RICHARD ORD: Let them eat cake... and soup! Why the art of protest is dying

Screen grab taken from a handout video issued by Just Stop Oil of two activists throwing chocolate cake on a waxwork model of King Charles III at Madam Tussauds in London. Credit: Just Stop Oil/PA Wire

Out I went to the local art shop to pick up materials. Drawing pads, pencils, a box of oil paints, brushes and even an easel. Oh, and a canvas.

The result is an expense to me that is roughly around the same price as buying myself a decent print … and a blank canvas taunting me.

Problem is, I think I may be a conceptual artist. The idea being bigger and more important than the work itself.

I’m toying with the idea of hanging the blank canvas on the wall and calling it The Empty Mind of an Ageing Man.

Who knows, maybe in a few years time that canvas may end up getting a tin of soup thrown over it by irate environmentalists (Hey, you gotta think big).

As it is, the only artistic idea I’ve had involved those Just Stop Oil protesters who threw a tin of tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London before gluing themselves to the wall.

The gallery missed a trick. Instead of calling the police, they should have just left the protesters glued to the wall and charged people to see them. I’d have billed them as a new Damien Hirst artwork, maybe called The Futility of Annoying Protest.

Within a few hours the stuck protesters would start getting hungry. “Why not try licking that soup,” they could be helpfully told.

If they appealed for help to be unglued from the wall, they could be told: “Sorry, that would involve petrol-fueled fire engines, and we know how much you don’t like fossil fuels.”

In the end, with the passage of time, we would have two skeletons hanging limply next to the magnificent Sunflowers. I think that would speak volumes. Unless of course we were all wiped out by climate change before then (oh, the irony).

While there was much fuss over the Van Gogh soup throwing incident, it probably caused less damage than the other protest which saw Just Stop Oil protesters shove a chocolate cake in the face of King Charles III’s waxwork at Madame Tussauds (there was a glass pane covering the painting) and wasn’t half as funny.

The protests did, however, work because it got me to check out just exactly what they were protesting about. They don’t like oil.

And while I may not agree with their methods, I’m doing my bit in support.

Those oil paints are going back to the art shop on Monday morning.