Various protesters continue to attack paintings at the National Gallery, which most people will agree isn’t a nice thing to do.
However, if one is so inclined, the National Gallery offers a wide choice of possible paintings to slash, cover with a photograph or throw some soup on. As a keen student of statistical probabilities, I’d think that, should targets be chosen at random, Rembrandt or Velázquez would be as likely to be vandalised as Van Gogh.
However, just hours after two Just Stop Oilers were sent to prison for attacking Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, last week three of their comrades threw some more soup at two versions of the same painting, one from 1888, the other from 1889.
Now, the National Gallery exhibits 2,300 paintings, most of them masterpieces. Though I’m not an expert on soup-throwing, I’d still suggest that any one of them should do as an outlet for a bubbling social conscience. Moreover, a red splodge on, say, the bare bottom of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus could serve the additional purpose of protesting against the objectivisation of women.
Another can of Campbell’s tossed at the face of any religious personage, say Zurbarán’s St Francis, could also act a multi-purpose protest against oil (in this case the paint), religion and Israel as a throwback to the Old Testament. This last one is a bit far-fetched, but it can do at a stretch. Just let your imagination run free.
Such exciting possibilities, and still youngsters from Just Stop Oil and, this time, Youth Demand, unerringly chart a path to those Sunflowers time after time. This takes any possibility of random choice out of consideration, says the statistician in me. What we are witnessing is a clear bias, and I must get to the bottom of it.
Could it be that Israel’s stroppiness caused by colonial capitalism and also warm weather caused by my diesel BMW are mere pretexts? What if – and please don’t discard this possibility out of hand – those youngsters are merely making an aesthetic statement?
It’s just possible that their tastes in art are as retrograde as mine, and they believe – as I do – that all those post-Impressionists (not to mention the multitude of other -ists) owe much of their renown to extra-artistic factors.
Specifically Van Gogh is a fine painter, but that’s not why he fetches higher auction prices than the other, better, artists I’ve mentioned. I suspect that, should he have retained a full complement of facial features, Van Gogh wouldn’t be outselling Botticelli or Cranach.
(Years ago I dropped into Christie’s to look at their pre-auction display. The reserve price of a beautiful – and large – Cranach painting was one-fifth of the cheapest post-Impressionist on offer.)
At some time in the second half of the 19th century, art veered off the traditional path of Western culture. In fact, it used that path for a doormat. New artists didn’t care about expressing aesthetically the spiritual essence of our civilisation – in fact, they explicitly rebelled against it.
Since wiping collective feet on Western tradition has since become a sine qua non, modernity detects a kindred spirit in Van Gogh, and a spot of self-mutilation doesn’t go amiss either. Alcoholism, drug addiction or ideally suicide also add to artists’ mass appeal. Dying of old age in one’s own bed is oh-h-h so yesterday.
These young lovers of canned soup must feel the way I do… No, forget that. You are right: my explanation is too off-the-wall. Having said that, another couple of Youth Demanders yesterday pasted a photograph of a crying Muslim woman on a painting by Picasso, not, say, Vermeer.
Again, aesthetically speaking, some may think the photograph was an improvement on the original content of that frame. But enough aesthetics – let’s talk politics.
Youth Demand insist that all arms supplies to Israel be summarily stopped and, in a seemingly unrelated fashion, that all new oil and gas production be cancelled. ‘Seemingly’ is the operative word there because different protests aren’t really unrelated. They are bound together by hatred of the West – not just of what it has become but what it has been from inception.
Lest you may think it’s only Muslims who wish to annihilate Israel and everyone in it (sorry, I mean to free Palestine), one of the two photo-pasters was a Jew by the unlikely name of Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld.
This 21-year-old is a politics and international relations student, which these days is another way of saying an impassioned hater of everything the West has ever stood for. To prove that, Monday said this on Wednesday: “I’m taking action because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza. I want the world to know this isn’t in the Jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine.”
Okay, Monday, you’re off the hook. No blood guilt for you, mate. As a Jew, you see nothing wrong in millions of other Jews living every day in fear of extinction under a rain of rockets falling on their heads. But let’s agree on what “a free Palestine” means, the other side of sloganeering.
Happy to help with the translation: it’s fully synonymous with “from the river to the sea”, which in its turn is synonymous with exterminating 7.2 million Israeli Jews, going Hitler a million better.
Perhaps neither aesthetics nor politics has much to do with this. It may be just the anomie of youthful rebelliousness coming to a boiling point and bursting out.
However, such fervour diminishes with age. My friend Tony, who worked for years as prison psychiatrist, observed that inmates who stay inside past their 35th birthday hardly ever reoffend. The solution offers itself: all those firebrands should be sentenced to a term equal to 35 minus their age.
Monday-Malachi should thus be looking at 14 years in the slammer. The humanist in me thinks that may be too steep for disfiguring a painting, especially a modern one. But then I think of bono publico, and the humanist falls silent.