There’s a super rich lady. You don’t really need to know anything else about her for this story.
An artist painted a rather unflattering portrait of her. It’s the image OP included. It’s hard not to assume it was intentionally cruel.
The portrait was put on display in a famous gallery.
The rich lady threw a fit and demanded they take down the portrait. The gallery complied and took down the portrait.
Her public tantrum drew more attention to the portrait, the artist, and the gallery than anything else. More people have seen and shared the image online in one day than would have ever visited the gallery in 100 years.
This is often referred to as the “Streisand Effect,” named for Barbra Streisand, because in 2003 she tried to prevent the publication of a coastal erosion report that contained a picture of her home. Almost nobody would have seen the report or the picture if Streisand had not drawn attention to it. It became a very famous report and the picture was downloaded and shared widely.
Probably worse for Barbra than the picture is this phenomenon being named after her. I was familiar with the the Streisand Effect and who the name came from, but didn’t know the backstory and hadn’t seen her house.
Perhaps the most well known controversy in the history of the company centres around the racist views of founder Lang Hancock towards Indigenous Australians. Hancock is quoted as saying,
“Mining in Australia occupies less than one-fifth of one percent of the total surface of our continent and yet it supports 14 million people. Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist.”
In a 1984 television interview, Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians − specifically “the ones that are no good to themselves and who can’t accept things, the half-castes” − to collect their welfare cheques from a central location. And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."
Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, Gina Rinehart, caused controversy in 2022, when she failed to apologise for or denounce comments made by her late father in the 1984 television interview. Hancock Prospecting subsequently withdrew an A$15 million sponsorship from Netball Australia after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam voiced concerns about the deal and the impact of the comments, pertaining to a genocide, by “poisoning” and “sterilising” Indigenous Australians to “solve the problem”; as well as concerns about the company’s environmental record.
There’s a super rich lady. You don’t really need to know anything else about her for this story.
An artist painted a rather unflattering portrait of her. It’s the image OP included. It’s hard not to assume it was intentionally cruel.
The portrait was put on display in a famous gallery.
The rich lady threw a fit and demanded they take down the portrait. The gallery complied and took down the portrait.
Her public tantrum drew more attention to the portrait, the artist, and the gallery than anything else. More people have seen and shared the image online in one day than would have ever visited the gallery in 100 years.
This is often referred to as the “Streisand Effect,” named for Barbra Streisand, because in 2003 she tried to prevent the publication of a coastal erosion report that contained a picture of her home. Almost nobody would have seen the report or the picture if Streisand had not drawn attention to it. It became a very famous report and the picture was downloaded and shared widely.
Probably worse for Barbra than the picture is this phenomenon being named after her. I was familiar with the the Streisand Effect and who the name came from, but didn’t know the backstory and hadn’t seen her house.
For anyone curious.
Well, maybe a liiiittle bit more:
Jesus fucking Christ