Famous painting attacked by protestors

A world-famous painting, worth millions of pounds, has been savagely attacked by activists earlier today. The activists have been arrested by police, who arrived swiftly on the scene to assess the damage to the work of art.

Well, not really.

You can organise a protest of several thousand people, but so long as the protestors or (more likely) the police don’t kick off, and it doesn’t slightly inconvenience or enrage a politician or a celebrity, then it simply won’t get reported in the press. What’s an activist to do?

Over the past few years protests by Just Stop Oil and others in art galleries have worked out exactly how to successfully game the clickbait nature of modern journalism.

Here’s the template that nearly all news sources have adopted:

CLICKBAIT HEADLINE: FAMOUS ARTWORK HAS BEEN ATTACKED BY ACTIVISTS

Introductory sentence (shown in social media previews) expanding on that claim in different words.

Next follow several paragraphs of quotes from:

• outraged members of the public who were present (This has inconvenienced my afternoon - it’s terrible! Er… how much will you pay me for my cellphone footage?),
• outraged art experts (I tend to agree with the protestors’ cause, but this is completely the wrong way to go about it!), and
• outraged politicians (This is why our laws need to be even more draconian and authoritarian. Vote for us and we’ll put them all in prison and throw away the key!),

…somewhere amongst which are two sentences:

• an admission that the painting was actually behind a pane of glass (sometimes bulletproof) and is utterly undamaged by the protest, and
• a statement that the police (more officers than you’ll ever see if your house/flat is burgled) are on the scene assessing the damage to the multi-million pound painting £20 pane of glass.

The format — particularly the headline and introductory paragraph not revealing that the painting was undamaged — is important, because the headline and introductory paragraph are usually the text shown in social media link previews.

From a technical perspective in the original article HTML the headline is replicated in the OpenGraph/TwitterCard “title” meta element, and the introductory sentence in the OpenGraph/TwitterCard “description” meta element.

(And yes, I’ve used exactly the same headline and opening paragraph format in this blog post, as a further example.)

For the newspapers, your outrage at the apparent damage to a world-famous piece of artwork is a financial necessity to make you click through from the social media link preview to the newspaper article itself in order to see the adverts surrounding the article.

Only after you’ve clicked through to the site and the adverts have been shown can you safely be told that a simple pane of glass protected the painting, as is fairly common.

Any newspaper that, whilst engaging in this misleading clickbait, still tries to maintain a claim to being a serious news source (such as the Guardian) will admit that the painting is completely unharmed and was never even going to be damaged in the second paragraph - the ads have been displayed and the cents/pence from the advertiser can be claimed - your outrage has been successfully monetised and is no longer required.

The right-wing tabloids tend to bury the “painting is completely unharmed” admission further down the bottom of the article, because they want both the advert money and your continued outrage (since these protests tend to be for causes that they ideologically oppose, such as saving the world).

Some examples in the wild

The Origin of the World (Gustave Courbet), Centre Pompidou, Metz - MeToo (May 2024)

Let’s take a recent example - the Guardian reports that “Painting of vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet sprayed with ‘MeToo’ graffiti” (that’s the headline in the Guardian at the time of writing this post).

The first two paragraphs from the article (as of 7th May 2024 - online articles are liable to be edited after the fact) are actually contradictory:

Two women have sprayed the words “MeToo” on a 19th-century painting of a woman’s vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet in a stunt by a performance artist, a museum and the artist said.

“The Origin of the World”, a nude painted from 1866, was protected by a “glass pane” and the police were on site to assess the damage, the Centre Pompidou in the north-eastern city of Metz told AFP on Monday.

The first sentence (and the clickbait headline) says that words have been sprayed onto the painting.

The second sentence — not included in the social media link preview — admits that words have not been sprayed onto the painting, but rather onto a pane of glass in front of the painting, strangely typeset in Daily-Mail-esque scare quotes by the Guardian.

To the relief of glaziers and vitreophiles across the world, the police were quick to the scene to assess the damage to the glass pane.

The article concludes with the correction:

The headline and text of this article were amended on 7 May 2024 to correctly refer to the painting being of a woman’s vulva, not vagina as an earlier version said.

This is indeed worthy of being corrected for accuracy - it’s important to know one thing from another, despite them being in close physical proximity to each other. It’s a shame that the headline’s claim that the painting was “sprayed with ‘MeToo’ graffiti” hasn’t been similarly corrected to distinguish between a painting and the pane of glass that’s in front of it.

Sunflowers (Vincent van Gogh), National Gallery, London - Just Stop Oil (Oct 2022)

Another example, from October 2022, is when Just Stop Oil activists threw soup at some glass in the London:

Again, the Guardian’s clickbait headline ignores the fact of the glass and states “Just Stop Oil activists throw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers”, and presents an almost identical pair of contradictory opening paragraphs:

Activists from Just Stop Oil have thrown tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London.

There were gasps, roars and a shout of “Oh my gosh!” in room 43 of the gallery as two young supporters of the climate protest group threw the liquid over the painting, which is protected by glass, just after 11am.

Right down at the bottom of the article, the Guardian almost gives the game away and cites the protestors saying that they deliberately chose a painting that was protected with a pane of glass:

The canvas of the painting is protected with a glass screen, a factor Just Stop Oil said they had taken into account.

Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), The Louvre, Paris - Riposte Alimentaire (Jan 2024)

I suspect you’re beginning to recognise the format now:

Protesters throw soup at Mona Lisa in Paris

Visitors at Louvre look on in shock as Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece attacked by environmental protesters

Two environmental protesters have hurled soup at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris, calling for “healthy and sustainable food”. The painting, which was behind bulletproof glass, appeared to be undamaged.

It will no doubt come as a relief to princes, politicians, presidents, popes, and others whose lives may depend on bulletproof glass that it does not have a secret Kryptonite-like vulnerability to soup, and snipers will not be preparing minestrone-tipped bullets in order to assassinate them behind the false security of their bulletproof glass screens.

In conclusion

Well, everyone’s been gamed.

The activists have successfully gamed the media into rolling out their clickbait template to get the publicity they need, the newspapers have successfully gamed you into clicking/sharing the link on social media in outrage to get the advertising revenue they want, the advertisers have gamed you into looking at adverts for things you neither want nor need, and the politicians are trying to game you into voting for parties that campaign for greater authoritarianism and crackdowns on the right to protest, rather than fixing the world’s problems that the activists are protesting about.

Anyway now that you’ve clicked through, please buy my artwork (soup not included: must be purchased separately).