Oct. 27 (UPI) — Protests to stop climate change continued on Thursday, as one man attempted to glue his head to Johannes Vermeer’s iconic painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in a Dutch museum.
A video on Twitter showed one man pouring a can of what appeared to be a type of liquid while also trying to glue himself to the iconic artwork at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. He was joined by another man who was wearing a “Just Stop Oil” t-shirt and shouted a message at patrons.
“How do you feel when you see something beautiful and priceless being apparently destroyed before your eyes?” he said. “Do you feel outrage? Good. Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed before our very eyes?”
Dutch police said in a statement that they had arrested three people for public violence against goods.
Thursday’s incident is the third in the last two weeks that involves damaging artwork to bring attention to the climate crisis.
On Oct. 14 two Just Stop Oil activists splashed cans of tomato soup on Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers” painting at London’s National Gallery.
“The 100 proposed oil and gas licenses will destroy all of our culture, along with human civilization as we know it,” advocates said from their Twitter account. “Why are we protecting these paintings when we are not protecting the millions of lives that will be lost due to climate and societal collapse?”
And on Oct. 23 two activists from the group the Last Generation doused the famed “Grainstacks” painting by Claude Monet with mashed potatoes before glueing their hands to the wall at Museum Barberini in Potsdam.
The group, which has called on Germany to do more to address climate change, said in a statement that the protest calls on society to ask the question: “What is worth more, art of life?”
In video of the incident published by the group online, one of the protesters, who has been identified as Mirjam Herrmann, said that in a few short decades the painting, which is valued at a more than $110 million, will be worthless “if we have to fight over food.”
Both activists were arrested and have since been released, the Last Generation said.
