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October 18, 2024 - 6:00pm
Is Just Stop Oil a protest group, or a protection racket? On Thursday the group published an “open letter” to the directors of the National Gallery, asking for a meeting. The letter came in response to one written by the National Museum Directors’ Council, begging the group to stop vandalising paintings in major galleries.
Just Stop Oil, founded in 2022, demands an end to new fossil fuel licences issued by the British Government. The group is notorious for a high-visibility and confrontational protest style with stunts including blocking roads and football games, occupying refineries, and vandalising beloved paintings in major art galleries. Recent such attacks have included Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, John Constable’s The Hay Wain and Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus.
The NMDC letter highlights the physical damage, staff and visitor distress, and — the point they are no doubt keenest to emphasise — harm to the overall mission of providing open access to great art that results from such vandalism. While the letter says “the world is in a very dark place”, suggesting its writers are sympathetic to the climate cause, it also warns that a result of such attacks is “greater barriers” between visitors and the artworks themselves.
JSO’s response describes the art vandals in heroic terms as “action takers” and “members of the public” that, implicitly, represent Britain’s silent majority. We are perhaps to assume that the kind of Middle Englanders who bring their kids up to town for a rare trip to a big museum have taken to vandalising the paintings when they do so. These heroes are, we learn, “unafraid to use the cultural power of their national institutions when those institutions fail to do so”. Or, in other words, they desire to commandeer institutions whose founding ideal was — however partially and problematically — universal good, in service to their specific ideological project.
The note itself promises “We’ll leave the soup at home” but conspicuously does not undertake to stop committing acts of vandalism. JSO declares only that the group has “some ideas” on how the National Gallery can “mitigate” its failure to behave, and think, in precisely the manner the group dictates. The overall tone is unmistakably that of a pirate or protection racketeer: nice art collection you have there, shame if something happened to it.
But this is obviously incompatible with an ideal of universal access which relies on high levels of civic trust. Never mind the supposed “woke capture” of cultural institutions; ideological piracy such as Just Stop Oil is now attempting can only result in the collapse of that ideal.
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SubscribeJust Stop Oil has always been blackmail. The basic blackmail is this “accept that I am a very important person; an ‘activist’, a saviour of you mere ordinary people without my moral courage to save your selves…. Think I am important or else I will make a nuisance of myself”. And so on ad nauseam. A total narcissist in other words.
These JSO “heroes” are nothing of the kind. They don’t expect punishment, at least of any consequence. Here’s a cynical idea: why not set up a pillory at every major art gallery? The miscreants could be tackled by a crowd of angered art lovers and put in the pillory as a form of “performance art.”
I like the idea. JSO are nothing if not performative; they should have no trouble in submitting themselves to the court of public opinion.
These days, galleries often have “post-it note” facilities for members of the public to stick onto a wall, in the name of ‘participation and inclusivity’. A similar facility next to the pillory could be utilised to good effect, i’m sure.
Damian Hirst has been very quiet lately – can’t he just pickle a couple of JSO’s in a tank? It could look rather beautiful- the gaze of youthful fanaticism preserved for all eternity, blue hair waving gently in the formaldehyde like a delicate sea anemone. They are all about preservation, after all.
Or they could throw them in jail until they see the light.
These JSO “heroes” are nothing of the kind. They don’t expect punishment, at least of any consequence. Here’s a cynical idea: why not set up a pillory at every major art gallery? The miscreants could be tackled by a crowd of angered art lovers and put in the pillory as a form of “performance art.”
Why are these clowns taken seriously? Just hit them with a stick and tell them to eff off. Yet another thing I don’t understand.