Art or food? That’s no choice

When two environmental protesters threw soup at the world’s most famous work of art in Paris last week, they were trying to create a link between art and food. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, protected by bullet-proof glass, survived the soup attack.

The activists articulated an antithetical relationship when they asked the world with some rhetorical flourish: “What’s the most important thing -- art, or right to a healthy and sustainable food?” They wanted to draw attention to the protest by French farmers for less regulation and better prices.

They more than succeeded in their intent because the attack on the picture was worth more than many reams of writing about the protest. The painting has also survived a custard pie and an empty tea-cup hurled at it in the past for various reasons.

But food was a theme running through these attacks. The latest attackers’ linkage between art and food will hardly appeal because the grievances of the farmers have nothing to do with the smiling lady in the Louvre, or with art in general.

Everyone has the right to a healthy and sustainable food and also to create and appreciate art. Art has been created by artists who starved and by artists who did not have to starve.

It is true that a hungry man may not have the time for art, and God will not appear before him as Mona Lisa but as bread only. But no-one can insist that art should flourish only after hunger has been eliminated. A pumpkin soup attack on Mona Lisa does not extinguish art. It only adds value to her and makes her smile more beguiling. The right to food and the right to art do not contradict. Both are rights inherent in the right to life.  

The contradiction that the protesters may have wanted to highlight was between the French government’s and the EU’s policies and practices and the lives and needs of the farmers. The farmers do not get the right price for their produce.

Global warming is a result of the Industrial Revolution around cities, which farmers did not cause, but the regulations to counter climate change affect the farmers. Some of them have said the world was changing too fast for them, and the rural way of life was collapsing.

There are contradictions in the situation, but Mona Lisa does not figure in them. The debate about whether art is for its own sake or for life is as old as both, and is still alive. The truth is that there is no art without life and there cannot be life without art. That may be a deeper link between the farmers’ protests and Mona Lisa’s inscrutable smile.