Some are criticizing the move as misguided. For starters, van Gogh used linseed oil paints—not the crude stuff produced by the oil and gas industry today, said one Twitter user. “I’m struggling to understand why destroying a painting of sunflowers done by Van Gogh, an impoverished man who was marginalized in his local community due to his mental illness, is the right target to make a statement about how awful the oil industry is,” they continued. Another wrote, succinctly, “the fuck did van gogh do to hurt the climate.”
Others tried to make sense of it. “Just so we all know, the Van Gogh painting remains unharmed by the evil soup, as it was protected by glass,” wrote one Twitter user. “But the painting, and painters, and all art and artists will not be protected from climate change, which I suppose is, or was, the point.”
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Some shared the activists’ frustrations. “Thoroughly sick of #VanGogh discourse already,” tweeted one user, citing famine deaths and other climate change-induced disasters they say are far more newsworthy.
Most people, of course, are just having a laugh. “Deirdre Barlow has thrown trifle on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery,” tweeted one user, referring to a character from the British soap opera Coronation Street. Another wrote, “It’s a shame Van Gogh died, he would have loved Heinz Tomato Soup.”