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‘Hay Wain’ protest goes haywire

ROSIE DIMANNO TWITTER: @RDIMANNO

LONDON Holding masterpieces hostage — a new form of performance art?

Nah, just another prima-drama protest by in-your-face and in-your-forbearance climate lunatics, surely designated thus even by the many rightly fearful about our fragile planet’s fate.

A pair of students — one a psychology major, the other studying music — on Monday stepped over the rope barrier and superglued themselves to one of Britain’s most famous paintings, John Constable’s “The Hay Wain,” at the National Gallery.

The priceless thing was covered by a sheet of paper, affixed to the artwork’s ornate gilt frame, covering the 1821 jewel’s bucolic scene with apocalyptic images of trees scorched by wildfires, pollution belching from factories and discarded household waste. The gallery was forced to partially evacuate for several hours as Met police were called to remove the mouthy interlopers.

“You can forget about ‘our green and pleasant’ land when further oil extraction will lead to widespread crop failures, which means we will be fighting for food,” Hannah Hunt declared before she and her accomplice were bundled off.

“Ultimately, new fossil files are a death project by our government. So yes, there is glue on the frame of this painting, but there is blood on the hands of the government.”

The righteous duo are members of “Just Stop Oil,” an environmental coalition demanding the government halt development and production of fossil fuels — oil, coal, gas — as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Tories have announced plans to license 40 new oil and gas projects over the next few years.

This stunt was staged a day after “Just Stop Oil” nutbars invaded the track at the British Grand Prix, lying on the track at the end of the opening F1 lap just as the race had been redflagged for a huge first-corner crash and drivers were heading for the pits. But the cars still had to veer around the demonstrators.

If the disrupters really wanted to throw the Prix for a loop, they should have put themselves directly in harm’s way and under the treads.

The art caper at the National did achieve its aim, however, as photos of the protesters appeared on all of Tuesday’s front pages. While art lovers were enraged, a spokesperson for “Just Stop Oil” clapped back: “If people are more concerned about a painting than the deaths of millions of people around the world, then they need to get their priorities sorted.”

Many more such antics are apparently planned for the summer in a U.K. reeling from a host of economic and societal crises, not least skyrocketing inflation, swelling cost of living and rising petrol prices, with the government under a self-imposed one-year deadline to end imports of Russian oil and gas in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Whatever patience the public may have had for over-the-top demos and inconvenience will likely vanish under broad hardships.

Police have already been told by political leaders to take zerotolerance with “guerrilla protests” by fuel campaigners amid alarm that “go-slow” protests on motorways will continue for several months, with warnings from polls that London especially is headed for “truck convoy” sieges à la Canada.

Law enforcement had been given tough new powers that came into effect earlier this year, with jail terms of a maximum six months for “wilful obstruction of a highway.” Previously the offence carried only a small fine.

Orchestrating the “go-slow” campaign is Extinction Rebellion, a global movement that says it advocates for non-violent civil disobedience to avoid social collapse and eventual extermination of the human species.

It was Extinction Rebellion that blocked four of London’s busiest bridges, roads, buildings and businesses for a chaotic fortnight last summer, protesters gluing — clearly a preferred tactic — and locking themselves in to hold their ground, bringing the capital to a standstill.

I blame PETA, which pointed the strategic way over some 35 years of fighting against animal cruelty. Their aggressive, often arresting (in all meanings of the word) campaigns have been immensely effective.

Certainly PETA killed the fur coat industry, with the paints-plashing and the public shaming. Too often they’ve overshot the mark, though, most notoriously with a “Holocaust On Your Plate” exhibit in 2003 that juxtaposed factory-farm horrors with Nazi death camps.

Listen, the world would be a much more awful place without the bravery of protesters down through the ages, from the suffragette movement to antiVietnam war demonstrations, to civil rights marches to apartheid resistance to Black Lives Matter, particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing.

Protest with violence is, in fact, quite effective, long as enough people sympathize with the cause, and most influential when apparatus of the law overreacts. Totally justifiable crusades and resistance.

But some of these organized remonstrances — notably on college campuses — have preposterously jumped the shark. From a quick perusal of the dopey demo and wacko outrage annals:

■ A “C--ks Not Glocks” rally at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students brandishing dildos in objection to Young Americans For Freedom inviting a conservative commenter-blogger to speak on the Second Amendment — the right to bear arms.

■ A “face-sitting” muster outside Parliament here after then-PM David Cameron threatened legislation over what kind of porn passed muster in the U.K. — face-on-sex parts deemed too dangerous for private laptop screens. So the demonstrators sat on each other’s faces while singing Monty Python songs.

■ Rick Perry, at the time Texas governor, deluged by handknitted and crocheted uteruses after the state legislature pondered rolling back family planning education and banning abortions. Which, of course, isn’t so funny anymore in 2022, with a reactionary U.S. Supreme Court catastrophically reversing the constitutional right to abortion.

■ A San Francisco performance artist, opposed to shark finning (used in delicacies such as fin soup) by piercing herself with giant fish hooks and hanging outside a LUSH cosmetics store.

■ Charles Manson groupies protesting the imprisoning of the murderous cult leader, bummed out because he still had “some more good tunes in him.”

■ Fans of iconic sitcom “Cheers” actually rioting — police cars set on fire — when Woody Harrelson was named to replace the beloved “Coach” role after that actor died.

■ A “million-baby march” — actually part of the annual March for Life by anti-choice demonstrators in Washington D.C. — total flop because it was scheduled for 1 p.m., when most infants are put down for their naps.

And, you know, babies can’t walk yet.

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2022-07-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-07-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

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