"I just don't like it."
When I asked visitors outside the National Gallery in London what they thought of protesters throwing soup at paintings or supergluing their hands to gallery walls, the response was overwhelmingly negative.
"They're just attention seekers," one tourist says. Another is slightly more sympathetic, but ultimately, "there are better ways to protest that will get more people on board".
From Just Stop Oil protesters to the Cambridge Slasher, art attacks are on the rise in the world of activism – but it's never been more unpopular with the public.
Even when the cause is something we are supportive of, most of us find it hard to stomach seeing priceless masterpieces made into soup Jackson Pollocks. But when we look back at the long history of attacking art in the name of protest, we seem to become far more lenient.
In the early 1900s, British suffragettes began targeting London's art galleries wielding hatchets, hammers and butchers' knives at Old Masters. Most famously, suffragette and arsonist Mary Richardson slashed Velazquez's famous Rokeby Venus (c. 1647-1651) as it hung in the National Gallery on March 10, 1914.
Slicing up oil paintings was just one of many militant tactics used by the suffragettes to draw attention to their demand: women's voting rights.
Although we may not agree with the methods, 50 per cent of us owe a great deal of gratitude to their campaign, yours truly included.
Hindsight is a… feminist?
A favourite witticism of educator and activist Joris Lechêne is that "a liberal person is someone who supports all protests, except the one that's happening now".
From the viewpoint of our 21st-century political sphere, Richardson's choice of artwork – an eroticised, female nude by a male artist – rings with feminist poeticism.
But the fight for women's suffrage came well before the concept of the "male gaze" had made its way into art discourse, and Richardson was not thinking of Velazquez's nude in terms of female objectification:
"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history," Richardson said, "as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history".
Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffrage movement, had been repeatedly arrested and endured forced feeding during her hunger strikes in prison, leaving her weak and in ill health.
"Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas," Richardson asserted, demanding the end to Pankhurst's ordeal.
All press is good press
Richardson probably also chose the Rokeby Venus as a target, because the painting had been the subject of a very public purchasing campaign by the newly formed National Art Collections Fund, who purchased it for the National Gallery in 1906.
As a well-known work bought for the British public using public donations, slashing the Rokeby Venus was sure to garner press attention.
Looking back on Richardson's stunt, however, we seem to have forgotten this context. (We also seem to have forgotten that after women won the right to vote in 1928, Richardson joined the Fascist Party – but that's a whole other story.)
Instead, looking through our contemporary feminist binoculars, we see the artwork and the protester as symbolically tied to the issue of women's suffrage.
We see a brave feminist making a statement about the history of women's subservience to men, when perhaps we should see an individual prone to agitation and dogmatism who targeted the artwork most likely to cause outrage.
Is outrage such a bad thing?
When asked why the public is so against protests involving artworks, Lechêne pushes back.
"One of the reasons why we appreciate art is because we recognise the labour, the effort, the craft that has been put in it. But we also value the way in which it makes us challenge our views," he says.
"Why are we surprised that art is being put in a context of challenging structures and power?"
In other words, art and protest are inextricably linked, and always have been.
Only time will tell how the story of today's art protesters will be reframed in the future.
Watch The Art Of… Protest on ABC TV and ABC iview on Tuesday July 2.