Last week, a group of U.K. museum directors including the National Gallery’s Gabriele Finaldi, the V&A’s Tristram Hunt, and the British Museum’s Nicholas Cullinan, published an open letter imploring climate protestors to stop targeting their art. Activist group Just Stop Oil has now responded. “Let’s meet next week,” it suggested. “We’ll leave the soup at home.”
In their letter published on October 11, the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC) wrote “these attacks have to stop.” They were referring, of course, to the spate of climate protests that have attracted widespread media attention by targeting famous artworks in major museums.
Most recently, soup was thrown over two of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings at an exhibition dedicated to the Post-Impressionist at the National Gallery in London, a response to the hefty prison sentences handed down to two activists who had targeted one of the same paintings two years prior. As the NMDC noted, the National Gallery has been the site of five separate attacks since July 2022, with John Constable’s The Haywain and Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus also targeted.
The letter said these demonstrations “are hugely damaging to the reputation of U.K. museums and cause enormous stress for colleagues at every level of an organization, along with visitors who now no longer feel safe visiting the nation’s finest museums and galleries.”
Just Stop Oil target Turner painting at Manchester Art Gallery in 2022. Photo courtesy of Just Stop Oil.
“With each attack we are forced to consider putting more barriers between the people and their artworks to preserve these fragile objects for future generations,” the authors added. “The world is currently in a very dark place, but these demonstrations now need to be taken away from our museums and galleries so that they can continue to provide light and solace to all.”
Publishing an open letter in response, the groups Just Stop Oil and Youth Demand said: “These are the actions of a public who are scared, angry, but unwilling to give up. People unafraid to use the cultural power of their national institutions when those institutions fail to do so.”
“We have some ideas on how you can mitigate this,” the letter promised, before offering to meet up at the National Gallery. “We have action takers who have risked liberty to call for an end to oil and gas that would love to speak with Dr. Gabriele Finaldi.”
The authors also critiqued the NMDC’s letter for failing to “acknowledge the climate emergency,” noting that 2023 was the hottest year on record. Experts predict that, after heat waves this past summer, 2024’s temperatures will set a new record.
“Today you take issue with soup and stickers, but tomorrow you will contend with rising waters in the [River] Thames and deadly heat waves in the city,” it said. “People disrupt museum and gallery spaces to break the illusion that everything is fine.”
The letter stated that its campaign, launched in 2022, to demand an end to new oil and gas licenses in the U.K. has been successful, referring to plans recently announced by the new Labour government. Just Stop Oil promised to continue with the next phase of its campaign, which is to demand a total end to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
The NMDC represents the leaders of the U.K.’s national collections and major regional museums. It has been reached for comment but did not respond by publication time. The open letter was published by The Art Newspaper.