared undamaged by the museums.

There is an impulse to discuss the protests using the worst metric we have to talk about culture, equating popularity with quality. The incident at the National Gallery spread quickly across social media, captured on film with tension and shock, a gut punch of a moment as it seemed one of van Gogh’s works would be tarnished forever. It was easy to question the motives — why a painting? Why van Gogh? Why soup? The viral impact seemed to be the only message. Before the incident, most had no idea who Just Stop Oil was, and afterward… they did. Popularity is also an interesting topic in itself to broach. Vincent van Gogh never sold a painting when he died by suicide at age 37 in 1890. He has since become the most well-known painter in Western culture. His paintings are in fact, what we think of when we think of art. But they have only existed for a relatively short amount of time, a 20th-century touchstone that we uphold. Amazingly, we have preserved his work for the public to see, but the planet we have inflicted devastating destruction upon is of course much older. There have been other targets hit by Just Stop Oil — Scotland Yard, Harrods — buildings drenched in globs of effervescent orange goo. But the broken social contract of the museum, the sense of betrayal in watching our shared sense of beauty and humanity shown to be so suddenly vulnerable to destruction, will be the lasting impact.

“I’m not saying art is sacred, only that it does something somewhat undefinable,” Saltz writes in his new collection of essays, “Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night.”

“In a sense, the museum is an ecstasy machine, a building filled with wormholes and time warps…” Saltz continues. “Museums are strange places where people stand in front of inanimate objects, talk to themselves, and experience rapture.”

Art critic Jerry Saltz will discuss his new book at House of Books in Kent, Conn., on Nov. 12. Advance tickets required.

Photo courtesy of Riverhead Books

Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers from The National Gallery London

Illustration by Just Stop Oil

Photo courtesy of Riverhead Books