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.
That sure will encourage work on environmental issues. /s
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 bit 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 think 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.
No it won’t
NO, it isn’t
you are talking about them. Therefore protest worked. Therefore it was a protest.
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.
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.
Fine you are right. Go do it
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.
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.
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.
Shit I am so sorry that there is only one news source on earth. The article does say the reason by the way.
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. 
Very well. Show me the legislation it will change and tell me when it will happen. It did work right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes there is no way to protest in France. No one in France has ever taken part in a demonstration complete with signs. Everyone knows that the French people just go gently into that good night when their government does something wrong. It isn’t like they have a literal holiday celebrating the storming of a jail.
Everyone heard that? The French never protest. All the million articles you have heard about strikes and demonstrations in France never occurred.
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.
Lmao no they didnt, it has been behind glass for almost 2 decades, facts dont care about your feelings.
The only legitimate forms of protest are ones that are easily ignored, right?
This is easily ignored. Everyone will forget about it in a few weeks and nothing will change
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
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Okay, amend my comment to read “throwing soup at paintings.” Any other changes needed?
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.
Are they?
Your reading comprehension is poor. This isnt about climate change. This is about food security.
… 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.
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.
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?
Random insult back atcha
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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.
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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?
We’re not the people they need to reach though. I don’t think either of us needs convincing that urgent action is needed on climate change, it’s our boomer parents, coworkers, etc. who need convincing. And if someone’s attempt at helping with that ends up making climate activists look like deranged vandals then please for the love of God stop trying to help.
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.