What’s Happening: Two activists flung tomato soup over a Van Gogh painting at London’s National Gallery last week, the latest in a spate of disruptive protests seeking to end reliance on fossil fuels in the U.K. The brazen tactics are getting attention, but are they actually moving the needle toward environmental protection?

The Download: Last week, chaos erupted at London’s National Gallery as two young protesters suddenly hurled tins of Heinz cream of tomato soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s beloved Sunflowers. As the viscous liquid dripped down the painting’s glazing, the duo—two members of Just Stop Oil, an activist group that aims to stop gas and oil extraction in the U.K.—smeared their hands with glue and stuck themselves to a wall. In an impassioned speech, they questioned if visitors “are more concerned about the protection of a painting, or the protection of our planet and people?” (The painting was protected by glass and overall unharmed.)

Footage of the incident went viral, achieving what the activists (who were both arrested) originally intended. Disruptive protests have become common in Europe and the U.K., with the goal of putting psychological pressure on governments to respond more quickly to environmental calamity and cultural institutions to divest from sponsorships by oil companies like BP and Shell.

Protesters have started gluing their hands to the canvases of masterpieces, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper at the Royal Academy and Van Gogh’s Peach Trees in Blossom at Courtauld Gallery in London. There’s a shock factor to seeing tomato soup splash all over an $84 million painting, but damaging art isn’t the point—the main strategy involves garnering publicity, and bizarre antics beyond typical “glue-ins” are a surefire way to make headlines.

Disruptive protests are nothing new. Demonstrators have used museums as props for nonviolent activism for more than a century, an early example being Mary Richardson slashing a Diego Velázquez nude at London’s National Gallery with a hatchet to protest the imprisonment of suffragette pioneer Emmeline Pankhurst. Richardson went on to inspire the Extinction Rebellion, an environmental movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action. Its members don’t limit themselves to museums—they’re known to climb on the roofs of commuter trains or block entire parts of London, such as roads and bridges around Parliament, much to the dismay of former prime minister Boris Johnson.

Besides shedding light on the climate crisis, activists have also put pressure on museums to stop accepting donations from the Sacklers—the infamous family behind Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that made the addictive opioid painkiller OxyContin—and part ways with board members who have ties to fossil fuels or weapons. In 2019, Warren Kanders stepped down from his role as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum after the activist group Decolonize This Place protested his ownership of Safariland, a manufacturer of military and law enforcement supplies including gun holsters and tear gas.

The filmmaker Nan Goldin, a former OxyContin addict, has staged multiple die-ins—a form of protest in which participants simulate being dead—at British and American cultural institutions to call on their directors to remove all associations with the Sackler name. Her efforts weren’t for naught—after years of vigorous activism and righteous anger, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, Dia Art Foundation, and the Louvre all dropped the Sackler name. Laura Poitras even directed a documentary, the critically acclaimed All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about Goldin’s career and persistent protests.

Though Goldin’s efforts have yielded tangible change, it remains to be seen what the glue-ins and tomato soup splashing will accomplish besides sparking a media firestorm. Some question if vandalizing fine art is an acceptable conduit for activism: “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,” one person tweeted. Speaking out against this form of protest, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz warned that “less protected works” may suffer permanent damage in the hands of increasingly brazen protesters.

Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland who specializes in protest movements, cautions that escalating strategies may alienate those who may otherwise sympathize with the cause. “Research shows that this kind of tactic doesn’t work to change minds and hearts,” she told the Washington Post. “It’s working to get attention, but to what end?” Protests and die-ins appear to be encouraging museums like Tate and to divest from oil money, though amounts are often on the smaller side—0.8 percent of the British Museum’s annual income, for example—and are easily substituted with other funding mechanisms. The takeaway: Money and trustees may be replaceable, but priceless art isn’t.

In Their Own Words: “This is not the X factor,” Alex De Kooning, a Just Stop Oil spokesperson, told The Guardian. “We aren’t trying to make friends here, we’re trying to make change, and unfortunately this is the way change happens.”

Surface Says: The soup-slinging activists must be Warhol fans.

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As New York City has come roaring back to life, so too has Archtober, the Center for Architecture’s month-long festival in celebration of the city’s architecture and design landscape. The programming, powered by the coalescence of world-class museums, firms, and historic archives, includes: institutional exhibitions by the likes of the Cooper Hewitt, MoMA, and the Glass House, architect-led tours of spaces created by the minds behind firms including SHoP and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and walking tours of Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery and Manhattan’s Chinatown.

This year’s virtual programming, the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design’s four-part series on the legacy of Indigenous communities throughout the U.S., is taking Archtober beyond city limits in scope and in reach.

From his days at the Pratt Institute to his postgraduate path in furniture design, a love for shape and form has always been at the core of Ian Collings’ work. In 2018, he turned his focus to sculpture full-time, left the design studio he co-founded in New York, and embarked on a three-year hiatus, during which he found abundant inspiration in the landscape of Central American rainforests. These days, the designer splits his time between Ojai, California, and Pavones, Costa Rica, finding new ways to present stone in the form of sculptural and functional design objects.

On October 10, artist Damien Roach kicked off the launch of Seed, an interdisciplinary project spanning art, design, music, and Web3. At its core is an AI machine learning model created by Roach to make art in the style of the masters of Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings. Roach partnered with digital art incubator Daata on the project, and together they hosted Elena Soboleva, Isabella Maidment, Jane Bustin, and more movers and shakers of the London art scene for a celebratory brunch.

Blanche DuBois may have always depended on the kindness of strangers, but for Thomas Houseago, friends aren’t half bad either. For his latest exhibition, the British sculptor looked inward, chronicling a tumultuous three-year journey he describes as a time of serious breakdown and recovery. (“I’m sort of being rebirthed at the moment,” he admitted in a recent interview.) Called “We” and on display at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Finland, the show sees the celebrated artist toss aside his ego and bring other voices into the fold—namely his collaborators and best friends, actor Brad Pitt and musician Nick Cave—while recasting himself as an avid painter.

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Art + Loom is a bespoke rug company based in Miami, Florida. Founded almost 10 years ago by designer Samantha Gallacher, Art + Loom’s mission is to bring fine art to the floor in homes around the world. Each rug is individually designed by Gallacher and hand-made in Nepal or India using techniques handed down over generations. Art + Loom works with top designers, collaborates with cutting-edge artists, and continues to push the bounds of rug design and construction.

Surface Says: A roster of collaborations with prominent creatives and founder Samantha Gallacher’s dedication to overcoming challenges posed by the built environment positions Art + Loom where the worlds of art and design meet.

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