Throwing soup at the problem: are radical climate protests helping or hurting the cause?

The rise of activists targeting famous artworks has experts divided on whether such tactics benefit social movements

On Wednesday, activists staged a protest at the National Gallery of Australia, scrawling in blue marker pen over the framed prints of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup I. One of the protesters, who belonged to the group Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidies, tried to glue herself to a print.

It was not even the first climate protest within the last week to involve soup: five days earlier, Italian activists from the group Ultima Generazione – Last Generation – threw pea soup over a Vincent van Gogh painting in Rome. The Van Gogh work, like the Warhol prints, was protected by glass.

Protests targeting famous works of art began mid-year in the UK, instigated by the group Just Stop Oil, who have carried out actions in Manchester, Glasgow and multiple London galleries. The stunts have caught on globally: activists have glued themselves to artworks and gallery walls in Milan (Ultima Generazione, August), Melbourne (Extinction Rebellion, October), The Hague (Just Stop Oil, October), Potsdam (Letzte Generation, October) and Madrid (November). Galleries such as the Prado have “reject[ed] endangering cultural heritage as a means of protest”.

The action that has attracted the most attention, and criticism, was carried out last month by Just Stop Oil activists, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London.

The backlash yielded its own conspiracy theory: that Aileen Getty, an oil heiress turned environmentalist, funded the stunt in order to discredit real climate activists. (“I do not fund these groups directly, nor do I have direct control over which specific actions climate activists choose to take,” Getty clarified.)

Is radical action like the art gallery protests an effective means of progressing climate efforts, or does it, as its critics argue, harm the cause it is trying to advance?

The activist’s dilemma

Social change research suggests radical actions have historically been effective for two purposes, says Prof Winnifred Louis, a social psychologist at the University of Queensland.

The first is in raising awareness – particularly useful in the early phases of a movement – because the media are more likely to cover actions when they are sensational or violate social norms.

The second area where radical action has been successful is in preventing or stalling specific events that don’t have social licence – “destroying a particular building against the wishes of the community, or bulldozing trees,” Louis says. In 1998, direct action – including a nine-month blockade of the mine site – helped to prevent uranium mining at Jabiluka in the Northern Territory.

Christopher Wright, a professor of organisational studies at the University of Sydney, cites the Lock the Gate alliance as another successful example, in localising protests against fossil fuel mining to “specific concerns of communities around how extraction is going to endanger their quality of life or environment”.

More disruptive action also exerts what researchers term the “radical flank effect”, in which the radical faction of a social movement can increase both support for and identification with more moderate groups in the same movement. The effect has been demonstrated in relation to the American civil rights, animal rights and climate movements.

This flank also has the effect of normalising radical tactics over time, suggests Prof Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “Mainstream big green groups that were saying ‘We only do institutional politics’ are now engaging in peaceful civil disobedience,” she says.

However, research also suggests radical tactics can reduce popular support for social movements. “This is what we call, in social psychology, the activist’s dilemma,” says Dr Morgana Lizzio-Wilson, a research fellow at Flinders University. “On the one hand, radical actions can bring greater attention to a cause, but they can simultaneously reduce support for that cause.”

Radical actions have been found to be less persuasive and more polarising for issues including animal welfare, abortion rights, and the US presidential elections, Lizzio-Wilson says. Her own work, which analysed responses to animal rights groups, found that radical actions (for example, undercover investigations at factory farms) were perceived as being both less effective and less legitimate than conventional tactics (such as advocating for legislative reform, or reducing meat consumption).

“Because people felt that radical tactics were less effective, this in turn meant that they were less willing to identify as an animal rights supporter and were less inclined to act on behalf of the cause itself,” Lizzio-Wilson says.

Research in this space is, however, contested. A review conducted by Sam Glover and James Ozden of the Social Change Lab in London has found it “likely that a nonviolent radical flank will increase an overall movement’s likelihood of achieving policy wins”, while others have found that radical climate action does not alienate those who are already sympathetic to the cause.

Earlier this year, the Social Change Lab also commissioned a YouGov poll of 2,000 people each, in three surveys conducted before, during, and after disruptive Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion protests in London. It found that despite the majority of respondents being opposed to the protests, there was “no significant negative change in the number of people saying that they supported the goals of Just Stop Oil”.

Glover and Ozden noted, however: “Due to existing high levels of climate concern in the UK, it’s possible that broadly trying to increase concern for climate change is now less effective than it was in previous years.”

Critics divided

The views among experts on the effectiveness of the art gallery protests are particularly divided. Some have criticised them for a lack of action logic, in which an action is immediately understandable to an outsider – chaining oneself to a tree to prevent it from being logged, for example.

Prof Robb Willer, director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University, has said that while disruptive protest can work, he was “not seeing a clear path to impact” for soup throwing. “Rich, left-leaning art lovers are supposed to take bold action on climate in response to these actions? In what form? Lobbying? Donations to climate orgs? I’ve not seen a compelling rationale yet,” he wrote on Twitter.

“The benefit of reaching a large number of people and alienating them is really debatable,” says Louis. She cites three reasons why people don’t act if they already support a cause: they don’t see the action as relevant, they don’t feel like it’s supported by social norms, or they don’t believe it is effective. The soup protests are likely increasing these perceptions and “actually slowing the pace of change”, Louis says. “It [would] be ironic for a movement that’s saying ‘trust the science’ if they didn’t look at what was evidence-based in terms of tactics.”

But Fisher, who was a contributing author on the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, emphasises that the impact of the art gallery protests has not yet been studied.

“The reason they picked this is because it really is attention grabbing, and it is shocking to see it until you know that the artwork is not being destroyed,” she adds. The climate activists say they have targeted art with protective covers – no damage has been done to date to the works themselves.

“As more people join in confrontational activism – even if it’s peaceful – law enforcement tends to employ what they call ‘insurgent repression’,” Fisher says. As many have pointed out, climate activists in many places are increasingly facing draconian anti-protest laws.

The rise in disruptive climate protest likely stems from a disenfranchisement – a pattern well established in social change research. “When people feel that their activism to champion an issue fails, they’re much more likely to use more radical tactics,” Lizzio-Wilson says.

“It’s actually very understandable that a lot of climate activists are resorting to these more radical tactics, because time is running out.”

cover photo: Experts say while radical tactics used by climate protestors can bring attention to social causes, they can also reduce popular support for those movements. Photograph: Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidies