Vienna museum underlines global warming with distorted art

The Vienna museum, where climate activists recently targeted a Gustav Klimt painting, responded with an exhibit called “A Few Degrees Higher.”

In that exhibition, the museum tilted the images several degrees to draw attention to global warming.

Activists from the group “The Last Generation” stained the glass in front of Klimt’s painting “Death and Life” in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Another activist glued his hand to the glass during a protest in November calling for an end to oil extraction.

On the day of the opening of the small exhibition, “A few degrees higher (will make the world an uncomfortable place),” the museum’s artistic director Hans-Peter Wiplinger told Reuters that they believe this way of thinking is completely wrong.

For the exhibition, the museum displayed 15 artwork pieces, some from Klimt and Austrian master Egon Seele, in a slanted orientation with supplementary texts that draw attention to the implications of a global temperature rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels on the scenery depicted in pieces.

Tell the manager of the museum

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization of the United Nations, states that if global temperatures are going to be kept to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels – a goal outlined by the Paris Agreement in 2015 – it is imperative that emissions be cut in half by the mid-2030s.

Wipplinger said their desire to start something productive and communicative. This means conveying a message through spectacular photos (such as the protest) and by helping visitors to inform themselves about the situation and the different contexts of global warming.