I so wish I knew what art heaven is like at the moment.
Renoir on his impressionist cloud, developing coping mechanisms because the so-called Last Generation – our version of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil – didn’t choose his work for their potato-mash-protest in Potsdam, but that of his peer Monet – who is getting all the fame on TikTok now.
A triumphant Goya, sneering at El Greco and Velázquez after activists glued themselves to two of his paintings in the Prado in Madrid, while ignoring theirs.
And Andy Warhol shyly floating towards Vincent van Gogh in a wheat field to comfort him after the attack in the National Gallery: “You know, I used to have tomato soup for lunch every day, for 20 years. Quite inspiring.”
Then suddenly Beethoven (AWOL from the music section) roars: “You must see zis! My violin concerto at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg – two nose-ringed idiots with orange vests barged in, one has a pudding-basin haircut and the other has had all the pudding. They glued themselves to the conductor’s railing which… (Beethoven nearly chokes with laughter)… can be detached in no time! They were marched out by maintenance staff, who got nearly as much applause as I did.”
Since writing about them in TNE last February, the gluers have moved from Autobahn to posher locations. Why freeze your bum on the tarmac if you can glamour-glue yourself to a warmly illuminated masterpiece?
Admittedly, I have a very conscious bias – even before I was forced to spend 11 hours at Berlin’s BER airport last week, which LastGen had paralysed. It’s because I’m weary of people who tear up at their own words (of doom).
Also: I don’t buy the passion-of-Christ-stunt. There is no self-sacrifice in letting police officers do the heavy lifting and carry you off the road.
Leaving aside my partiality: LastGen is showing an ugly lack of empathy for those they hold hostage. People who commute to work, who need to pick up their kid, to get surgery, to visit a dying relative or simply to drive from A to B to make a living.
One activist tweeted, after a cyclist had died in a traffic accident: “It’s climate combat not climate cuddle & shit happens”. Her life could perhaps have been saved if the special vehicle to lift a lorry off her hadn’t been stuck in a traffic jam caused by the gluers.
But to them, “the end is nigh” justifies the means. Since July, there have been 13 glue-inflicted cases of delayed emergency ambulances in Berlin alone. No wonder that Germans, while sympathetic to saving planet Earth, show an 80%-plus majority against the gluers in polls.
Since the cyclist’s death and the BER airport blockade there’s been a shift of tone regarding the superglue movement in the establishment (some in politics and media remember the variety of other apocalypses they themselves had warned against in their youth).
But when a Berlin activist can stop the traffic 27 times, only to be released from custody each time, no wonder there have been 306 cases of LastGen disruption this year.
While stuck at BER, plotting revenge, I felt some guilty pleasure watching videos of the French police’s hands-on approach to get the gluers’ hands off the street.
But there’s enough pseudo-martyrdom going on as it is: Bavarian police took around 20 activists into so-called preventative detention: jail time for a month (longer even) without needing a court verdict, based on Bavarian laws made for immediate terrorist threats.
LastGen got what they wanted: a campaign. You can tell by their professional photo portraits they expected to be taken into custody, could then plead their cause, ask for donations, go on hunger strike.
Officials finally realised they had fallen into a PR trap and released the lot, but in other parts of Germany there are calls to copy the (in my view: disproportionate) Bavarian measures.
What to do? The right (innovative as always) demands tougher laws against the “climate terrorists”, while the Greens and the left lack credibility, having played things down as civil disobedience for too long.
In the end it will be down to judges across the country: some activists have been let off, some have been sentenced, one got four months in jail. Coercion, dangerous disruption of traffic, damage to property, the laws are there: could someone make good use of them – and faster than usual, please?
Unless, of course, we want Dalí, Rubens, Miró, Sisley, Chagall, Dix, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch to get some TikTok fame, too.
