Cowards vs culture 

For some while I have marvelled at the way in which artworks seem to have become the focus of hatred for people wanting to say something banal. If you wish to make a point about politics, the climate or anything else, there are a range of ways to do it. But the least effective must surely be to glue yourself to a painting, throw soup on it or attack it with a knife. Nonetheless, artworks have become the means to communicate certain rote-like messages – with the violence stepping up a notch each time.

It is two years since a couple of morons from Just Stop Oil decided to throw a tin of soup at Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ in the National Gallery. A glass cover protected the painting. In March an anti-Israel protestor spray-painted and then slashed a portrait of Lord Balfour in Trinity College Cambridge. Earlier this month a protestor in Paris stuck an adhesive poster on to Monet’s ‘Coquelicots’ at the Musée d’Orsay.