Vienna museum uses tilted paintings to spark climate conversations ... - Yale Climate Connections
Vienna museum uses tilted paintings to spark climate conversations " Yale Climate Connections
Visitors to the Leopold Museum in Vienna, Austria, may be surprised to find that some of the gallery’s paintings are hung at an angle.
“You know, you can see that there is something wrong with these paintings,” says Claudia Michl of Climate Change Centre Austria, a climate change research network. “All the paintings are hung a little crooked.”
She says these tilted artworks are no accident. They’re part of a project called “ A Few Degrees More (will turn the world into an uncomfortable place).”
By tipping the paintings by a few degrees, the museum is calling attention to the risk caused by a few degrees of global warming. The tilted works depict European landscapes, such as the Alps and the Normandy coast, by artists including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.
Next to each painting, visitors can read about the threats each location might face from global warming. The information is provided by researchers in Climate Change Centre Austria’s network.
Michl says the tilted paintings get people’s attention. So they stop and read the information to figure out what’s going on.
“They notice it and they are rather uncomfortable with it but also understand it very quickly,” she says.
So the exhibit prompts visitors to think about climate change.
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman/ChavoBart Digital Media
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.