Opinion Express View on protest, soup, art: Mona Lisa still smiles
And no amount of soup-throwing protests will change that
In 2022 and 2023, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, The Scream by Edvard Munch, The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpieces were subject to food attacks — from cake smears to tomato soup — by protesters. Their causes were often just — climate change and the excesses of the fossil fuel industry, for example. 
The Mona Lisa keeps on smiling, pumpkin soup hurled at it notwithstanding. The woman inside the painting has been witness to war, revolution, theft and vandalism, for reasons as varied as nationalism, love, climate change, disability rights, and now, the latest, food and economic security. Through it all, she smiles knowingly, and to some, annoyingly.
Earlier this week, protesters from a French group called Food Counterattack threw pumpkin soup at arguably the Louvre’s most iconic exhibit.
“What is more important,” the protesters can be seen shouting in a video, “art or the right to healthy and sustainable food?” While the deliberately starving artist, or the penniless writer, whose only fuel is coffee and cigarettes, might disagree with the framing, most people would probably agree that food matters more. What many might also ask, though, is: What’s a painting got to do with it?
In 2022 and 2023, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, The Scream by Edvard Munch, The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces were subject to food attacks — from cake smears to tomato soup — by protesters. Their causes were often just — climate change and the excesses of the fossil fuel industry, for example.
Or as in the current case, the need to ensure food security and nutrition for the marginalised. But the target was wrong. Time was when protesters would protest outside the buildings and offices of the rich and powerful. Artworks on public display, on the other hand, are one of the only ways that those without means can access the rarefied world of what was once “high” culture. Perhaps in this, like so much else, social media is to blame. It seems like the all-caps scream of the troll has bled into real life, replacing for some the meaningful engagement and anger of a thoughtful protest. Whatever the case, behind her protective glass shell, the Mona Lisa smiles.
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