Fair question.

I haven’t protested about this specific issue, but I have done about others. Specifically, the erosion of human rights in the UK.

Here’s a video of a performance protest we made last year:

Au

It’s pretty blunt, it’s about how wealth is used to distort rights and the meanings of language. The full thing took over four hours to read out. We held a talk and a symposium as well as educational visits with schools. I’m a big believer in education as social justice.

Hypothetically then, in their case, I would make art that engaged with the subject. Just like picasso did with Guernica, an image that still resonates the horror of war.

We are talking about the protest, not the subject of the protest.

That’s one of the problem with protest stunts. They get attention but often the attention drowns out the intent.

I get that. And I broadly supported the stop oil protests that took a similar form. But I do take objection to the weird value judgement they are making.

What’s worth more, art or sustainable food…

If I wanted to get complex about it I’d highlight the numerous ways in which art and sustainable agriculture have traditionally interwoven through folk practices, but I’m going to keep it simple and say that the sort of false equivalence they just used is the rhetoric of fascism.

In the UK it is frequently used to defy art that may be oppositional to political and corporate interests.

And that’s it, art is, more than anything, a vector for public discussion and protest in its own right.

Their protest and the reason behind it is fine. The daft shit they said during it undermines everything else and could do easily have been avoided with a small amount of thought.

I love a good protest … But this isn’t a good protest.

What’s the most important thing?” they shouted. “Art, or right to a healthy and sustainable food?”

Yeah, no. I think in a civilised world we should be able to have both and that sort of argument is weak as fuck.

Destroy all art because it is more important that we conduct research into cot death. Oxygen is more important than art and yet look at you, with your galleries.

It’s infantile posturing of probably well off middle class kids who want their Rosa Parks moment for Instagram clout.

Further to that, attempting to destroy something that essentially belongs to everyone is just going to bring negative press. How about going after something owned by the head of Nestle? No? Is that too difficult and requires too much work?