Can a museum today also be a place for spontaneous political demands and performances? Some Quebec arts and museum specialists react to the gesture of Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, 21 and 20, of the group Just Stop Oil, posed at the National Gallery in London. The soup or the art?
The question is however not so simple, and the answers of the specialists are divided. At the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), all the teams were challenged by the gesture, as they always are when works of art, “and moreover masterpieces of world art , are subject to acts of vandalism,” said media relations manager Linda Tremblay. “And this, regardless of the claim that underlies these gestures. »
The MNBAQ claims to have put in place security rules allowing it to react quickly to a set of situations, some of which could resemble that of the National Gallery. “These events show us that no museum is immune,” recalls Mr.me Tremblay.
For Yves Bergeron, holder of the Chair in Museum Governance and Cultural Law at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), the fact that “these two young people knew that there was no real danger pour le tableau” changes the reading that can be made of their act. “The glass protected the work; the varnish would still have protected it. »
The inconsistency of the gesture is all the more flagrant in that museums are the guardians of values that environmentalists claim to claim. Like nature, which must be protected for future generations and for the benefit of all, works of art in museums also have an essentially public character.
Mr. Bergeron believes that Just Stop Oil understood that this staging was going to attract the media. “By choosing a work protected by glass, [ces activistes] cleared themselves. It’s quite clever. Let’s not forget that museums have become popular mass media for cultural elites and governments, since they are useful in international diplomatic relations. »
For Michel Lacroix, member of the Observatory of the Contemporary Imagination and sociologist of literature, the action of Just Stop Oil is more meaningful “precisely because [qu’elle est] camped in a purely symbolic violence, in a virtual destruction of a sacred common good, to denounce the violence of environmental destruction, ”he wrote in a long post on Facebook.
“But the reaction to this action, a reaction which does not want to hear anything, does not want protests to disturb everyday life, to disturb the order of things, a reaction which cries out that above all nothing should be changed, well, this reaction, she scares me,” adds the professor at UQAM.
According to François Le Moine, lawyer at the firm Rules of the art, the act is vandalism. “The inconsistency of the gesture is all the more flagrant as museums are the guardians of values that environmentalists claim to be. Like nature, which must be protected for future generations and for the benefit of all, works of art in museums also have an essentially public character. The mission of museums is not only to conserve, restore and exhibit works for the contemporary public, but also for our children and our grandchildren. »
This paradox, Yves Bergeron thinks otherwise. The staging of Just Stop Oil, he thinks, “opposes culture and nature. In this regard, these young people are right: if nothing is done for the environment and if we do not stop the exploitation of fossil fuels, there will be no more life and consequently no more culture”, considers the museologist.