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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Your reading comprehension is poor. This isnt about climate change. This is about food security.
Random insult back atcha
… 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are they?
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.
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.
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?
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 but 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 thunk 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
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.
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.
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. 
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.
Lmao no they didnt, it has been behind glass for almost 2 decades, facts dont care about your feelings.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is soup the choice rather than dye, ink, or paint?
They’re bringing attention to food insecurity, so their method is… wasting food. Yea that checks out
Yeah that one can of soup in Paris would make such a massive difference to worldwide food insecurity lmao
There’s three types of protestors in the world:
-
Cause minimal, non serious disruption. Spread the message without pissing people off, because that’ll make people more receptive to joining you.
-
Cause serious disruptions, even if it pisses people off, because it brings attention to the issue makes it impossible to ignore.
-
Bring attention to an issue at all costs by any means necessary, even if it makes the issue worse or has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. Be an asshole to make people listen.
There’s a valid argument that without 2, people won’t take something seriously, and mild inconveniences are the whole point of nonviolent protest. It gets a bit morally grey when it would do something like prevent an ambulance from operating though. I don’t think anyone who normally waves that away would feel the same if it resulted in the death of a loved one.
And 3 is just clout chasers imo, like in this situation. I can’t take someone protesting food insecurity seriously if they’re wasting food to do so.
-
Or one of those laser “pointers” with crazy high power, 1 watt or higher?
Because they didn’t want to cause damage. The target was glass, not the painting.
Real reason: They’re demanding that France make assurances for access to food.
Fake reason: They’re Warhol fans.
Now I want to know if DeVinci had any rivalries with other artists that we could bring back.
They knew they couldn’t (probably didn’t want to) damage the painting itself. The Mona Lisa has been behind bullet proof glass since the mid 90s, so it wasnt a secret. So they chose something that was relevant to their cause and they probably (rightly) guessed that soup would make a headline when paint or dye has been done so many times before that it might not.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Footage posted on X captured the attack on Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece as well as the gasps of visitors and the cries of children apparently shocked by the incident.
Louvre staff scrambled quickly to erect black cloth screens around the painting and the protesters but failed to effectively block the view of the scene.
Riposte Alimentaire is part of the A22 umbrella movement of protest groups in 12 countries, which also includes Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
In a statement sent to AFP, it said the soup throwing marked the “start of a campaign of civil resistance with the clear demand … of the social security of sustainable food”.
Questions were being asked as to how the women managed to smuggle the soup into the Louvre, as strict bag controls at most major galleries are now normal practice due to numerous other attacks on paintings, including a 2022 mashed potato attack by Letzte Generation (Last Generation) activists on Claude Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks) at the Barberini gallery in Potsdam, Germany.
The original article contains 485 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It worked. Good for them, no damage was done and the news is talking about the issue
It’s doing more harm than good for the climate cause.
It’s a dumb action, and this is from someone that supports direct action. How people are talking about an action is critical: the context matters.
The first thing people are going to ask is “why did you do this?” and the answer needs to make sense. Throwing soup on an oil exec, painting their office, etc – those things make sense. They start a productive conversation.
“Vandalizing” a famous piece of art not even tangentially related to your cause is just going to make people think you’re an asshole, and unsurprisingly sets them against your cause.
Some of the most successful stunts of extinction rebellion over here were painting private jets orange, and my personal favourite declaring a golf course a nature reserve and planting all kinds of indigenous plants there.
Not even the pearl-clutching “but that’s property damage!” types tend to be really mad about that kind of stuff.
Yeah and I’m pretty sure the issue with climate change isn’t a lack of awareness…
Right? Raw shock value is only useful when something isn’t well known. Everyone knows about climate change and has a position.
Great, use “shock value”: but make a worthwhile statement with it too. The goal is to force people to confront an issue, not effortlessly write it off as a childish tantrum and ignore it.
Usually when this happens, the articles forget to mention the glass and the comments are all centered on how stupid the protestors are. Good to see an exception here.
Edit: Never mind. I scrolled down and it’s bad as it always was on reddit.
sigh
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
Anyone else think of the Mona Lisa case from Glass Onion?
Possibly why it was chosen?
The Mona Lisa is So Hot right now
Protesters did shit attention grabbing thing and no one even knows what it was for.
So I guess now regular people will have to put up with security theater
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.
If only there was some incredibly easy and simple way to find out what it was for
Why would I care it’s probably stupid, all these groups have childishly stupid goals like ‘why don’t we just not use oil, I’m sure no one ever though of that, right?’ and ‘force everyone to live the lifestyle I personally happen to prefer’
Their plan always overlooks the fact that total chaos would ensue if anyone ever tried what they’re demanding, if they had anything worthwhile to say they’d be saying it in the relevant places and people would be listening.
I guess if you presuppose the group’s intentions you never have to worry about what they actually say. Kinda like how I’m gonna presuppose that your second paragraph was just complaining about people being noisy or whatever instead of actually reading it.
Of course your going to ignore it, it’s the inconvenient reality ignored by everyone that wants to feel like a hero because they wished for an easy solution to difficult problems
idiots
This one weird trick makes everyone in the immediate vicinity instantly despise you! Click for more info!
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 nite worthy as that was not behind bullet proof glass
Climate change is an issue but this is not the best way.
What way would be better?
blockading freeways 👍
Actual propaganda, not this shock headline provoker
Why not both? Direct Action gets results.
