'Last Generation' protests: The Resistance's regulars' table

Images by van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer and Toulouse-Lautrec have been showered with soup and other foods.

Allegedly, the protest movement "Last Generation" wants to put pressure on politicians to counteract global warming more quickly.

They stick to museum walls, picture frames, luxury limousines and streets.

Or they spray paint on buildings.

This is annoying, keeps the police, security and cleaning services busy, leads to reports of property damage and trespassing and to reports.

However, it is incomprehensible to what extent their actions exert the alleged pressure.

Do the protesters seriously think that there is someone in the coalition who, through Monet and mashed potatoes, will come to their senses and now resolutely tackle taxing aviation fuel or a speed limit?

Even “decarbonize” traffic, as is being demanded?

For the time being, neither dried up rivers nor melting glaciers and floods were enough.

And now a few aggressive gestures in museums or car showrooms are supposed to do it.

How conceited do you have to be to believe that?

And how unwilling to face the difficulties of ecological politics?

As if all that was needed was a change in consciousness triggered by symbolic deeds to set it in motion.

One gets the primal feeling of having acted and even "resisting" even when noise is the only consequence of the action.

Idealism was once more realistic.

Foolish Defense

Even more foolish than the protesters are their defenders.

Line of Defense Number One: Climate change is so catastrophic, how can you complain about just a little bit of soup in pictures?

Not only could one then no longer complain about a breach of the law masquerading as a sign in the struggle for nature.

The argument also opens the spectrum of protest action in all directions.

The supreme end justifies every means, even the useless.

If Klee and Picasso, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, Rothko and Warhol will soon be doused with stew and ecologically nothing will happen, to what level of escalation of protest do the beating hearts then want to go?

The glassed pictures would not be damaged, it is said.

According to their own statements, the London throwers of tomato soup would have accepted that too.

A restorer at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam explained that it was all thanks to a piece of felt that the protesters didn't even know about.

If the canvas had gotten wet on the back, parts of the paint layer would have flaked off.

The actions are not purely symbolic, material consequences are accepted.

In Berlin, emergency services have just arrived late at the scene of an accident with a seriously injured person due to the road blockades.

The "Last Generation" shares dismay.

It would be better if she switched on her mind first.

Line of defense number three is particularly grotesque.

Here a deep hermeneutics reports that squeezes sense out of every nonsense.

The actions themselves are transfigured into artistic ones, and from the point of view of art, of course, art is allowed to do almost anything.

Works of art, is given as the significance of the attacks, would themselves become threatened cultural assets if nothing were done to combat climate change.

Trivial: If the whole earth burns, the museum burns too.

But why do we have to attack the works of art now?

Does the earth then burn less?

Less fast?

The activists, it is said, take advantage of the respect that humanity has for art and express it themselves.

I beg your pardon?

In what culture can respect be expressed

by dousing the object of respect with soup?

And was it respect for engineering achievements that prompted the activists to throw paint at luxury cars?

Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", the London activists said very clearly at this point, were mistakenly admired.

So why did they get more attention than actual sunflowers in the first place?

These are sayings from the resistance's regulars' table, on the verge of describing museums as a case of wasting taxpayers' money.

In this respect, it is sheer sarcasm to say that the activists have accepted the museums' invitation to engage in dialogue and – the most trite phrase – are making the works of art speak.

But what exactly is Monet saying through the mashed potatoes and the shouting of the activists to the sensitive defender of the riot?

We don't find out.

Possibly because nothing has ever been made to speak by throwing mashed potatoes at it.