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Last week, two protesters affiliated with Declare Emergency, a climate activist group, walked into the National Gallery of Art and made their way to Edgar Degas’s bronze sculpture, “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” a masterpiece that dates from 1881. They plastered their hands with red and black paint and spread them all over the sculpture’s clear case until they were arrested, reveling in the stunt they created.
The incident was only the latest in one of the most grating and counterproductive forms of environmental activism: targeting cherished works of art in prominent museums to stir public outrage and, in theory, inspire urgent action on climate change. But this kind of “protest” is no protest at all. It is vandalism plain and simple, and perhaps more than anything, it harms the cause these “protesters” claim to care so much about.
Over the past year, vandalizing art on display has become a regular — and increasingly frequent — occurrence. In May 2022, a man smeared cake on the protective glass that covers the world’s most famous painting, the “Mona Lisa,” which hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. In October 2022, activists affiliated with the group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup onto Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery. Less than two weeks later, the same thing happened at Potsdam’s Museum Barberini, where demonstrators linked to a similar group threw mashed potatoes on Claude Monet’s “Les Meules.”
“We need our leaders to take serious action, to tell us the truth about what is happening with the climate!” one of the U.S. National Gallery protesters yelled, performing for an audience of smartphone cameras. This is where the demonstrators’ message becomes particularly incoherent. The Biden administration is actively pushing aggressive climate measures, including new rules designed to slash harmful pollution from coal power plants, raise fuel economy standards for vehicles and reduce automobile pollution. In fact, the administration announced last month new standards that would require as much as two-thirds of new vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2032. That’s about a tenfold increase over the current percentage.
Is there more to be done? Absolutely. But as these demonstrators’ antics result in priceless works of art being withdrawn from public view to be assessed for damage, all they ultimately accomplish is removing some of the purest forms of beauty from the world they claim to care so much about saving.
Anyone truly invested in protecting the planet would also care about protecting the treasures of human civilization as well as future treasures yet to be produced.
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Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Opinion Editor David Shipley; Deputy Opinion Editor Karen Tumulty; Associate Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg (national politics and policy); Lee Hockstader (European affairs, based in Paris); David E. Hoffman (global public health); James Hohmann (domestic policy and electoral politics, including the White House, Congress and governors); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Associate Editor Ruth Marcus; Mili Mitra (public policy solutions and audience development); Keith B. Richburg (foreign affairs); and Molly Roberts (technology and society).
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