Daisy Dunn

Just Stop Oil’s protest is doomed to fail

  • From Spectator Life
Activists from the 'Just Stop Oil' campaign group glue themselves to 'The Hay Wain' by John Constable in December 2022 (Credit: Getty images)

The eco-mob is at it again. Members of the protest group Just Stop Oil have progressed from blocking fuel terminals to disrupting the British Grand Prix and gluing themselves to the frames of paintings in galleries and museums across the country. To which anyone with even the vaguest recollection of the traffic-stopping stunts of Insulate Britain must sigh, ‘Not very original’.

Last Wednesday, a pair of activists stuck themselves to the frame of a nineteenth-century landscape by Horatio McCulloch at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. The following day, another pair selected the decidedly more famous ‘Peach Trees in Blossom’ by Vincent van Gogh at London’s Courtauld Gallery for the sticky-fingered treatment. Further attacks have since followed on a J.M.W. Turner at Manchester Art Gallery, a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ at the Royal Academy, and on one of the nation’s favourites, ‘The Hay Wain’ by John Constable, at the National Gallery.

All Just Stop Oil has really done so far is to highlight the inadequacy of gallery security

Beyond their desire to express frustration with the general lack of progress in tackling climate change, the protesters, many of whom are in their early twenties, have set out two main objectives. They are calling on the government ‘to immediately halt new oil and gas licenses in the UK’. And on ‘the directors, employees and members of art institutions to join the Just Stop Oil coalition in peaceful civil resistance.’

Why anyone working in the art institutions to which they refer would want to join them after this is a mystery. The activists may not have done anything as drastic as Mary Richardson, the suffragette who attacked Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ with a meat cleaver in 1914, but they have caused damage to the frames and spray-painted several walls and floors. It would appear that the environmental impact of aerosols and glues, many of which are petroleum-derived, doesn’t bother them very much.

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