“For it is truly, Lord, the best testimony / That we can give of our dignity / That this ardent sob which rolls from age to age / And comes to die… streaked with spilled soup.“Yes, we took the liberty of rewriting the last eight syllables of the Headlights, famous poem by Baudelaire, which, in 11 sublime stanzas, pays homage to the genius of painting – from Rubens to Delacroix via Rembrandt and Goya. Charles Baudelaire exalted the testimony of human dignity there. Some activists see it as an opportunity to get people talking.
In recent weeks, the masterpiece happening has become the Holy Grail for some activists, who, staging themselves in the process of vandalizing The Sunflowers by Van Gogh, Millstones of Monet or The Girl with a Pearl Earring from Vermeer, secured the favor of the algorithms, and the attention of the media. Luckily, the masterpieces thus sprinkled were all protected by glass. The damage was therefore minor, if not non-existent. Therefore, the question arises: once past the emotion (sought) by the provocation, is the method, ultimately, effective? It is more than permissible to doubt it.
If these activists indeed manage to make people talk, their much commented gesture is likely to slow down the necessary environmental awareness rather than to accelerate it. Profaning something so popular in this way – a pride, a heritage, which has nothing to do with the causes of global warming – can only strengthen the anti-ecology camp, by dissuading, in particular, hesitant people by shovelfuls. After all: apart from certain ultra-educated urban circles, where people like to talk about the degrees of radicalism, spitting on Van Gogh is not a highly valued attitude.
But these activists do not see it. Victims of a militant inter-self. And blinded by the detestation of all that is produced by humans. When it instructs the systematic process of Promethean man, that is to say of the being who emancipates himself from nature, ecology is on the wrong track. The absolute urgency that there is to put in place far more radical measures than we are taking today deserves better than this cookie-cutter philosophy.
Part of the environmental fight is leading to a form of nihilism, even obscurantism light. “I prefer women who cast spells to men who build EPRs”, Sandrine Rousseau once confided to Charlie Hebdo. She was wrong. Even when considering the goal of decarbonizing the planet, she was wrong.