Botticelli: Sacrificing cultural heritage for gimmicks

Botticelli - Primarvera

Before I start this post let me tell you that I was one to speak about environment and the heating of the planet long before it was fashionable to do so. My whole lifestyle is too "green". Still, there are areas which are of major debate to me.

So it seems environmental activists have glued their hands on Botticelli's Primavera painting in the Uffizi gallery in Italy. International media mentioned the activists, their mission, and their cause. Mission accomplished? Well, here's where the debate comes.

Ruining cultural heritage - and I am sure Botticelli's Primavera ranks as one - is no laughing matter. 

Sadly this is how the communication world is being run these days. Gimmicks, leading to eyeballs on social media, and on to the next one. Little or no strategy behind anything. Basically this is what is called Clicktivism/Slacktivism as opposed to activism.

Don't believe me? Think back of the #bringourgirlsback campaign. Remember the furor? Remember how much it trended online? Remember how everyone who was anyone either reshared it or retweeted it or re-whatever it? The result? Negligible.

Look I do not want to be nasty, and I suppose everyone who reads this blog knows at this point that I have tremendous respect for Tahaab Rais and his work, but I also wonder how his film about the 47 years of electricity problems in Lebanon will impact daily life (see here). 

As we drown in a world of "grand actions" and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility - which turned out to be a hypocrite act - see here) I really wonder where we are going in terms of communication. Because grand, shocking, media-stealing actions are now a dime-a-dozen. The world is full of them and basically we just look at them, then look away. 

Everything is done for the here and now. For the fleeting eyeballs on social media. For that - not even - 15 minutes of fame (these days if you make it to 15 minutes then you must be Kim Kardashian in some latex suit). 

And then what?

And then the world is left impoverished because Botticelli's Primavera will now require restoration.

Why I haven't said anything about Palestine.

With the whole world up in arms about Palestine (no need to link anything, you can just read it anywhere), I have been totally silent about the issue. Why? You might ask. Well, for a long time I have been the proponent of the idea that tags and social media do not solve much (remember how effective #bringourgirlsback campaign was? Not much actually). You know it is easy to post on Facebook between zoom meetings or whatsapp discussions about this or that, and flood social media with sentiments: But apart from the feeling that you have cleaned your conscience and engaged in an act of slacktivism, tell me - what else did you do?

All right,  I can see your point already: You are running a blog, supposedly for the betterment of the advertising industry, so how does that differ? It differs that for 15 years I taught at master's level at universities, worked on future generations of advertisers, was very harsh when it came to ethics, tried to instill in them - not just methods of creativity - but also deep entrenched values. It also means that advertisers (and here I know how little that effect can be in real life) were less enthusiastic to copy (read that steal) other people's ideas knowing they will get caught and exposed and ridiculed (usually this is under "compare and contrast" on this blog).

Oh, and last week, mother had a health scare. The kind of health scare that in the past would lead her to a hospital stay. She was adamant she did not want to go. So the Chemaly boys worked hand in hand to stabilize the situation. And it worked. But of course me being the resident of the house, there was extra duties to perform and things to do. So all this was time consuming, and me being me, I had to remain calm and steady and ever-efficient. So honestly this was priority over an issue (i.e. Palestine) I had no control or influence on.

I do care about what is happening there, but also am trying not to be a hypocrite and just do things which are ethically pseudo-meaningless.

Government confidence vote: Slacktivism at its worst

Source

So everyone is changing their Facebook avatar to "la thika" (no confidence) in reference to the confidence vote session of the government (the joke of course is that phonetically it resembles Lecico the sanitary wares company). This reminds me of  "liking isn't helping" - the Crisis Relief Singapore ad which illustrated that liking something online has no implication on the actual situation, ergo a mere act of slacktivism (slack-activism). I am not being a defeatist, but how such a move online will get translated on the ground is beyond me.