Is petrol on a Picasso next? Threatening art won't fix climate crisis

Another day, another gallery: the attacks on art in the name of climate action have become a headline-hogging obsession with a hideous escalating logic.

- Jonathan Jones

The nastier the treatment a famous masterpiece gets, the bigger the media coverage.

Now, members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) have smeared "non-toxic fake oil" all over the glass covering of Gustav Klimt's Death and Life, a colouristic vision of pink and gold intertwined human bodies menaced by the grim reaper. Not that you can see much of that in the disturbing images of the attack at the Leopold Museum in Vienna: a black and purple stain all but obscures the delicate picture. The aggression of the attack takes this wave of action a step further than tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers and mashed potato on a Monet. But a step further to where?

There's no chance of governments changing their policies because of these protests. There's every chance, however, that a great work of art will eventually be destroyed.

The action in Vienna makes that horribly obvious. This is iconoclasm. There's a deliberate flirtation with destroying art, an implicit threat to go all the way, which expresses contempt for art and the museums that try to conserve and protect it.