In each case, it involved two activists who entered a museum and smeared one of their hands with glue before clinging to a painting. On the floor of a museum in Manchester they wrote the words ‘Just Stop Oil’. In another museum, activists wrote ‘no new oil’. The group is calling on the art world to join the ‘civil resistance’ against climate change.
In a Twitter video, a Manchester Art Gallery employee tells her colleagues via walkie-talkie to call the police. One of the activists then gave visitors a quiz about climate predictions in scientific journals. This caused enormous frustration for the museum employee, who then addresses the activist: “I am not interested in this story. No no no no! You destroyed our property. I don’t want to hear another word from you. So please have some respect and shut up. Let it be a silent protest.”
Destruction
The Manchester police report to MailOnline that the two activists have been arrested for vandalism after the incident that lasted an hour to an hour and a half. On Wednesday, two activists from the same organization glued themselves to a 19th-century painting in a Glasgow museum. Thursday it hit the Courtauld Gallery in London. There a Van Gogh had to pay for it.
It is not the first time that the organization has made itself heard; previously oil terminals and British government buildings had to suffer. The action group says the British government’s choice to drill for more oil is incomprehensible, because it ‘is ruining the future of the younger generation’. She argues that it is almost too late to take action and do something about climate change, but why ancient art suffers is not clear.