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'The View's' outrage over climate activists vandalizing Monet work ridiculed: 'Performance art'
By Charles Creitz
Published June 16, 2023
The co-hosts of "The View" condemned climate activists who doused a Claude Monet work with red paint, but some observers said they were only bothered because the incident made them and their liberal allies look bad.
"The View's" Joy Behar said it was "annoying" to use "art as your cudgel" to affect political change.
"Leave art alone. That's not your job. Your job is to go out and make people understand why we need to be careful about the Earth," Whoopi Goldberg added.
On "The Five," Thursday, Greg Gutfeld and the panel of co-hosts discussed the recent incident at the Swedish National Museum, where two women vandalized "The Artist's Garden at Giverny" and then affixed themselves to the painting's frame to bring attention to global warming.
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"The View" airs daily on ABC. (Screenshot/ABC News)
"[T]he View is mad is because it makes their cause look bad. That's all it is. They don't care about the art. They're on ‘The View’," Gutfeld riffed.
When asked by host Jesse Watters if he believes Behar and Goldberg have "refined" artistic predilections, Gutfeld had doubts.
"No… They don't – ‘The View’ is performance art," he said.
Emma Johanna Fritzdotter, identified by the Associated Press as one of the activist suspects, claimed "The pandemic was nothing compared to the climate collapse – while Helen Wahlgren, a spokesperson for the Återställ Våtmarker (Restore Wetlands) group, said the incident was meant to pressure lawmakers in Stockholm to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Stockholm Regional Police told European news outlets the incident is being criminally investigated as aggravated vandalism.
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In a previous incident, the United Kingdom-based activist group "Just Stop Oil" poured tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting at the London National Gallery in October.
As for the incident in Sweden, "The Five" host Dana Perino claimed the climate change movement has not been helped by such spectacles.
"No one ever has been persuaded to join the climate change movement by watching ridiculous young people -- that should be working -- instead throw paint on priceless works of art. Literally no one is persuaded at all," she said.
"I think that the climate movement is so based on fear and not reality -- we all want a clean Earth. We also could have logic to realize that renewables aren't going to cut it just yet. We need advances in technology. We are working on them, but give people a slow ramp to it rather than trying to do it all at once."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/the-view-outrage-climate-activists-vandalizing-monet-work-performance-art-gutfeld