“I respect what the activist are fighting for, but there are many more ways to portray their points instead of damaging artwork.”
A new form of protest has been found, the art attack protest. People have been vandalising famous artists artwork for attention while protesting. There are many other ways people can protest rather than destroying someone else’s hard work. One should think of how the artist would feel if they destroyed his or her artwork because once it’s done it can’t be undone.
Many artworks have been destroyed in recent past, an activist from Just Stop Oil threw canned soup on the sunflower painting by the artist Vincent Van Gogh. A similar incident took place by a climate activist throwing mashed potatoes on a painting, Les Meules by Monet. This is disrespectful to the artists and their hard work and can have a negative affect on the art world.
I read about an An artist Paresh Maity who said “Art is life, life is art.”
He adds that, “Every civilisation exists with art and culture. Whether it’s the Indus Valley, Harappa, the Greek or the Mesopotamian civilisation, they all existed with art and culture, and art is for everybody. So destroying art is like destroying a civilisation! Destroying art is like destroying a sensitive part of our history . Instead these works should be preserved.”
You can see how deeply he is connected to art and that the vandalism of art had affected him. He is not the only one, these sentiments have been echoed by many artists like him.
This got me thinking and so I interviewed a painter and video artist Mr. Tahseen. To get an artist’s voice I asked him what were his thoughts on the vandalism of art in the name of social activism? He stated that “I don’t support these acts of attack on the artwork as the painting or the painter is not related to these issues that the people are protesting for, in my opinion this is a form of illogical violence.”
He went on to explain, “If I don’t have food I won’t go to other people who have food and throw stones at their house, I’ll try to find the root cause and take relevant measures to correct the situation. The reason why these art works are being targeted is because of the price and popularity of the artist. These acts are basically desperate attempts to raise an alarm or a siren and bring the issues like climate change from subconscious to conscious level of people.”
It’s an issue and needs to be worked upon. I enquired if there were any solutions towards this, to which he replied that the art can be used as a medium to bring the issues from subconscious to conscious level of people. He gave an example about various artists of FICA collaborating to highlight the use of harmful chemicals for agriculture practices through public art work and performing art.
His last words were: “Protest is to alarm, not to harm.”
By Avantika
Team three team task