For some while I have marvelled at the way in which artworks seem to have become the focus of hatred for people wanting to say something banal. If you wish to make a point about politics, the climate or anything else, there are a range of ways to do it. But the least effective must surely be to glue yourself to a painting, throw soup on it or attack it with a knife. Nonetheless, artworks have become the means to communicate certain rote-like messages – with the violence stepping up a notch each time.
It is two years since a couple of morons from Just Stop Oil decided to throw a tin of soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery. A glass cover protected the painting. In March an anti-Israel protestor spray-painted and then slashed a portrait of Lord Balfour in Trinity College Cambridge. Earlier this month a protestor in Paris stuck an adhesive poster on to Monet’s ‘Coquelicots’ at the Musée d’Orsay. And this week Neanderthals from Just Stop Oil defaced Stonehenge with orange cornflour.
🚨 BREAKING: Just Stop Oil Spray Stonehenge Orange
— Just Stop Oil (@JustStop_Oil) June 19, 2024
🔥 2 people took action the day before Summer Solstice, demanding the incoming government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030.
🧯 Help us take megalithic action — https://t.co/R20S8YQD1j pic.twitter.com/ufzO8ZiDWu
One reason these works of art are chosen is because we notice the action. People talk or write about the latest barbarism, and publicity is just what most extremist groups want. Yet it is also striking that these must be the softest targets imaginable. Indeed, other than strangling a baby panda for publicity, it is hard to think of a softer one.
As I say, if you want to start a debate about something, there are plenty of ways to do it. Why would anyone think that assaulting artworks will win people over?
It seems that if you believe in a cause, it is now permissible to just rush to the nearest museum and slash away
It certainly helps that there is no punishment for these acts. As far as I am aware, the disgusting young woman who attacked the Balfour portrait – and was filmed doing so – has not been arrested. In part, this appears to be because Trinity College doesn’t much mind the destruction of this wonderful work by the great Hungarian-Jewish painter Philip de László. It seems that if you believe in a cause, it is now permissible to just rush to the nearest museum and slash away in the name of something or other.
What worries some of us about this is that an escalation always feels possible. If you can slash canvases with impunity, why not burn them? Why not set up fresh bonfires of the vanities in the middle of our major cities and offer up works of art as votive offerings to the great goddess Gaia? And after we have destroyed the artworks, perhaps we can move on to people?
But the soft targets are also chosen precisely because they are soft. It is the same with the bizarre campaign to persuade literary festivals to stop taking money from the firm Baillie Gifford. The claim of a campaign group called Fossil Free Books is that the investment fund is somehow destroying the planet and complicit in the war in Gaza. As Jeeves might say, the possibility seems to be a remote one. However, the campaign has been successful and a number of literary festivals and other arts organisations in the UK have told Baillie Gifford that they don’t want their money. As a result, Baillie Gifford have announced that they aren’t going to sponsor any literary festivals at all.
This doesn’t entirely sadden me. It is hard to think of a worse event than the Hay Festival. It has almost nothing to do with literature and almost everything to do with organising a left-wing summer camp in an egregiously beautiful part of Wales. The fact it was Hay that first came under pressure to distance itself from the war in Gaza and a love of fossil fuels is telling.
There are few places more completely removed from the world or more incapable of effecting any actual change than a supposed literary festival that actually consists of a bunch of celebrities who happen to have had books written for them addressing a gaggle of celebrity-hunters in a Welsh marquee. Again, activists exert their pressure where they can, and they go for the easiest targets.
Museums have become particularly vulnerable to this sort of pressure. And as with literary festivals, it is probably inevitable. If they are not attacked, they surrender before they are. I see that the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has decided to withdraw yet another artefact from display. The problem is a mask made by the Igbo people of Nigeria which was originally supposed to be used in male-only rituals. Therefore (the illogic goes), female spectators should not be able to see it.
I don’t know how many Igbo broads can be found wandering through the Pitt Riverson an average day, but I would estimate the number as being somewhere near zero. Still, it seems that the museum has been persuaded that even the remote risk of offending the sensibilities of some Igbo locals is enough to kibosh the mask.
The Pitt Rivers can’t know what it’s getting itself into. The collection already presents itself as if it is out on bail, with the curators apparently labouring under the belief that it’s mainly visited by white-supremacist colonialists who need a re-education camp, or wildly censorious treasure hunters looking for stolen loot. The whole thing is a disaster and you wonder whether at this rate the museum shouldn’t just go the way of the Wellcome Collection and shut entire galleries for inappropriate behaviour.
If they do, others will doubtless follow. Museums used to be in the news for acquiring items or putting on exhibitions. Today the only time they’re in the news is because the director or trustees have decided to divest the collection of some artefact or other. The British Museum, for instance, regularly hits the headlines for stories about items it has given away or items that it is mulling about giving away.
Perhaps this, too, is an inevitable process – as inevitable as book festivals and Cambridge colleges being run by cowards. And a reflection of the fact that after the great ages of exploration and collecting, our cultural life should be run by people who want to abolish what they were meant to preserve while the kids run riot.
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