A new penalty for attacks on works of art?

Last Saturday, an environmental activist targeted a painting by Claude Monet to raise public awareness about climate change. The young woman, part of the collective Riposte Alimentaire, stuck a poster on Monet's Les Coquelicots, which is protected by glass. A citizen engaged with the Riposte Alimentaire campaign covered the painting “Les Coquelicots” with a nightmarish version of the same painting, depicting a field of poppies in 2100. This can be seen in the video of the action which has garnered over 240,000 views on X. The Musée d’Orsay clarified that the artwork was not damaged and was quickly put back on display. 

A “performance” that angered Rachida Dati, the Minister of Culture. She immediately reacted on X: “This destruction of Art by delinquents cannot be justified in any way. It must stop”. “Once again, a cultural institution and a work of art are targeted by iconoclasts”, the minister continued, adding that she had “called on the Minister of Justice for a penal policy adapted to this new form of delinquency that attacks the most noble aspect of our cohesion: culture!”. This statement seems to align with many negative comments about these happenings. Indeed, it appears that attacks targeting artworks shock a significant part of the public. 

We remember the outcry when activists threw tomato sauce on Van Gogh's Sunflowers or when the Mona Lisa was pied. Many people struggle to understand why environmentalists target artworks that are not responsible for climate change. It might be that the purpose of such actions is to highlight the “double standards”. Why are we more outraged when a work of art is attacked rather than seeing the Earth being slowly destroyed?