Throwing Soup at Van Gogh: The Framing of Art in Climate Change Activism by British Mass Media

Abstract

Abstract Throwing food at famous paintings (e.g., a can of soup thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers) represents a rather novel form of climate change protest. The study, which is further presented in the article, seeks to unpack the way British mass media cover the food-throwing incidents that take place in the context of climate change activism. To that end, a corpus of texts was collected on the official websites of the leading British mass media outlets that describe the instances of throwing food at the world-known canvases by climate change activists. The corpus was analysed qualitatively in line with the theoretical premises of i) intermedial ecocriticism proposed by Bruhn (2020a, 2020b) and ii) framing methodology developed by Entman (2007). The results of the corpus analysis indicated that British mass media frame the famous paintings involved in the climate change protest incidents by foregrounding the monetary value of the paintings and the extent of damage done to them concurrently with de-emphasising the climate change component. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.