You’d think a billionaire would have time to exercise, like maybe have a personal trainer, go to the gym, get some surgery, maybe have a personal chef that can prepare food that’s good but healthy. I dunno.
It is factual news. The artist, Vincent Namatjira, has done many paintings in this style.
Famous for his quirky style of painting, Namatjira is known as a ‘satirical chronicler of Australian identity’ whose “paintings offer a wry look at the politics of history, power and leadership from a contemporary Aboriginal perspective.”
The Archibald prize winning artist has used his unique style to paint notable figures from the Queen to Slim Dusty, usually to pretty good receptions.
Hey, that’s Gina Rinehart, Executive Chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting! She recently sent me a mail about giving me ~$2.000.000, I should finally get back to her on that.
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.
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.
This quote is from her father in '84, and it was in a televised interview. However, just two years ago she refused to denounce those comments, and pulled millions of dollars from support from Australian Netball’s governing body because an indigenous player raised the issue.
Another commenter mentioned she refuses to denounce her father’s word there, and pulled funding from a sports org because one of the players had brought up the issue.
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.
I had to look this up. An indigenous Australian artist, famous by antipodean artworld standards, included an unflattering portrait of the woman who owns the most profitable mining company in Australia and depending on the day, she’s usually calculated to be the richest Australian in the world, and sometimes the richest woman.
The company is infamous for doing as mining companies are wont to do, and also specifically for her late father’s old-school racism on the topic of indigenous Australians, and then her own actions that suggest she was fine with his attitudes. Frankly, the fact that her portrait looks to have been just a bit more exaggerated than the rest should have been viewed as a minor win that she could ride out, but she decided to raise a stink about it and be the biggest Karen in the world, accusing the national gallery of doing the Chinese government’s bidding, even though she is on record saying nice things about them to get their business.
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