I feel like a van Gogh painting was a poorly picked target but also think van Gogh himself would approve.
I know people don’t like focusing on optics, but like cmon how can you expect something like this wouldn’t push people away?
Its young people just trying to get cameras on them and headlines written about them because they think any publicity will raise awareness and so the more the better.
The logic behind this is similar to the logic behind spree killings. Young people are incapable of even imagining politics solving problems so they just think up something subversive to do to vent their anger and say it’s in response to x or y issue. https://nitter.it/butleriano/status/1580920740005543936#m
If it is an op (if), I wonder if the soup kids even realized it. Like how far down does the meta-op go? Where is the line between op and misplaced but sincere action?
My theory is the kids were persuaded to do it by higher ups. I have talked to someone who’s roommate was in Red Guards and they said basically the “leaders” would make all the 18 year olds that just joined do their weird stunts. Also they would be shamed if they didn’t do any praxis that day.
Hm I wonder what percent of “we’re doing something broadly annoying and definitely unproductive to raise a w a r e n e s s” is an op like that
Seriously if you want to get attention to a cause, you can absolutely spend the time to think of something that is good and awesome, instead of whatever the fuck that shit was.
Seriously why attack some beloved cultural artifact when the CEO of Pollution parks his Tesla right fucking there
Like, don’t get me wrong, art should be openly and freely accessible and we need full communism ASAP, but this feels fucking dumb on several levels.
- It’s very performative, I’m assuming there’s fucking glass so they didn’t actually get it on the painting (correct me if I’m wrong!), just a frame.
- If you’re protesting emissions and extraction, there’s gotta be something better as a target to throw soup on.
- Art is one of the few things that at least tries to resist capital (not that it always does, and late capital has been especially effective at incorporating art into its ideology). Still, as a direction of productive activity towards beauty rather than accumulation, it’s definitely a strange target (though, there’s a bit from Hannah Arendt that notes all art is extractive, since you need trees for paper, etc. She talks about how “the price of art is life itself”)
Just really dumb, since this will just turn bourgeois :LIB: s away from the project, and I don’t see any way this rallies the proletariat.
Very much feels like an op as others in the thread have said.
I dunno, I saw that self-portrait of Van Gogh in Chicago and there wasn’t any glass or anything. There’s a docent watching the room but that’s it. I could have just taken out a dremel and rearranged his face until he looked like that portrait of Jesus that that woman “fixed” in Spain.
They probably show off a replica, have the ‘real’ in some vault and just use copies because why wouldn’t you
Depends on the museum. Big tourists centers, like the national gallery where the Van Gogh painting is, I doubt would ever do that because people travel from across the world to go there. I’ve definitely seen pieces labeled as ‘replica’ or ‘reproduction’ on the card next to it at smaller private collection museums.
Interestingly enough, if you read the cnn article for this Van Gogh painting incident, they mention that the painting is glazed and therefore there’s no actual damage to it
you don’t even need ops when you do shit like this
Ah yes, the world’s biggest user and pusher of the mass usage of fossil fuels, checks notes… 19th century oil painters?
