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.
I love a good protest … But this isn’t a good protest.
What’s the most important thing?” they shouted. “Art, or right to a healthy and sustainable food?”
Yeah, no. I think in a civilised world we should be able to have both and that sort of argument is weak as fuck.
Destroy all art because it is more important that we conduct research into cot death. Oxygen is more important than art and yet look at you, with your galleries.
It’s infantile posturing of probably well off middle class kids who want their Rosa Parks moment for Instagram clout.
Further to that, attempting to destroy something that essentially belongs to everyone is just going to bring negative press. How about going after something owned by the head of Nestle? No? Is that too difficult and requires too much work?
You are talking about it right now.
That means it worked, regardless of how “good” you think it is.
We are talking about the protest, not the subject of the protest.
That’s one of the problem with protest stunts. They get attention but often the attention drowns out the intent.
How would you protest then?
Fair question.
I haven’t protested about this specific issue, but I have done about others. Specifically, the erosion of human rights in the UK.
Here’s a video of a performance protest we made last year:
It’s pretty blunt, it’s about how wealth is used to distort rights and the meanings of language. The full thing took over four hours to read out. We held a talk and a symposium as well as educational visits with schools. I’m a big believer in education as social justice.
Hypothetically then, in their case, I would make art that engaged with the subject. Just like picasso did with Guernica, an image that still resonates the horror of war.
I mostly agree but I mean it’s not like they were trying to destroy art or suggesting that all art should be destroyed. There’s plenty of unprotected art in the Louvre. In the same room as the Mona Lisa There’s a huge painting on the opposite wall that’s arguably more interesting than whatever view of the Mona Lisa you can get from 6 ft back and they didn’t go after it. They’re trying to get attention, like most protests.
I get that. And I broadly supported the stop oil protests that took a similar form. But I do take objection to the weird value judgement they are making.
What’s worth more, art or sustainable food…
If I wanted to get complex about it I’d highlight the numerous ways in which art and sustainable agriculture have traditionally interwoven through folk practices, but I’m going to keep it simple and say that the sort of false equivalence they just used is the rhetoric of fascism.
In the UK it is frequently used to defy art that may be oppositional to political and corporate interests.
And that’s it, art is, more than anything, a vector for public discussion and protest in its own right.
Their protest and the reason behind it is fine. The daft shit they said during it undermines everything else and could do easily have been avoided with a small amount of thought.
I recently saw someone on Lemmy point out that the UK has an emergency plan to move precious artwork to bunkers in the event of a nuclear attack, but no such plans exist for the people. Paintings can be replaced or remade. People cannot. The planet cannot. There are many things in this world far more valuable than art, in part because life is the source of art.
I’d actually say the reverse.
Our collective learning, as captured in our literature and art, is unique. It’s the result of countless human lives. It is what would allow us to rebuild a society after a nuclear war.
Populations are replaceable. As long as enough people survive, the population will recover. On an individual level, of course, each person is unique but most are unremarkable.
You may find what I’m saying abhorrent, but for the potential success of any post-nuclear society I think it’s more important that knowledge and culture survive than individuals.
I think an important consideration is who gets to decide what knowledge and culture get preserved. For example, I would say that medicine, agriculture, and human language would be much more important to preserve than computer science or economics, but I’m sure someone would disagree.
In general, I think art is very valuable and should be protected when possible (and not just European art), but if the choice is between a painting or a human life… the painting goes every time.
That’s like saying playing with unloaded guns is completely harmless. You don’t do that. All it takes is one accident or a crazed person to make it worse.
You want to protest? Go to the buildings of oil companies or politicians who are the reason for this or have the capability to make a change. The art is entirely irrelevant to this.
The only attention they’ll get is a bad one. And from whom? The same people you are advocating for?
And what did you do this week to prevent environmental destruction, recycle some sody pop cans?
I can’t wait to go to my old high school’s student art show and throw soup on alllllll the art! You know, because food.
The painting, which was behind bulletproof glass, appeared to be undamaged.
Wow, who would’ve guessed.
It’s also probably not even the real one. They rotate it with several copies and never disclose which one is the original.
Well, they never said it was soup proof glass.
yet they happened to prove it
Now we know. Every article from now on has to call it bullet- and soupproof glass. It is the law.
It’s actually a fair point. Bullets move in straight lines. Liquids splatter and drip. The painting might not be safe from all directions.
It’s bulletproof not soupproof.
Fair enough.
Also, it’s not the real Mona Lisa.
It’s a painting 🎨🖌️ of her?
Almost like the spectacle is the point, and now people are talking about it
yeah, they really advanced environmentalism with this dumb shit. 🙄
They did studies that demonstrated this kind of thing can make political progress more difficult because politicians don’t want to look like they’re weak to it and voters don’t want to be associated with it.
But they, and I guess you, don’t really care, it’s not about actually making positive change it’s about feeling like a hero and getting followers on social media.
I suspect the protesters knew about this.
If it’s anything like the other times, that’s exactly why they targeted it instead of something unprotected. They aren’t trying to destroy art, they’re trying to make a statement.
It just appeared to be undamaged.
Who knows, there might be some soup doing quantum tunnelling and plopping itself right in-between the canvas and the paint.
I’m not usually inclined to conspiracy but I honestly think this group is planted by somebody to make environmental activists look bad.
You underestimate how dumb the average person is. Couple that with a good cause and a lot of drive, and you get the statistical certainty that from time to time someone is going to do something unproductively dumb, supposedly for the sake of a good cause that doesn’t get promoted in any way.
If you got evidence present it. I tend to take people at their word. If someone tells me they are religion x or fighting for cause y I run on that assumption. There are of course shills but internet shilling or talking on media is not going to land you in jail. It would take a very very large sum of money to convince me that I should do something like this.
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.
The first line of the Guardian article says, “Two environmental protesters…”
Granted, I did assume that this was the same group that’s been throwing paint onto artwork and corporate headquarters and yachts.
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.
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.
Been there. Guarantee the time it takes to clean it is less than the time it takes to get through the crowd to look at it. I know it’s a popular edgy opinion, but the painting across from the Mona Lisa is much cooler imo
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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”.
Shows how effective it was. People don’t even know what it is about
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.
It’s just the obvious trajectory of social media attention seeking within the disaffected aesthetic. Someone that loves to feel special and the center of attention picks a cause almost at random then throws themselves into the fray as loudly as possible.
It’s always happened, you can see them in every community and aesthetic - conspiracy theories, political types, sports fans… Protest communities are especially attractive to attention seekers, it’s great for social media clout to pretend that you’re doing these crazy things for a bigger cause
No true Scotsman would throw soup on the Mona Lisa.
THROW PIES AT THE RICH! Not art. The rich.
People have target the rich as well as buildings (banks, polluting factories) They get sued and it rarely ever hit the news.
Something like this? Plenty of witnesses jumping to record this and share on social media.
I dont think any art has gotten damaged by these stunts yet. All important pieces are behind bullet proof glass or not unlikely a copy with the orginal in a vault.
Ok ok ok, I’ll set aside pies for the rich… But can I also throw soup at activists?
idiots
Again?!
Didn’t another group do this exact same thing last year? I believe it was Stop Oil last time.
You’d think they just stop anyone with a thermos or other vessel capable of holding soup.
I believe that they did it to a Van Gogh painting which actually was more note worthy as that was not behind bullet proof glass
Im almost positive this is either the same exact story being posted a year later, either way I distinctly remember the same argument of “it’s behind glass, dumbasses” being mentioned last time.
Unless they get to the point of doing full strip and cavity searches, there’s no way to prevent someone from bringing in a Ziploc baggie full of soup.
What a brain-dead form of protesting. It only upsets people and makes no sense.
The painting, which was behind bulletproof glass, appeared to be undamaged.
This is why education is important.
eh idk. they probably knew about it. they wanted headlines, not damage, and they got them
Bitch, if I flew to fucking France to see the Mona Lisa and you’re up there flinging soup on it, you’re getting a foot in your ass.
Want to raise awareness? Be aware of this. Shithead.
Yeah fuck those starving people I wanna see the tiny painting
Living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and complaining about sustainability…
They’re complaining about food security, but regardless it doesn’t invalidate their message.
I know you told us 9 times because literally no one else knows what their cause was about. Shows how effective the message was.
Maybe if they weren’t passing a bunch of money around at the top, food would be more accessible.
Complaining by wasting food certainly invalidates the message however.
A can of soup isn’t going to change anything. What kind of an argument is that? With that logic, any protest uses energy, so all of it is invalid if it’s about any form of energy or food usage. That’s not a valid argument.
I suppose in a purely symbolic way, maybe it’s not the best, but scale matters. Wasting one can of soup when you need 10 million is not really a big deal.
deleted by creator
You need to work on your reading comprehension, lol.
simply parroting what others have told you doesn’t make you right
the irony is amusing, though ;P
Yeah, you’re the one who’s just relying on memes.
Lol.
show me on the doll where the mean meme hurt you
Yeah, there you go again relying on reference humor :(
There’s not an original thought in that mind, which is why you were projecting lol.
Anyone else think of the Mona Lisa case from Glass Onion?
Possibly why it was chosen?
The Mona Lisa is So Hot right now
They are covered in glass. They do this to make a scene to bring light to their cause. The painting wasnt harmed. Meh. Either way I’ve kinda accepted that humanity is doomed. I’ve gone through the 5 stages. Too many are suck on denial.
some of us have been chilling at anger for a while. it’s kinda nice.
How do you separate your anger at the world from your regular everyday anger at morons? It’s a real struggle.
Why would i separate them. You take all the anger, you squish it down real hard until it’s tiny and it’s white hot, you put it in the center of you and set it to spinning, and it’ll drive you to incredible feats.
“Our farming system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work.”
“… And WE are wasting the food that the farmers died for.”, while at the same time, turning the world towards destruction of all testaments of technology of the previous era.
That sure will encourage work on environmental issues. /s
Name a better form of protest to get the people’s attention.
Spoiler: They’ve tried that before.The world is making progress in climate change. This isn’t going to make it go faster.
The world is making progress in climate change.
It better hurry the fuck up.
Throwing soup on paintings discredits environmentalism to a lot of people. But what they should really be upset about is misleading graphs cherry-picked to look as alarming as possible.
Sea ice is a concerning indicator, sure, but if you look at other news and other graphs about it you’ll not find anything like this gigantic drop. In particular in the section of that page about Antarctic ice:
At the beginning of December, ice extents were at record low levels. However, the seasonal decline in Antarctic ice extent subsequently slowed. As a result, by the beginning of the new year, extent was only sixth lowest.
It also notes that Arctic sea ice extents were typical during 2023, so whatever was happening to Antarctic ice wasn’t necessarily an indication of global trends.
I am an environmentalist, I want to see continued effort being made on switching to renewable resources and ameliorating the effects of climate change. But I worry that a lot of environmentalists are crying wolf very loudly and it’s going to harm the movement in the long run when people realize how overblown some of these arguments are.
They didn’t throw soup on a painting. They threw soup on glass that was in front of a painting. No paintings were harmed in this protest.
Okay, amend my comment to read “throwing soup at paintings.” Any other changes needed?
No one cares what people think about the movement in the long run.
Having a long run is the goal.Personally, I think we have 20 years left in which we can pretend to do something against climate change (because nothing has actually been achieved, CO2-output keeps climbing, completely unaffected by this whole debate).
By 2045, conditions around the equator will trigger a global migration north, then we’ll go back to bombing each other at large scale and all mitigation efforts are over.
Your reading comprehension is poor. This isnt about climate change. This is about food security.
… So they threw away food to make a statement?
This is like protesting pollution by purposely throwing oil into the ocean. Generally speaking the act of protest should not directly intensify the problem.
I mean it’s more like knocking over a barrel of water during a rainstorm to bring attention to the fact that people across the world don’t have access to clean water. There is more than enough food to go around in Paris, the problem is distribution and greed. You think donating a single can of soup would make a meaningful impact compared to getting on international news to spread your message?
A can of soup dude. The trashcans at the Louvre have far more food waste than a can of soup. What larger good can be done with a single can of soup?
Feeding a person.
Random insult back atcha
Are they?
While continuing to tap new oil fields and failing to make sufficient progress. Also, this one isn’t about climate, but healthy and sustainable food. Connected issues, but still.
All that aside, to come back to the somewhat dodged question, what would make things go faster?
Well voting for one. Have people tried that?
Yeah that’s helped us so far lmfao
If voting did nothing they wouldn’t make it difficult.
That’s the good question. I’m not sure there is one. We ( the world) were slow off the ball on climate change and its not like we move like a power boat, more like a barge.
If you aren’t aware of climate change by now then you’re an absolute moron. I don’t see how soup is going to change anything
Funnily enough this has been the most successful form of environmental activism to this day
Successful in pissing off the general public and causing them to ignore anything of substance that you have to say, sure. Pushing people away from your cause is not a good strategy if you want to effect change.
Hey guys science says our plant is heating up due to carbon emissions we are creating by burning fossil fuels. Can we tone it down a bit?
No
Hey guys going to chain myself outside, because this is super important
Don’t care
Hey guys, going to burn myself alive to protest climate change
Meh
Soups and super glue on art!
Oh the humanity! Why would you not engage with us in simple conversation before chucking a cream of tomato onto bulletproof glass!?
Wait… THAT’S WHAT GOT YOUR ATTENTION?!
People were talking about climate change though. Movements like FFF (until Covid took the wind right out of their sails) had quite a bit of momentum, and actually were making it a mainstream topic.
Protests like this are getting people to talk about what you did, not about why you did it.
I mean it has us talking about why they did it, right?
Literally killing yourself to protest climate change has barely made the news so yea, for some reason people only talk about it if you throw soup at glass in front of art for some reason.
Killing yourself to protest climate change isn’t a climate issue, it’s a mental health issue.
You sound like you live in a bubble.
Hop off lemmy bro. It’s rotting out your brain.
dont put /s, it ruins the joke
My own personal style of humor is to say absurd things with a straight face, and unfortunately I have found that on the Internet there is always going to be someone who believes me without question no matter how absurd a statement I make. Because unfortunately there’s always someone on the Internet who actually believes something that absurd.
It will make the climate crisis be covered in headlines and make it harder to ignore. This IS a legitimate form of protest. They didn’t do any harm and brought attention to their cause.
They weren’t doing it for the climate crisis.
Yeah the article is a bit strange. They call them environmental protesters but they seem to have been protesting food insecurity. Which I guess can be considered environmental but isn’t usually what I think of.
Especially when you consider the famines that yhe climate crisis will cause. And yeah that’s piss poor reporting, they call them environmental Protesters multiple times…
I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.
It will make the climate crisis be covered in headlines and make it harder to ignore
No it won’t
This IS a legitimate form of protest.
NO, it isn’t
The only legitimate forms of protest are ones that are easily ignored, right?
Put a million people in the streets and I’ll notice. Take out a painting and you’re a vandal :::
No one damaged any paintings
No, but forms of protest that are specifically intended to destroy the property of unrelated people aren’t particularly legitimate.
Ok, but that’s not really relevant here. Nothing was destroyed
This is easily ignored. Everyone will forget about it in a few weeks and nothing will change
you are talking about them. Therefore protest worked. Therefore it was a protest.
I can get people to talk about me by taking a dump in public that isn’t the same as listening to what I have to say.
420 million people a year defecate in public, so unfortunately not.
Real public not in the freaken woods. As in people around and seeing it. Jesus.
TIL wood are “fake public”
PS, not a lot of woods in the middle of New Delhi. Or here in Brooklyn, where I saw an unhoused person, taking a crap in the street the other day.
We’re talking about what idiots they are.
Pithy quotes aside, not all publicity is good publicity.
I’m curious what you think is acceptable protesting?
Marches are one traditional approach. Those can be disruptive, but they don’t deliberately cause property damage to unrelated victims so that’s way better.
They tried to destroy a cultural icon. That’s the only topic worth talking about.
No, they didn’t. They knew it was behind the bullet proof glass and would not be harmed. They did this to draw attention to a cause. It worked.
They knew it, huh. Sounds like an admission of guilt.
They clearly didn’t accidentally spill soup so I’m sure their guilt isn’t really in question.
Half of the comments here don’t even know what cause it was for. You know you are supposed to learn by kindergarten that there is a difference between good attention and bad attention. Making a scene is easy but ineffective the vast majority of the time. Convincing people is difficult but it is the only way to get long term results.
You must have met people like this in your life. Someone completely unable to grasp that there are others around them and they got their own needs and wants. Does that person care? No. They didn’t get what they want so now everyone has to suffer.
Half of the comments here don’t even know what cause it was for.
That’s because the news piece deliberately omits that part, at least from the headline. If they didn’t throw soup at an important piece of bulletproof glass, there wouldn’t even be news coverage.
Even if I agreed with your premise (which I don’t) I think it pretty silly to use a small niche internet comment forum as a gauge for saying this didn’t work, when it’s plastered on headlines around the world. And you’re already admitting that it did work, now you’re just debating it’s effectiveness. And that’s not the point. 
Lmao no they didnt, it has been behind glass for almost 2 decades, facts dont care about your feelings.
the Mona Lisa is behind several centimeters of glass. they have absolutely no way to date it with soup.
You know why the glass is there? Because some lunatic tried to throw pait at it. You can’t justify the act because it’s guarded against it. It’s like saying it’s OK to to launch a missle at me because you know I have an interceptor system.
Well we disagree. I think protests qua protests are interesting to talk about, same for climate protests, civil rights, the role of art, the role of art conservation, and even soup is pretty interesting.
Couldn’t have just used any of the socially acceptable ways to protest? This is France ffs, they are the world leaders in organizing a protest. You piss the French off and you got a march on your hands.
there are no socially acceptable ways to protest - that is the definition of protest.
In the end, I think it’s no different than religious fanatics destroying part of their culture because they disagree with it. They prove nothing. They accomplish nothing.
