Rapper avenges Van Gogh with ‘attack’ on Andy Warhol painting

The most famous work of the father of pop art was not affected

American rapper Lil Nas X responded with an original hoax to eco-activist vandals who recently doused Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in London’s National Gallery with tomato soup. “MK” became aware of the details of exactly how the 22-year-old musician avenged the classic.

Lil Nas X responded with soup for soup. If British eco-activists doused Van Gogh’s famous masterpiece with tomato soup, he did not respond by dousing Andy Warhol’s Soup Can (from the legendary series that brought worldwide fame to the father of pop art in the early 1960s). American rapper took revenge on vandals using Photoshop. The young man posted photos on social networks in which he throws the painting “Sunflowers” into Warhol’s “Can of Soup”. In the first frame, the rapper is preparing for an “attack”, in the next frame, the “Can of Soup” is unevenly closed by “Sunflowers”. The caption under the post reads: “I will avenge Mr. Van Gogh.”

The witty joke instantly spread across the network and received many enthusiastic responses. One of the rapper’s fans, for example, continued the story by replacing the face of Lil Nas X with a photo of Andy Warhol, who throws a photo of the rapper himself into Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Andy, for sure, such an artistic “revenge” relished.

It is clear that both actions with masterpieces – both for activists from the Just Stop Oil movement and for Lil Nas X – are a way to draw attention to themselves. Only now the British are PR at the expense of great art, to put it mildly, unsuccessfully, roughly speaking – mediocre. They say that in this way they want to solve environmental problems and force the British government to abandon plans to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

Young people (by the way, the same age as the American rapper) use radical methods: they doused Sunflowers with tomato soup, Monet’s Haystack with mashed potatoes, and recently ruined the wax figure of Charles III in Madame Tussauds. All these actions led to only one – completely logical – result: the word “eco-activists” became synonymous with the words “vandal” and “barbarian”. The public has lost the opportunity to admire the masterpieces of Monet and Van Gogh – they are under restoration. At the same time, the “opponents of oil” did not affect the oil problem in Europe in any way.

Against their background, the amusing hoax of the American rapper turns out to be not just a joke, but a position. It is impossible to convey your ideas, no matter how good they may be, in aggressive barbaric ways.