Eighteen months later, Anna Holland still can’t stand the smell of tomato soup.
“I can’t eat canned food anymore,” said the environmental activist who shocked the art world – and much of the planet – in October 2022 when he hurled a can at Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London.
Holland and fellow protester Phoebe Plummer carefully chose Heinz’s bright orange colour – the same colour used by international brands – to symbolise the “hope for a brighter future” depicted in the post-impressionist painting.
“The reason we used soup specifically is to get media attention,” says Just Stop Oil’s Holland. “It keeps the conversation going. It gets people asking questions like, ‘Why soup?'”
The extravagant act captured more global attention than any previous climate change action, and solidified the movement’s resolve against art vandalism, a form of protest first popularized by suffragists in the early 20th century, when Mary Richardson slashed a Velázquez painting with a meat cleaver at London’s National Gallery in 1914, but quickly fell out of fashion.
I’m back now.
In 2022 alone, protesters have hurled black slime at the wall, mashed potatoes at the wall, and cake at the wall. They’ve nailed priceless works worth an introductory art history course from to. And even they haven’t been spared. Further assaults followed in 2023 and 2024, including the aforementioned Velázquez and Just Stop Oil’s Orange Dye, a mysterious 5,000-year-old monument in England, attacked with a hammer.
A movement long defined by shaggy hippies camped out in old-growth redwoods and Indigenous protesters chained to construction equipment has been reimagined as a couple of non-binary college students brandishing cans of tomato soup.
Equally unexpected was the success of environmentalists in maintaining their monopoly on museums, despite combative public protests that spilled into the mainstream.
“We knew it was going to be significant, but we never expected it to be this big,” Holland said. “In a way, because we advocated for this strategy,[the public]associated it with the climate movement.”
All of this raises the question: What is the message being conveyed by the media?
“We’ve been asked many times, ‘Why did activists target paintings? Why didn’t they target fossil fuel infrastructure?'” said Margaret Klein Salamon, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Confronting the Climate Emergency: How to Change Your World with Climate Truth.
“This is a very frustrating complaint because Just Stop Oil has been arrested hundreds of times for blocking fossil fuel facilities and barely got any coverage,” she said. “So they threw soup.” (The Climate Emergency Fund is a Just Stop Oil affiliate.)
In Klein-Salamon’s view, and many others’, the target is irrelevant: attention is the intent, outrage the goal. Pushed further, some would argue that the outrage over the defacement, compared to an inanimate work of canvas and pigment, speaks volumes about our culture’s disregard for the planet.
“You’re risking jail time because the government values the painting and the frame more than your life and all of our lives,” Holland explained. “This shows that the government values material things more than human life.”
But that doesn’t mean the arts don’t have a role to play in the climate crisis. At least, the art world believes so: grant-making organisations are now explicitly funding climate-focused works, and several prominent museums have made public commitments to exhibit such works.
“The climate crisis is something that’s really frightening to me, and it’s also something that fascinates me as a subject,” said Josh Klein, whose new exhibition, “Josh Klein: Climate Change,” opened in June at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. “There’s very little contemporary art that deals with the climate crisis, which is one of the reasons I started making this work.”
The works in question, a “science fiction installation collection,” encompasses roughly five years’ worth of material, and were supported in part by the MoCA Environmental Council, a first-of-its-kind initiative to transform museum operations and support artists who address the climate crisis through their work.
“We have come to appreciate artists who address the issue of climate change,” said curator Rebecca Rowley. “We believe most visitors will immediately identify with the themes of this exhibition and leave thinking about what we can collectively do to avoid this future.”
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of immersive sculptures called “Personal Responsibility”, comprised of tents and other makeshift shelters in which projections of actors playing their “residents”, future climate refugees, narrate their experiences of the impending disaster.
“I’m not here to tell people there’s a climate crisis; that’s the role of a scientist,” Klein said. “What I can do as an artist is help bring it closer to people.”
On this point, Holland agrees.
“The protests are driven by the arts,” they say. “One reason the climate change movement isn’t getting bigger is because it’s easy to connect intellectually to the climate crisis but not so easy to connect emotionally.”
“That’s the power of art,” Holland continued. “It’s the first step to taking action.”
For some, the natural conclusion of this debate is that museums and other cultural institutions should not be made podiums in the debate, but rather be invited out of it.
“I think protest is an important form of civic engagement, and I want to respect that,” said Devon Vella of the Bay Area-based group Working for Arts Sustainability, “but when it comes to climate activism, there’s also a lot of work that needs to be done in local communities” that is often less glamorous and more sustained than a brief, symbolic attack on a beloved painting or sculpture.
Not surprisingly, the industry group, the Association of Art Museum Directors, takes an even more scathing stance.
“Attacks on works of art cannot be justified, regardless of whether their motivation is political, religious or cultural,” the group said in a statement in response to the Soup protests. “Such protests are misguided and the ends do not justify the means.”
Equally unsurprisingly, activists say that’s an excuse.
“Nobody wants to be shaken awake. It’s very unpleasant, and people get very angry at the activists,” Klein Salamon said. “But normal life, including sports, theater, the arts, etc., is actually very dangerous at the moment.”
In this worldview, art about the climate crisis is at best irrelevant, and at worst counterproductive to the direct action needed to stop it.
“I want to distinguish between participating in climate protests and what most people still think of as climate action, like recycling Amazon packaging or bringing a reusable bag to Whole Foods,” activist Klein Salamon continued. “What we should be aiming for is true mass protest, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, occupying buildings, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience.”
Artist Josh Klein shares a similar view.
“There’s a shift in the blame game,” he said of the current debate over climate change. “Instead of saying, ‘We need structural change, we need government change, we need a change in our political system,’ we’re saying, ‘We need to change the world.’ your “It’s our personal responsibility to spend hours sorting and recycling plastics.”
While there is broad agreement that artists and museum-goers are rising to the crisis, some argue that the arts industry itself is complicit in it.
“Throughout history, art has been intrinsically linked to wealth and finance,” said the Los Angeles-based artist, whose paintings of Los Angeles highlight destruction and decay, “(But) artists and activists often overlap. Artists are typically the ones who identify with the spirit of protest, so it’s kind of a double-edged sword.”
Though their methods may differ, activists and artists both agree that they are engaged in an arms race to keep public attention on the emergency unfolding before their eyes.
And the soup may finally be running out of steam.
Even Klein Salamon acknowledges that, 18 months after “Sunflowers,” the impact of political vandalism may be fading. Nothing shocks forever — not “The Rite of Spring,” not “Piss Christ,” not “Pink Flamingos.” Protests, like the artworks they destroy, must evolve with the times.
“Even if it works once, twice or three times, it doesn’t work forever,” Klein Salamon said. “It wears off.”
