Last Friday, two young girls walked through the imposing columns of the National Gallery in London. From the entrance hall, they immediately went up to the second floor. Quickly passing by the Corots, the Degas and the Monets, they made their way to room 43, world renowned for its paintings by Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh. This is where Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland were filmed live by an accomplice slathering tomato soup on Van Gogh’s famous painting entitled The sunflowers.
All this in the name of a small group called Just Stop Oil which, inspired by the violent actions of Extinction Rebellion, demands an immediate halt to the exploitation of hydrocarbons. Of course, the canvas estimated at 84 million dollars was in no danger since it was protected by a glass case. What is the link between Van Gogh and hydrocarbons? None since, in this agit-prop in the form of terrorism soft, it is precisely the absurd character of the gesture which is intended to provoke amazement.
One could consider as harmless this profanation of a work considered as a masterpiece of humanity. One more manifestation of this “civil disobedience”, which for some years has become the cream pie of ecological radicalism. One could see in it an adolescent gesture, isolated and without consequences since, in any case, the canvas was in no danger. Our brave amazons themselves only spent a few hours at the post. A way like any other to win their “fifteen minutes of fame” to use Andy Warhol’s famous formula.
However, nothing was left to improvisation in this gesture, which the international press delighted in. Starting with this dripping Heinz soup, symbol of industrial food. Continuing with this watchword “is art worth more than life?” “.
By choosing as target The sunflowers, of Van Gogh, these activists are resolutely part of this radical and anti-humanist ecology which opposes nature to all human activity. If man is a parasite for the environment, we understand why these sunflowers, discovered in America, then patiently selected and cultivated before being sublimated by art, become unbearable for them. Don’t they represent in their own way what man can do best with nature?
Not all ecologists practice this detestation of beauty. “The climate deserves better than this idiotic caricature,” said MP Yannick Jadot. The former environmentalist candidate for the French presidential election claims an ecology that would be “a commitment to beauty”. He even considers Van Gogh as “the most beautiful of nature and culture”.
For many years, however, we have seen the development of an ecology that no longer has anything to do with beauty. Forget the bucolic landscapes of the Romantics, the undulating flora of the Impressionists and the dazzling skies of the Flemish. For a decade, ecologists and speculators have formed an alliance in France in order to massacre with blows of wind turbines as far as the eye can see these same landscapes which once inspired Renoir, Cézanne or Van Gogh. In all regions, landscapes shaped for centuries by a delicate and respectful hand have been bristling with cement towers 150 meters high without environmentalists shedding a tear.
The same goes for the Normandy cliffs painted by Monet. In front of them will soon stand a Maginot line of windmills clearly visible from the coast. Enough to cultivate nostalgia for this sea which, only yesterday, danced “along the clear gulfs”. How ironic to say that it will have been necessary to wait for ecology to brutalize and industrialize landscapes to such an extent!
How can we be surprised that this punitive, radical and soulless ecology openly displays its detestation of art? At the beginning of October, in Australia, militants attacked the Massacre in Korea of Picasso. In July, in Italy, it was Spring by Botticelli. Each time, these militants with millenarian discourses stick to the wall, evoking the apocalypse to come. Earlier, Mona Lisa had been entitled to a scaling in order.
By tackling these masterpieces, the disciples of Gaia demonstrate their detestation of one of the last objects of the sacred in the West. This hatred is expressed today from radical ecology to the highest echelons of GAFAM, where multinationals like Netflix allow themselves to rewrite literary masterpieces as well as to censor without scruple works like Caleb’s daughters.
Whether they vomit masterpieces of painting or censor those of cinema and literature, it is the same contempt for art that is expressed in the name of the primacy of ideology. “When you attack art, you’re not far from auto-da-fé,” said writer Marc Lambron on the radio this week. By opposing, in a merciless war, art to “life” and man to nature, these activists are preparing a sad future for us. Without Van Gogh and his ilk, who will reveal the beauty of the world to us tomorrow?