--:-- Noel King: The police must have all the powers that they need to stop the protesters who use guerrilla tactics and bring chaos and misery. That's Britain's Home Secretary Suella Braverman warning that the UK government is going to crack down on climate activists.
--:-- Noel King: A group called Just Stop Oil has been disrupting British society. There was anger when a group blocked the busy A4, an arterial route west of the city. Blocking traffic, blocking oil terminals. But the move that got this group the most attention? A protest at London's National Gallery of Art. Climate activists throwing what authorities say appeared to be tomato soup on Van Gogh's famous sunflowers painting, then gluing their hands to the wall.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, does endangering priceless art help save the planet? Or does it just make people hate you? School me, I don't know. How is pouring two cans of tomato soup on a Van Gogh painting a protest?
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package. Closer to the action. The best seats. The best suites. Closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment. Closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Emma Brown is an artist and a spokesperson for the group that's caused all of this ruckus in the UK. The group is called Just Stop Oil, and it started its campaign in April of this year. Among the tactics, blocking oil terminals, a move that did not get the kind of media attention the group wanted, blocking traffic, a move that annoyed a lot of people, disrupting sporting events, and also throwing soup on a painting. A move that got them a lot of attention, even though the painting was protected by glass and was not itself damaged.
--:-- Emma Brown: Just Stop Oil is demanding that the UK government stop issuing new licenses for fossil fuel exploration in the UK. And they've promised that in the days leading up to Christmas that we will see many more actions from them. They're demanding that the UK government immediately halts all licenses and consents for new fossil fuel exploration and development in the UK.
--:-- Noel King: We already have plenty of oil and gas projects, oil rigs in the North Sea. So what we're asking right now, what we're demanding is that the government stops giving licenses to private companies to explore for more oil and gas in the North Sea to open new oil and gas projects. And we're saying we need an eight-year transition, but we need an end date and we cannot give out any more licenses for new oil and gas and coal.
--:-- Emma Brown: We're in an extreme energy crisis where millions and millions of people are being plunged into poverty in this country because they can't afford their energy bill. So it makes sense on a lot of levels that we need to transition. In the six to eight years during which the UK is transitioning off of oil, what will happen? The country will transfer to renewables?
--:-- Noel King: What is the ideal situation, I suppose, is what I'm trying to get out?
--:-- Emma Brown: We would argue that renewable energy, just because of the amount of time it takes to come online and the amount of potential that we have as an island nation with plenty of wind, plenty of tidal power and even solar power, we would argue that is where we need to be focused. So these are the kind of solutions that we need to drastically invest in to bring down our carbon output and to bring down our bills so that British families aren't starving to death this winter.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So you've got a solution. Let's talk about how you're addressing the problem. Two members of Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Van Gogh's sunflowers. Can you tell me how that transpired?
--:-- Emma Brown: We knew that we needed some more higher profile actions to break through and to get the message out there. And one of those actions was going to be throwing soup at a painting. The reason why we chose the soup is because we're in a position in the UK now where we have more food banks than McDonald's. That's never been the case here before. And people are going to food banks and saying, we don't want soup because we can't afford the energy to heat it up. So that's one reason why we were using soup, because we wanted to make those parallels.
--:-- Noel King: What is work more, art or life? Is it work more than food? Work more than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?
--:-- Emma Brown: Artists love to interpret. Why sunflowers? There's a few reasons we chose that painting. First of all, it's very famous and much loved. You really want to take advantage of the value and the profile of a work of art. Another reason we wanted that dramatic, slightly bizarre protest, because by targeting something that is precious and valuable, people feel a sense of shock and discomfort when they see that being threatened. That is really the emotion that we need to be feeling when we're seeing the decisions our governments are making and the sort of devastation being wreaked by the climate catastrophe.
--:-- Noel King: What do you say to people who love art and agree that you have a very important cause, that you are doing a very important thing, but you're also endangering priceless art?
--:-- Emma Brown: There was a letter I think by hundreds of museums and they were sort of pearl about these fragile works of art and how they have a duty to protect them for future generations. But do you not see the irony in that? Protecting objects for a future that currently doesn't exist, the trajectory that we are on, there's going to be no place for walking around an art gallery, that's for sure, if there's not enough food to eat, if we're wracked by devastating floods and wildfires and heat waves that kill millions of people. You know that's not the place where we get to go around an art gallery and enjoy a nice cup of tea in the in the cafe.
--:-- Noel King: So I would say to them and to everyone listening, I studied art myself, I'm an artist, I love art. But art has always been quite radical, many artists have been socially progressive and even outrageous in their time. And if we can use art in any way to get more coverage for this, to challenge people's perceptions of what has value, then I think it's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. It's appropriate for us to use as tools anything that we can to get some action on this huge problem.
--:-- Emma Brown: I heard about him and my heart broke because I thought, it is devastating that someone can make that sacrifice and it doesn't achieve anything. And I think that our group is not just throwing soup on a painting. They also scaled the Dartford Bridge hundreds of feet into the air and shut that bridge. They stopped the motorway around London. They roadblock every day. They throw paint at buildings. They stopped traffic on the Abbey Road crossing like the Beatles.
--:-- Noel King: The way I see it is like there's a brick wall that is the current system. And it seems completely immovable, completely impenetrable. We've got the fossil fuel industry against us. We've got, especially in the UK, the mainstream media funded by Rupert Murdoch against us. And it feels impossible to change. And we're just here throwing stones at that wall and people have been throwing stones at that wall for decades and maybe they're weakening it but you just can't see it yet and we don't know what the stone is going to be that we throw and that is going to finally make a chink in that wall and allow us to dismantle it and build something else but we have to keep throwing those stones we have to use every stone that we have whether it's a small one whether it's a big one and we just keep going because the thing that is more likely to defeat us than anything else is hopelessness or giving up on ourselves.
--:-- Emma Brown: We cannot afford to do that.
--:-- Noel King: Emma, let me ask you about public reaction. A researcher and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania here in the U.S. polled the public and their polling found that overall the public disapproves of these types of protests, nonviolent but disruptive. 46 percent of people they polled said these kind of tactics decrease their support for efforts to address climate change. 40% of people told the researcher and the professor it does nothing either way. Just Stop Oil actually did their own polling on Twitter. You asked people, what should we target next, more or less? And only 11.5% of people wanted you to target great artworks.
--:-- Emma Brown: I would hugely disagree after seeing the 40 degree heat in the UK that however many percent of people sulkily said that they now don't support climate action. I mean, people don't want to see their kids die because they're annoyed that they were stuck in a traffic jam. So I think we need to kind of take that with a pinch of salt. And you have to remember that it's a very big ask to want people to approve of being disrupted, you know. And disruptive protest movements throughout history have never been popular at the time. So just because people don't like being disrupted doesn't mean that it's not working. So it's not always down to what people think of us it's down to what they think of the demand and down to what they think about the issue and if we can increase support and bring people along with that that's a lot more important than whether they like us personally.
--:-- Noel King: Let me ask you about um a threat if I can put it that way. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says he's going to crack down on what you guys are doing. When he says crack down, do you know what he means?
--:-- Emma Brown: Yeah, so they want to increase prison sentences. They want to increase monitoring of activists and protesters, increase tagging, make it an illegal offence to lock on, which is a very old protest tactic where you fix yourself to a gate or whatever. Right, we'll criminalise locking on. So they're just they're being very reactionary, which is ridiculous. Obviously, it's a worrying sign for our democracy, but it's also revealing to the British public that the government would rather imprison peaceful protesters than take action on what the British public can see is definitely a climate emergency.
--:-- Noel King: So so I think that I think the conservative government are in trouble and I think they're doing what any kind of group of people do when they're in trouble and they see no way out. And that is they just keep digging themselves into that hole. So it's unfortunate, but we're going to keep going because we've obviously reached a point where they think what we're doing is effective and they want to stop us doing it.
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--:-- Noel King: The UK government's response to that? A spokesperson tells Today explained, quote, the right to protest is a fundamental principle of our democracy. But those protesters that disrupt public life delay our emergency services and drain police resources cost the taxpayer millions and must face proper penalties. End quote.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, what are we to think about all of this? Are loving art and wanting a livable planet mutually exclusive? A professor of art history wrestles with his own thoughts.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. We're back with David Friedberg. He's a professor of art history at Columbia University. And we called him because in 1989, he wrote an important book and a book that is still relevant, according to many Goodreads reviewers, called The Power of Images. That dealt with a whole gamut of psychological responses to art, from emotional responses of all kinds, from the use of images for propaganda, for also the ways in which it aroused distress, pleasure and the impulse to destroy.
--:-- David Friedberg: Well, I'm afraid to say it's usually very effective. All acts of rebellion against power, all acts of insults to power are effective at the start. Whether they actually end up affecting regime change is another matter. It's there from the beginning of time. We have the destruction of images of hated rulers in ancient Babylon. Here where Nero rules today, Christ shall rule forever. We've had image destruction in the late Roman Empire when Christianity came on the scene. But he said Christ would replace me.
--:-- Noel King: And we shouldn't forget that some acts of destruction are simply ways of replacing the symbols of a hated past, past of the ancien regime, of old regimes, as took place in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, with the fall of the Iron Curtain. People pulled down images of hated leaders because they never wanted to see them again.
--:-- David Friedberg: Anti-government protesters toppled Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary. With sledgehammers, they smashed to pieces this symbol of Russian influence over Ukraine. That actually fell into an old class of image destruction, which was the so-called damnatio memoriae, the damnation of memory. The instances can go on and on when the Shah of Persia was replaced. Images in Tehran came down. It was the famous removal of the statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A U.S. Marine tank with a large chain has pulled the statue of Saddam Hussein down. It's a giant statue crumbled at the knee and toppled over.
--:-- Noel King: It's a well-known strategy. This is not a new thing at all. We talked to a spokeswoman from Just Stop Oil. Her name is Emma Brown. And she told us that the group did not get much attention from blockading oil terminals, which is an action that is explicitly tied to their goals. But they got a lot of attention when they threw tomato soup on a painting, a thing that is not explicitly tied to their goals. Why do you think that is?
--:-- David Friedberg: Any assault on a loved object gains attention. You know one of the interesting things about great paintings is that they housed in museums which are the equivalent of the ancient temples. People go and stand in front of them in hushed silence. And there another issue. People don't love oil terminals. As far as people are concerned, I think what you don't want to forget is that most people have some kind of aesthetic sense. People like the sunflowers, not only because it's a famous picture, but because they're moved by the paintings. It means a great deal to them.
--:-- Noel King: So who the hell cares about what an oil terminal looks like? It's too complicated. They have to start thinking about, you know, what will happen if we lose our oil? They have to make an analysis. But when you see a beautiful thing destroyed, it's upsetting.
--:-- David Friedberg: When you ask Just Stop Oil members, why are you doing this, they will say very openly, it is ridiculous to protect art in museums and not protect the earth. What do you think about that?
--:-- Emma Brown: I would respond by saying it's ridiculous to invest so much in oil. We should stop oil. But what's the connection with allowing people to go on enjoying works of art that they love, which means something to them? There's no conceivable connection between the two claims. It's a kind of logical absurdity. You know, to do away with one great salvation of civilization for the sake of saving civilization from climate change seems to me a confusion of aims.
--:-- David Friedberg: I'm not a determined conservative in search of protecting everything that goes under the name of art. You know, I think a lot of the problem now in our society is not only climate change, but the disparity between rich and poor, and the fact that works of art are now sold for absurd amounts of money. And that has led to a devaluation of the very notion of art in our society. And I think unwittingly, just stop oil by these attacks may be aiding in this.
--:-- Noel King: For example, there is the famous case quite recently of Banksy's Girl with a Balloon, which was put up for sale at Sotheby's. It had just sold for that 1.4 mil. And as soon as it did, an alarm sounds. Banksy very cleverly had installed a paper shredder in the frame of the painting. A remote-controlled shredder began chewing its way through the canvas, a shock to everyone. What happened?
--:-- David Friedberg: Banksy's now infamous shredded work of art is going up for auction again, and it could be worth much more than $1.4 million. The painting was sold for a higher price. For new world record, sold to you, $16 million. Because of the fame, I suppose, which this attack would bring to the picture, which was then bought at a higher price than it would otherwise have been.
--:-- Noel King: One gets the impression that Just Stop Oil is betting that artists would understand their actions in some sense, or that at least artists would work to try to interpret what they are doing. She said the group picked tomato soup specifically because it's an allusion to Britain's high cost of living, people cooking soup in cans. Is there any way to look at these protests as art themselves, or is that a bridge too far for you?
--:-- David Friedberg: There's no doubt that many artists are radical. Artists are supposed to be radical. Thank God they're radical, and they're radical in their political views. And I'm sure there are plenty of artists, I'm not surprised, who are not especially opposed to the throwing of tomato soup on sunflowers of Hanhoch.
--:-- Noel King: I do think that the question of, you know, somehow drawing attention to, I mean, bringing in sympathizers from a group in our society who are reduced to having to make meals that consist of tomato soup. I think that's the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard because these are people who are reduced to such straits that they are really not going to be worried about Van Gogh or anything at all in the context of such an attack.
--:-- David Friedberg: I think that's one of the most spurious connections you can imagine. I mean, it appeals to intellectuals and artists maybe, but that's a small section of our society. And I think we should leave things in our museums alone for the most part.
--:-- Noel King: So that precisely the people, I mean, Britain, after all, is a society which until very recently had museums that were free for everybody to attend. And that was one of the great things about Britain because it made it clear that art was available for all. And to distract people from the pleasures of art by throwing, as I speak, I'm becoming stronger in my feelings about this that I anticipated, to deprive people of those chances of pleasures, which, you know, now has become increasingly only available to the rich, would be a great shame.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Halima Shah and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
