An Influencer at the Service of Culture: The Italians’ Scandal!
Chiara Ferragni visits the Uffizi under the director’s guidance: Do you mean “guidance”? Anger strikes on social media
A few days ago, the famous Italian influencer Chiara Ferragni, who has 20.8 million followers all over the world, posed for a Vogue photo shoot. The proceeds were designated to be donated to charity, and Italians, the people of ancient generations and powdered wigs—who are now comfortably installed in the ignorant slums of their living rooms, shouted at the scandal and at the desecration of the Temple of Art.
The Temple of Art is also known as the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, and with 550 thousand followers, it is an influencer in places of culture. Anathemas have been pronounced against the self-marketing star, and the Director of the Gallery, Eike Schmidt, has not been spared.
"Chiara Ferragni effect" at the Uffizi
The “contemporary divinity in the social age” was how the photo shoot was dubbed by Uffizi’s Instagram profile. By publishing a set of nine images, the photo shoot was able to achieve more than institutional marketing campaigns were able to do. In just one week, visits by young people under age 25 increased by almost 30%.
Instagram post by The Gallerie degli Uffizi.
During the fiery weekend of controversy over the presence of the influencer in the famous Florentine Museum, the Uffizi registered 9,312 visitors gathering in the Gallery between Friday and Sunday, marking a 24% increase compared to the previous weekend when there were ibky 7,511 visitors.
This is not a surprising fact—unlike the controversies that spill over to the unfortunate visionaries attempting to rejuvenate their approach to the market to achieve results (in Italy, you know, earning and improving are two ancestral faults).
In Italy, a country where culture is unfortunately still conceived of as elitist, if not terribly boring—due to the modest-very modest-communicative ability of places of culture and the drastic economic cuts of past and present governments—a battle is underway. It is shortsighted and against any cultural disclosure that does not follow the more traditional logic and channels. We have some of the most beautiful museums in the world, but they are also among the least visited. It’s clear that has to do with the anti-marketing concept of the so-called Italian medium, which is snobbish, conceited, and ignorant.
Chiara Ferragni at the Gallerie degli Uffizi, in Florence.
Source and copyright Chiara Ferragni
That war continues to be waged by those who imagine a courtly, plastered, and absolutely unrealistic conception of ancient art and the society that expressed it. That culture was not made up of sighing girls and ecstatic lovers of beauty, but instead, it was built on very concrete interests, rivalries, and gossip—just like ours always has been since the dawn of time.
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