Visitors at Louvre look on in shock as Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece attacked by environmental protesters
Two environmental protesters have hurled soup on to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris, calling for “healthy and sustainable food”. The painting, which was behind bulletproof glass, appeared to be undamaged.
Gallery visitors looked on in shock as two women threw the yellow-coloured soup before climbing under the barrier in front of the work and flanking the splattered painting, their right hands held up in a salute-like gesture.
One of the two activists removed her jacket to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the slogan of the environmental activist group Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) in black letters.
They aren’t even protesting about (necessarily) environmentalism! It’s crazy the number of people outraged that soup was thrown on glass that was in front of a painting and didn’t even get to the part where it says this is about food security.
I know it’s a minor point and food security is an actual very practical concern and valid reason to protest, but I feel like one of the tenants of a successful protest is very much like advertising : make the target directly relevant to the message. “Art and historical conservation efforts aren’t worth your concern as much as (blank)” feels like it’s a muddy message when the whole point of art culture is that it is kind of frivolous. Quite frankly you could throw anything at a beloved historical conservation peice and make the news even if your reason was “I felt like it”. People are probably gunna treat it as a bare faced stunt for attention because it’s already been done and the response is predictable. Our society wide fascination with historical preservation is immediately hostile to anything that seems to be spontaneous. It’s the opposite of exploiting a weak spot in people’s thinking.
I understand and am sympathetic to their cause but I am pretty sure there’s some property damage or mischief stunt that could have been immediately more effective by being somehow tied more directly to food, convenience culture or contemporary targets.
That just shows why this isn’t an effective form of protest. I’ve seen a lot of comments about how “this gets attention” but fail to see how no one is actually talking about the “point” these protestors were trying to make. Which basically ruins anything the protestors are trying to do as no one focuses on the issues expressed.
Although part of it might also just be the classic issue of people not reading that much past the headline. People see “protestors throw soup at Mona Lisa”, and not get much farther than that.
Or more likely that news doesn’t get paid to put it in the headline.
What form of protest gets your rubber stamp of approval?
Well the guillotine seems super effective. Start there.
I love you types that add nothing to a conversation except “WhAt dO yOU ApPRoVe???” Like that’s a useful response to the conversation of “is this effective in getting a message across.”
If only you held yourself to the same standard before yet another generic “This isn’t an effective form of protest even though it made the news, and I’m talking about it, and I know what it was about” comment.
Or fuck, even in this reply, where your “useful response” was “you should protest with murder”.
Looks to me like you just didn’t like your opinions challenged, you just wanted to make sure everybody knew what they were.
Of course WE know what this is about. We’re both reading the article (and most likely have a similar view of how important food insecurity is across the globe and in our own countries/states/provinces/cities). I’m not concerned about you or I getting the messaging. I’m question if the general public will get the messaging. The people who don’t know about food insecurity, or food waste, if they get the messaging. Even next door in Germany DW interviewed the communications head of the organization that protested and they couldn’t really point out how this was beneficial for their argument. They talked about wanting access to high quality food, so they mysteriously threw high quality food on the Mona Lisa? Wouldn’t a better protest of the same variety to have been throwing shit food at it? Or maybe blocking deliveries of crappy food to markets?
So here we are, on the internet, having a conversation about the Mona Lisa being hit with pumpkin soup. The messaging isn’t clear from the protestors and the demonstration just goes to show why we need better organization amongst people who realize this is an issue. We need clear messaging to relay to the every man. The person who maybe doesn’t experience it themselves, or who maybe doesn’t see how good insecurity has a wider impact on people and keeping social-economic classes in the same groups.
Challenge my viewpoint, prove to me how this protest has brought attention to their cause that’s meaningful rather than just notoriety to the Mona Lisa (that it didn’t already have), and that the every man is viewing this as a reason to help stop food insecurity.
DW video interview.
For-profit, neoliberal media will never fairly cover any protest that may impact the profits of other neoliberals. It doesn’t matter what form the protest takes, nor what the protest is for.
It’s been that way ever since “Occupy Wall St”, when news anchors feigned carefully practised bewilderment and asked "But what are they protesting. Of course if you asked any of the actual protesters, they were happy to make it clear.
So they just didn’t ask.
Measuring any act of protest by metric of “the media covered it in a way that will bring the great unwashed on side” ensures that no protest will ever meet your standard. You may as well advocate that people don’t bother and just politely wait for the end of the world. You won’t even be alone in doing it.
Fortunately, those media companies don’t control every method of communication just yet, so we can discuss it on social media or look it up independently.
What we can’t escape is the endless protest policing, where people complain “that’s not how I would have done it” on social media.
So maybe it’s time for those people to unveil their perfect protest strategy that gets international attention, doesn’t inconvenience anybody, gets fairly covered despite the millions spent to prevent it and doesn’t require 3 wet wipes to fix.
My money is on their big reveal being “do fuck all and try and die of old age before it matters”.
I would argue it’s a slightly effective form… but only if they advertise the point. There’s been plenty of times I’ve seen this for environmentalism, and people start talking about it in the comments. Not completely directly, but it gets them talking. Like when they would super glue their hands to the ground, in one video one of the protestors threw the bottle into a drain. So people started talking about how hypocritical it was because that’s bad for the environment. Which was a small thing, but the conversation was happening.
People used to make fun activists who would throw red paint onto fashion models wearing fur. But over the years, that slowed down because designers stopped using real fur. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it was because they were afraid of getting their stuff ruined, but now most designers won’t use fur for ethical reasons. Because they realize animals don’t need to be bred and killed for their suits.
The only real downside is that it does make them come off as assholes, but also no real way to turn that around. Like black people would do sit ins at restaurants, and a lot of white people hated them for it… but then other white people also got to see them get abused for it. Things like that can help change people’s perspective. With this, they throw it, and then it mostly stops there. They’re just assholes. It gets the conversation going, but not enough, because it just stops at them being assholes.
I agree with everything in your post except them being assholes. What part of this makes them assholes? Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt or inconvenienced, except for maybe a few museum employees who had to clean up a mess. The whole setup for viewing the Mona Lisa causes far more inconvenience than these people did. It’s a tiny painting in a packed room. You can’t really see it anyway.