The smile of The Mona Lisa smeared with soup by environmental activists. The symbol is disturbing and above all leaves one doubtful. What connection is there between the target, the most famous masterpiece of Renaissance painting, and the cause that these two women claim to defend, namely “healthy and sustainable eating”?
Traditionally, this type of depredation targeted places linked to the interests that were denounced: anti-capitalists spray-painted bank windows; animal activists attacked breeding sites, slaughterhouses and butcheries; Uyghur defenders targeted Chinese consulates or large importers of products made in Xinjiang labor camps, etc.
With the paintings of Van Gogh, Goya, Monet, the sculpture of Degas, and now the masterpiece of Leonardo da Vinci, we are elsewhere. And the message appears very confusing.
It is true that it is not easy to identify those responsible, due to the fact that the majority of the foods that end up on our plates do not constitute a “healthy” and even less “sustainable” diet.
Who is responsible for this state of affairs? Food manufacturers? Certainly. But could we feed six billion human beings without this massive production and at—relatively—low costs? Large agricultural producers? Same answer. Not to mention that for a century these farmers have been pushed to industrialize their farms and intensify their crops.
Did they have a choice if they wanted to survive? Governments, then, would be the main culprits, those who do not do enough to regulate theagribusiness ? But do they ever do enough in the eyes of some, since governing always requires taking measures to remedy certain problems while accommodating divergent interests? Or does this responsibility not lie with consumers themselves? In other words, we, who often have no choice but to buy industrial food products — if only for reasons of availability and, above all, price.
Nihilism
In reality, if we carried out surveys to find out whether the population would prefer “healthy and sustainable food” to the food full of chemicals and produced with a lot of pesticides that they currently consume, I am convinced that a large The majority of people would opt for the first option. At least from a theoretical point of view, that is to say before we detail the reductions in productivity and the price increases which would inevitably result, to the point of endangering the food security of three quarters of of humanity, agricultural production that is more respectful of nature.
If the cause defended by these activists is indeed more or less consensual, to date no one has effective solutions that can be implemented quickly and whose impacts would not be too catastrophic, in order to be able to offer food to all. “healthy” and from “sustainable” production methods.
But who are these gestures of revolt aimed at, which sound like cries of anger launched into the void? There is a sort of expression of adolescent anger (and partly directed against one’s own impotence) in these jets of paint, soup or puree which seeks above all to provoke, to shock.
That they take place in museums and that they target masterpieces of the past is not insignificant either. These sprinklings in fact reconnect with a nihilism which has long maintained a dispute with works of art. How can we not hear in the rhetorical questions of the two soup-throwing activists at the Louvre — “What is most important?” Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food? » — an echo of this famous sentence of the Russian nihilist Dimitri Pisarev, who already declared in the 1860s: “For the common man, a pair of boots is worth a thousand times more than the collection of the complete works of Shakespeare or Pushkin. »
Narcissistic emulation
Originality is therefore not what characterizes this epidemic of museum vandalism. The somewhat short explanation offered by our two Parisian vandals reproduces with a few words that put forward by their London predecessors, just as their followers in Potsdam copied their pose: kneeling, one hand glued to the wall.
This mimicry is disturbing. Whether they denounce unhealthy food or demand the end of fossil fuels, we have the impression that these activists act out of narcissistic emulation, like those Internet users who film themselves taking on generally stupid challenges and then proudly broadcast their exploits. on social networks. Seeing them pose in front of their work before being arrested, it is difficult not to think of these “15 minutes of world fame” which Andy Warhol prophesied that “everyone” would soon be “entitled to”. The cause that these new Erostrates claim to serve suddenly becomes not unclear, but secondary.
Fortunately, these works are all protected by protective glass – something our iconoclasts are well aware of. Visitors to the Louvre will thus be able to continue to admire the beautiful face and the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa, who will seem, if some of them ever remember this incident, to gently mock such insignificance. .