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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.
Silly hysterical girlies.
Unfair to girlies.
I’ll thqueem and thqeem until i’m thick. As a brick, in reality.
Have you seen this?
“Narcissists may engage in feminist activism to satisfy their grandiose tendencies, study suggests”
https://www.psypost.org/narcissists-may-engage-in-feminist-activism-to-satisfy-their-grandiose-tendencies-study-suggests
Long prison sentences might help.
Lock ’em up!
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.”
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.
I think cups of cold soup might be more fun.
I’m so pleased to see my fellow UnHerd readers thinking in such a forward-facing, clear-headed manner!
Bravo! Brava! You made my day!
It probably does not matter if the soup is hot or cold. The key point is that it stays in the tin while being thrown at those in the pillory.
If ever I encounter a “post-it-note” facility and inclusivity wall in a public museum, I solemnly promise to write “White Lives Matter” on it.
The reason they behave in this stupid way is that they can’t defend their ideology with argument because then they would have to confess to the misanthropic and even genocidal underlying motives. For example, without plastics there can be no NHS as we know it. That means a lot of people have to die who otherwise wouldn’t. “Too bad, we’re saving the planet, doncha know.”
I agree with the point you’re making, but I question your assumption that modern healthcare and “NHS” are synonyms. Other countries get by without an NHS, many with far better services than us. We need to distinguish between the two if we are ever to improve healthcare in the UK.
Brilliant idea!
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.”
Works for me.
Just ignore them and leave them stuck to walls or the road, in all weathers and with no loo breaks.
“Honest guv, too worried about challenging their right to protest to interfere.”
I believe the Volkswagen Corporation took that approach to some protesters at one of their plants or headquarters. They simply turned off the lights and let the protestors spend the night with their hands glued to the floor. VW sent a watchman around periodically to check on them, but otherwise left them to their own devices. The protesters were very unhappy at their treatment. Can you imagine? I don’t suppose they’ll do it again though– at least not to VW.
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.
From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian
Sonnet 58
Cher requin, basking in your murky dregs,
dream in your sleep of chewing surfers’ legs.
A shark preceding in your role once served
as Baptist to your Christ. But age makes old,
rots shambles inefficiently preserved,
though Saatchi stretched its skin on plastic mould.
Because formaldehyde congeals your veins
(plus flame retardants made by Albemarle?),
and Hirst’s minions fisted your faecal drain,
still, petrified in your vitrine, you snarl;
and in MOMA eternally shall swim,
a testament to the decline of art,
an adman’s cynical, corrupting whim,
displayed like Tracy Emin’s bottled farts.
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.
That would probably be the Singaporean approach. It seems distasteful, but it apparently works. See, for example, Peter Moskos’s little book In Praise of Flogging.
The gallery security guards have been shown holding back members of the public who want to approach them during these protests. We need an investigation of the galleries’ role in this: are they conniving with the protestors, in order to get some ‘virtuous’ free publicity for themselves?
Let’s hang these wokaneers from the nearest yardarm.
Without the Sheepshank.
Please explain
The Sheepshank? You mean the pub in Bangkok?
It’s always struck me as perversely appropriate that JSO attack works of art.
Climate extremists are often motivated by a pathological hatred of humanity which they think can only be saved, if at all, by strict adherence to their ideological demands.
Great art is the cultural record of humanity’s existence, in all our wonder, imperfections, differences and similarities. If we will not submit to salvation at their hands, then to their logic it is fitting that record should be attacked.
There is a difference in scale and, so far, thankfully level of destruction. But the motivation is remarkably similar to the Taliban destroying the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Submit to our ideology or be erased.
They are Iago: ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life /That makes me ugly’.
They can’t abide the achievements of man because it shows them how talentless and stupid they are and rubs their pathetic noses in it.
When one of these attacks takes place, I always text a friend of mine (a senior figure in Greenpeace) to ask why the Green Left hates art.
And the most pernicious aspect of this and a huge problem for the museum staff is that the worst would be offenders are not identifiable by sight. It’s not Sharon and Kayleigh from Blackbird Leys with Croydon facelifts and tramp stamps. And age is no signifier either. Teenage Indigo and Saffron with Grandma, obviously highly respectable lady vicar Perdita of the Manor House, RichasFuck,a charming West Dorset village with no public transport,are so obviously.respectable,well dressed,well spoken,well off total members of the Establishment with media links aplenty especially to the BBC,up to now they’ve sailed past security,not so much in future I think. And Grandma drives a Bentley. And she was AT the Grosvenor Square riot. And she once shagged Mick Jagger. Her grandkids have heard all her stories. They need a cause to be against,when they’re not taking a flight to the Greek Islands of course.
Nothing will change until ordinary citizens take a stand against the plutocratic financiers of this activity. Boycott their companies, their films, their Spotify … Everything. Let’s start with Dale Vince.
The man who ripped off his first female partner and beggared his son. That’s as in kept all his money out of his sons hands
Ask the JSO people how many deaths they are comfortable with. Stopping fossil fuels in the short timescales they demand will degrade power supplies and agriculture to the point that many people will die. Cans of soup will be too rare and expensive to use for protests.
The law is pathetic, utterly useless, they should be dealt with very harshly.
That we’re even having this conversation is absurd. We don’t negotiate with terrorists.
An appalling bunch. The police should deal with them. The public would not object.
Surely more direct action would be picketing of petrol stations. See how that works out for them.
How about retaliation? Every time they throw soup at an Old Master, we throw soup over some solar panels.
How about we tie the miscreant to the solar panel instead? Cable tie is cheaper than soup.
Since they are temperamental malthusians I suspect limiting public access is very aligned to their mission of emiserating and eliminating the ultimate scourge – us.
Two can play at that game.
They are lucky I am not king…
These people aren’t “activists”, they are just spoiled middle class kids indulging in “storming the Winter Palace” fantasies.