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.
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