I’m sitting at my desk, watching footage of two people throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, and I don’t really know how to feel. On Sunday at the Louvre, environmental protesters from the group Riposte Alimentaire targeted the world’s most famous painted smile—an attempted Heinz-a Lisa—in order to highlight France’s groaning agricultural system and its citizens’ fundamental right to food. The orange liquid vs. precious masterpiece vignette echoes the anarchic antics of Just Stop Oil, whose soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, whose hands were glued to the protective glass of a Da Vinci, and whose summer saw the weaponization of a Wimbledon jigsaw on Centre Court.
What I feel, when I see the orange spurts, is a sense of annoyance. Like, why make such a scene in such a public place? The attention-seeking jumps out. I do realize that’s the point, yet I can feel my eyes rolling at the trivial frivolity. Someone tell Just Stop Oil that I get it.
We scroll through a feed designed for distraction. Julia at Jacquemus or Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl logistics, Mean Girls or girl dinner, Pharrell’s cowboys or The Row’s weird-ass slippers are all welcome diversions from that nagging feeling at our periphery. They are relatively frothy moments that transport us away from the amassing lasagna layers of worsening news—the oozing dread, the glistening bad vibes. We’re living through what is alarmingly feeling like a globe in multidimensional crisis, from the planet warming at a terrifying rate, to the equally upsetting Make America Great Again reprise, to the constant evidence of the erosion of human empathy, to the mass conflicts of Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza War (I don’t want to be glib about either of these; just hoping we can all see their enormity without me having to explain either here).
When the world seems particularly negative, it’s natural to want escapism—into the pillowy-soft comfort of our feeds or boxsets or books. Known securities defang the lack of control we have at our extremities. But whenever I’m trying to forget my worries over a few fail vids, environmental stunts jolt me back to reality in a confronting and uncomfortable way.
I’ve been trying to work out why they wind everyone up so much, how they manage to get so far under everybody’s skin. These acts of damage aren’t permanent—we’re often a vacuum and damp sponge away from restored equilibrium—and because of that, they can often feel like irritations, an annoying interlude at an otherwise normally functioning gallery in France.
I thought I was irritated because reversible stunts are futile—changing nothing and easily rectified—but I’m actually irritated because, well, the truth hurts. These reversible violences annihilate nothing; they just force me to recognize the world beyond my immediate vicinity.
It doesn’t have to be overwhelming to know the planet is in bad shape. It’s important to be able to hold two truths at once—the world is complex and conflicting and you need to look after yourself. You don’t have to choose one or the other. It’s good to remember that no amount of distraction can edge us toward a brighter or safer world, but it’s also important to take breaks from the increasing emotional weight of a planet on fire. There’s a balance between shutting it all out and taking it all onboard. This week’s Tomato da Vinci (yes, I know it was pumpkin soup) was annoying, and yet it achieved the desired goal; it was an attention-seeking strategy that dialed our attention back toward pressing issues. I just hope we can stay focused for long enough to exact permanent change.