With surprise and bewilderment, you follow the news about ecovandals.
(A strange word, by the way, something like a gop-intellectual, but God bless him.) Well, this is when some activists stick themselves everywhere or do some other stupid things.
Either in a Vienna museum, a Klimt painting will be doused with oil, or in Melbourne they will stick to Picasso's "Massacre in Korea".
Either in London, Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" will be doused with tomato paste, then on Wednesday in Hamburg they glued themselves to the conductor's stand at the Philharmonic and delayed the concert.
All this in protest against the environment.
Well, that is for the environment.
Well, you understand.
There are two considerations here.
Firstly, before people, when they wanted to speak out against something, did not stick to the pictures, they painted them.
The same Picasso was outraged by the execution of peaceful Koreans by the American military - he wrote "Massacre in Korea".
And Goya wrote "The shooting of the rebels on the night of May 3, 1808", protesting against the occupation of Spain by Napoleon.
They did not let Repin sleep under the slavish working conditions of barge haulers on the Volga, and he wrote them.
All masterpieces, by the way.
People are watching and admiring.
Maybe someone even wonders what the artist had in mind, what he wanted to say, what to speak out against.
The paintings are, you know, not only about colors and composition, they are also about the idea.
In all recent times, the European and Russian humanistic traditions of art have protested: against oppression, against war, against inequality, against political repression, against fascism - with music, paintings, books.
It cannot be said that the struggle was so successful.
And the wars do not stop, and the world is full of oppression with political repressions (I’m not talking about inequality at all), and even fascism, condemned by all mankind, is returning, dressed in a suit in the color of democracy and freedom.
But you can’t call this fight completely senseless.
Nevertheless, for decades and centuries, the ideas of humanism gradually permeate human societies, the passionate sermons of Rabelais and Tolstoy, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, Beethoven and Shostakovich do not go to waste.
And so... And here, then, they came to a museum or to a philharmonic society (soon, apparently, their hands will reach bookstores), smeared their hands with glue, stuck.
We are waiting for the cursing guards to come and unstick.
We rejoice at what good fellows we are: we spoke out!
We don't care!
Ooty little things, take a candy.
Big uncles in the offices of oil companies and chemical industries let out a mean bourgeois tear: what good kids!
Artists of the past were banned, exiled to the end of the world and killed.
The current activists, I have no doubt, are given grants.
And here we come to the second point.
The great humanistic artists of the past remained in the memory of generations with their masterpieces because they did not just protest like “No to environmental pollution!”.
Polluting the environment is bad!
Try to avoid as much as possible!
Not at all.
With all the power of their mind, anxiety and talent, they tried to understand what was the matter, why it was happening this way and not otherwise, what was the root of the evil they were fighting.
What level of understanding do Hamburg glue lovers offer us?
"The German government refuses to take action..." Seriously?
And that's what it's all about?
Why is he refusing?
Where did such a government come from?
Who does this government represent, who sponsors it, who is behind it?
Or maybe it's just stupidity?
For sure.
You just need to stick yourself to the conductor's stand and tell everyone: they say, this way and that, everything is, in principle, good, only we need to take measures to protect the environment.
And then all these people in the hall slap their foreheads: well, for sure, they completely forgot!
Or is it not about the forgetful government, but about the system itself, where the government represents only the interests of big business, and often not its own, but foreign?
Where big business has only one goal: to earn more tomorrow than today, and the day after tomorrow, at least the grass will not grow.
After all, people who throw away plastic bags instead of washing, drying and reusing them are not the people who pollute the planet.
These are only in a small, insignificant part.
The lion's share of pollution comes from large-scale industries, and their owners wanted to spit on any ecology, only market capitalization is important there.
True, for change from dinner, you can hire some activists or even current artists to shout something like this in a general sense: to play off steam in society a little, and if you're lucky, to lower the capitalization of a competitor.
The main thing is that without specifics and that lovers of academic music who come to listen to Beethoven feel guilty.
The system has worked and will continue to work.
Pity the giants of the past.
Not such dwarfs they would like to see on their shoulders.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.