Mashed potatoes on Achilles' heel

The last mashed potatoes

»People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying!« – What sounds like a line from a Black Eyed Peas song, shouts a young woman, kneeling on the exhibition floor of the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. Behind her, mashed potatoes drip from Monet's grain elevator. She is kneeling because she has stuck her hands to the floor and wall with superglue. A young man next to her does the same, silently. It was they who catapulted the canned puree onto the 130-year-old painting just seconds earlier. Both are wearing orange high-visibility vests – the identifying mark of the German climate protection group the Letzte Generation (Last Generation).

A week and a half earlier, the British climate activist organization Just Stop Oil served Van Gogh tomato soup: the red liquid ran over his world-famous sunflowers in London's National Gallery. In Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, Frankfurt's Städel, at the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and Dresden's Gemäldegalerie, there have also recently been gluing actions. All paintings remained intact thanks to a glass cover.

Barberini director Ortrud Westheider announced after the mashed potato action that the museum would temporarily close for a few days and contact the lenders of the new exhibition – fearing what might happen to the loans of the current surrealism exhibition.

»Stunned«, »cultural barbarism« – a wave of indignation

With its protest action, Letzte Generation has hit the Achilles' heel of the cultural landscape: Politicians like CDU member of parliament Christopher Förster were outraged: »The sole purpose of this grouping is to prepare and carry out criminal acts. There are even training courses on how best to get stuck and what to do when the police arrive.« Manja Schüle of the SPD tweets, »With this, the activists are doing a disservice to the issue and are willfully destroying our cultural treasures.« Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP) was left »particularly stunned.« Potsdam Mayor Mike Schubert (SPD) declared the whole thing »cultural barbarism.«

Pianist Igor Levit, who has even played in the streets for Fridays for Future, tweeted, »If you want to preserve something beautiful, why are you hurting/destroying something beautiful? Who is being helped? I can't wrap my head around the causality.« In short, a real riot. People react harshly to such a fragile target as a van Gogh or Monet.

The concept of »protest« thrives on attacking where it hurts. And in contrast, Letzte Generation sees its own actions as extremely peace-loving themselves. The press release says: »Through peaceful civil resistance, [determined people] protectively place themselves in front of everything we are in danger of irrevocably losing. Security, peace, democracy, and last but not least, art.«

What does this have to do with climate protection?

At first glance, the images don't have much to do with climate change. Attacking the images doesn't save the environment either, Twitter users conclude. The German newspaper taz intervenes that the problem, as so often, is the »communication that is difficult to understand.« Bridging the gap between alleged museum vandalism and the activation of climate policy is not easy for everyone. The group's spokesperson, Aimée van Baalen, explains the action with a counter-question: »How is it possible that so many are more afraid of one of these images of reality being damaged than they are of the destruction of our world itself, whose magic Monet so admired?«

The painting belongs to multi-billionaire Hasso Plattner. It is said to have been worth 111 million euros to him. »But very few people find it scandalous that the super-rich use the cultural treasures of this world as an investment« – writes the taz. The patron of the arts himself makes sure quite quickly, he and the museum consider how they can increase security.

No reason for excitement

There is actually no reason for excitement, at least to this extent. The Museum Barberini announced the same evening that the grain elevator had not suffered any damage: »Since the picture is glazed, it has not suffered any damage according to the immediate conservational examination.«

The activists have deliberately chosen the protected exhibits in all museums, because it is precisely not their intention to irretrievably destroy the cultural asset. Nevertheless, they are not making themselves popular with the action. The mashed potato scandal is being treated as a »marketing campaign.  At least the protest was tactically clever: loud, but not destructive, as first assumed. Attention was entirely on their side and no one was harmed. The soup action even brought the British climate group Just Stop Oil a windfall: The co-founder of the non-profit Climate Emergency Fund and daughter of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, Aileen Getty, donated one million US dollars to the organization.