🖼️ Climate protestors glued to paintings come to Spanish museums
Their media campaign is working very well. They generate headlines all over the world and the paintings are not damaged.
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🌍 Climate protestors sticking themselves to paintings..
In recent months, climate protestors have stuck themselves with glue to and/or thrown food at Van Gogh’s The Sower in Rome, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Paris, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in The Hague. The two Belgian activists who stuck themselves to Vermeer’s painting have just been jailed for a month.
💃 Today it came to Spain…
With so many museums and paintings, it was only a question of time before the new protest fashion arrived in Spain and that happened this morning at Madrid’s El Prado museum, where two activists from Plant Future glued themselves to Goya’s Las Majas and painted “1.5ºC” on the wall. The group posted on Twitter that “We need change now. We need a #PlantFuture”.
👮♂️ Both girls arrested
Plant Future said on its Twitter account that both girls, Sam and Alba, had been arrested by the police, and that was confirmed to me by the Prado museum this evening by phone. The museum also confirmed that, just like at the other European museums affected, neither of the Goya paintings has suffered any damage. It’s just a bit of glue on the frames. “They have been arrested for defending life”, said a tweet from the group: “In the meantime, the chairman of [ham company] @ElPozoAlimenta and the CEO of [energy company] @Repsol keep destroying our planet”.
📷 Art, media and news
The female attendant in the video managed to instantly define news in the middle of an art climate protest during the 50-second clip. "Don’t take photos, don’t take photos! […] STOP RECORDING RIGHT NOW..! [...] It's not news […] you are recording and we don’t want you to record". News, of course, being some event of public interest that someone with some power somewhere would rather you not see or hear about because it makes them look bad.
💬 Comment
For the moment, as far as I can see, none of the old paintings in any of the countries has been damaged. The young activists want to draw attention to climate change and have found a new and very media and social-media friendly way of doing that. Each generation protests in different ways about what it cares about and getting arrested for an afternoon is part of that rite of passage. They are generating headlines all around the world every time it happens, so from a media perspective their campaign is working. If none of the works have been damaged, it would not appear that is the intent of the protestors, otherwise they would use a more destructive technique. They are generating images that invite comment and reflection on life in places full of images that invite comment and reflection on life.
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