Pumpkin soup and the Mona Lisa: Exploring climate protests through Debord


Wesley Tourangeau, University of Windsor

News media outlets across the globe responded in concert as climate protestors splashed pumpkin soup across Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa while it was on display at the Louvre in January of 2024. This event is a recent example of a particular style of climate and environmental protest that has been gaining popularity in recent years—using famous pieces of artwork in stunts that capture media attention. Other examples include throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers and covering Claude Monet’s Les Meules with mashed potatoes. Captured heavily within news media, and shared further and more rapidly through social media, these forms of protest warrant closer analysis for several reasons. Perhaps the most critical reason worth exploring is that in most cases there was no discernable damage to these works of art due to protective glass coverings, yet these protestors are still framed as criminals, while these paintings become personifications of the ‘ideal’ victim. In this presentation, Guy Debord’s ideas on ‘the spectacle’, ‘détournement’, and ‘recuperation’ are utilized to imagine these acts as complex discursive events with potential contributions to environmental awareness and environmental justice, but subjected to power relations that may limit their transformative potential. In the Debordian sense, these events are set within the ‘spectacle’ of everyday practices of cultural consumption (i.e., of art and museums) as a ‘good’ that is protected by laws and police and then further supported/defended through longstanding social norms and expectations about visiting museums. However, targeting and defacing these paintings provides a fitting comparison to what Debord calls critical art and ‘détournement’—a restructuring of culture and experience through art to create something new by placing it within a new context. On the other hand, staging such newsworthy events also risks what Debord calls ‘recuperation’ wherein the spectacle regains control by intercepting, commodifying, and trivializing radical ideas. In this regard, the media’s role of reducing acts of defacement to consumable images may in turn diminish the aims of protestors. This presentation aims to bring critical sociological and criminological attention to this phenomenon of counter-conduct that uses newsworthy law-breaking to protest environmental harms. The aim is to inspire dialogue on the meaning, and potential impact, of these potentially transformative events being consistently captured and shared in news and social media around the world.

This paper will be presented at the following session: