SThey find art “beautiful and valuable”, “priceless”, “one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization”, say the people who have seen a van Gogh in London, a Monet in Potsdam and now on Thursday a Vermeer in The Hague with tomato soup and respectively Mashed potatoes edits (a Warhol was originally intended for the tomato soup, an editor told Frieze art magazine: because of the meta effect).
Their action was about awakening the protective instinct for these “unique items” and then transferring them to the endangered planet. So, as it says with appropriate solemnity in a now-disappeared text on The Last Generation’s website, “they stopped in front of Monet’s ‘Les Meules’ (Eng.: haystacks) and threw mashed potatoes at the table with heavy hearts but determination art treasure”.
This insurance is not very credible. The activists’ sign of recognition, the self-sticking, is otherwise mainly used on motorways and expressways, in Porsche pavilions and transport ministries, i.e. in areas of application of fossil fuels that are probably not supposed to be passed off as valuable; and Bayern Munich’s soccer goal post, which failed to be glued on, should only be regarded as a limited achievement of civilization.
Rather, the common denominator of all these sticky surfaces is that they symbolize adjusting to the provisional, which could previously have been considered normal, but now, in the face of definitive catastrophe, loses its innocence. It’s as if the people who are stuck there want to call out to us: Why are you still driving to work, watching football, going to the museum, as if nothing happened?
Civilization as Deception
It is such routines of everyday life that, to those who want to face the catastrophe directly and exclusively, seem like a Potemkin village with which one deceives oneself about the reality of the abyss beyond. When the “Last Generation” asks, “Which is worth more, art or life?” a decision is demanded. One should recognize civilization as at least a potential deception in order to be able to devote oneself entirely to the one and only important thing.
The question is, however, whether this is not an illusion on his part. Whether man, as a cultural being with all his penultimate feelings, thoughts, actions and, yes, also works of art, can not get the strength to face something as monstrous as climate change. More so than if he were condemned to face the snake unprotected like a rabbit all the time.
On the other hand, the American writer Walker Percy once described in the novel “The Idiot of the South” how even in the greatest museum, the masterpieces exhibited there can become invisible – made to disappear by the “gluttonous particles” of cultural routines. And then Percy told how unexpectedly a skylight falls down into the museum room. Everyone present escapes with the horror, but in the rising dust the novel’s hero “accidentally catches a glimpse of a picture of Velázquez through under his arm: “It shone like a jewel.” It is not impossible that it dem Monet, once the horror is over and the mashed potatoes wiped away, the same thing happens: that you suddenly really see him again. But of course that would be a completely unintended side effect and no justification for the ignorance of the act.
