The Other Climate-Change Art Protest
“What is worth more: art or life?” That was the provocative question that the demonstrator Phoebe Plummer asked onlookers at London’s National Gallery last month. Seconds before, Plummer—along with another activist—had splattered tomato soup across Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, superglued one hand to the wall, and kneeled in front of the painting, facing museumgoers in a shirt emblazoned with JUST STOP OIL. In the subsequent weeks, more climate activists defaced other famous works of art at museums across Europe in stunty attempts to draw attention to the climate crisis. “A lot of people, when they saw us, had feelings of shock or horror or outrage,” Plummer told NPR. “Where is that emotional response when it’s our planet and our people that are being destroyed?”
The protesters may have succeeded in grabbing headlines, but their logic was puzzling. As my colleague Robinson Meyer has , pitting concern for the climate against concern for protecting famous paintings makes little sense. In posing a false choice between art and
