What do you believe is the single most important factor driving up the cost of living in Nigeria?

Two Just Stop Oil activists were recently jailed for 27 months and 20 months respectively for throwing soup at one of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers paintings at London's National Gallery back in October 2022. Some commentators suggested these were overly harsh sentences for a nonviolent protest, while others felt such sentences were appropriate and an important deterrent.

We study activism and its impact (and sometimes have participated in direct actions like these). In our latest research, we looked at 42 climate protests at museums and art galleries in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia between 2022 and 2024. We wanted to know what makes this form of protest so unpopular with the general public, and why climate activists have continued to return to galleries despite, or even because of, the resulting social outrage.

As it happens, we published our work in the journal Protest just a few days before the Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced.

One common theme we found is that such protests are widely criticized because of their supposed irrationality. For instance, in his sentencing remarks in the Sunflowers case, Judge Christopher Hehir spoke for many when he described the soup-throwing action as "criminally idiotic."

However, we should consider the logic offered by the activists themselves. The video of the action in October 2022 shows one of them, Phoebe Plummer, asking: "What is worth more—art or life? Is [art] worth more than food, more than justice?"

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