When Greenpeace protesters poured 1,000l of (organic) blood-red liquid down a vast canvas off the Shell Skiff platform in the North Sea last week, it was billed as an artwork – entitled Butchered, and created in collaboration with Anish Kapoor. It was also the latest in decades of high-profile stunts that activists have used to grab the public imagination and plant a thought that can grow into a global movement.
The likes of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion (XR), and the Occupy movement don’t just block roads or pitch tents in churchyards, but seed ideas. Gen Z and millennials – marinated in a drip-feed of bad news, climate collapse, economic precarity and political implosion – suddenly connected to history and saw protest not as eccentric behaviour, but as the only real theatre left.
