What next, petrol on a Picasso? Threatening art is no answer to the climate crisis | Jonathan Jones

It’s arrogant of the activists who attacked a Klimt to assume anyone who cares about art doesn’t also care about the planet

Another day, another gallery: the attacks on art in the name of climate action have become a headline-hogging obsession with a hideous escalating logic. The nastier the treatment a famous masterpiece gets, the bigger the media coverage.

Now, members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) have smeared “non-toxic fake oil” all over the glass covering of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, a colouristic vision of pink and gold intertwined human bodies menaced by the grim reaper. Not that you can see much of that in the disturbing images of the attack at the Leopold Museum in Vienna: a black and purple stain all but obscures the delicate picture. The aggression of the attack takes this wave of action a step further than tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and mashed potato on a Monet. But a step further to where?

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