This January 28, climate activists made a splash at the Louvre as they threw tomato soup over the Mona Lisa. Two weeks later, Claude Monet’s Le Printemps was also sprayed with soup. That was just before photos of a flooded Tuscan town were pasted onto Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in Florence. These were all part of a series of actions by environmental groups targeting museums and galleries. The first had taken place already in October 2022, when activists from the Just Stop Oil collective sprayed Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, on display at London’s National Gallery, with soup in protest at climate inaction. A few days later, at the Barberini Museum in Potsdam, two other activists hurled mashed potatoes over Monet’s Les Meules.

These headline-grabbing actions sparked lively debate — between those who insisted that art is sacred and those calling for it to be used in the service of the climate cause. Is it fair to attack an artwork (even without materially damaging it), in order to make the climate emergency more visible? In truth, the relationship between art, life, and politics is more complex than this utilitarian line of questioning might suggest. Indeed, artistic creation can bring about what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s book on the painter Édouard Manet calls a “symbolic revolution”: transforming the very categories through which we understand reality, and revealing the wider possibilities for our individual and collective existence.