I feel like a van Gogh painting was a poorly picked target but also think van Gogh himself would approve.

  • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Like, don't get me wrong, art should be openly and freely accessible and we need full communism ASAP, but this feels fucking dumb on several levels.

    1. It's very performative, I'm assuming there's fucking glass so they didn't actually get it on the painting (correct me if I'm wrong!), just a frame.
    2. If you're protesting emissions and extraction, there's gotta be something better as a target to throw soup on.
    3. Art is one of the few things that at least tries to resist capital (not that it always does, and late capital has been especially effective at incorporating art into its ideology). Still, as a direction of productive activity towards beauty rather than accumulation, it's definitely a strange target (though, there's a bit from Hannah Arendt that notes all art is extractive, since you need trees for paper, etc. She talks about how "the price of art is life itself")

    Just really dumb, since this will just turn bourgeois :LIB: s away from the project, and I don't see any way this rallies the proletariat.

    Very much feels like an op as others in the thread have said.

    • BatCountryMusicFan [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I’m assuming there’s fucking glass so they didn’t actually get it on the painting (correct me if I’m wrong!), just a frame.

      Yep. The London National Gallery is saying the painting is glazed, so the only damage the soup did was to the frame.

    • Kookie [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I dunno, I saw that self-portrait of Van Gogh in Chicago and there wasn't any glass or anything. There's a docent watching the room but that's it. I could have just taken out a dremel and rearranged his face until he looked like that portrait of Jesus that that woman "fixed" in Spain.

      • notceps [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        They probably show off a replica, have the 'real' in some vault and just use copies because why wouldn't you

        • 4zi [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Depends on the museum. Big tourists centers, like the national gallery where the Van Gogh painting is, I doubt would ever do that because people travel from across the world to go there. I’ve definitely seen pieces labeled as ‘replica’ or ‘reproduction’ on the card next to it at smaller private collection museums.

          Interestingly enough, if you read the cnn article for this Van Gogh painting incident, they mention that the painting is glazed and therefore there’s no actual damage to it