More news from the Tweetisphere!
We may not be following what is happening in Syria, Tampa, Victoria, Ottawa or any European capitol, where decisions are being made that will affect millions of lives, including our own, but we know all about the botched restoration of a religious fresco by a dotty 80-year-old woman in the tiny Spanish town of Borja.
When Cecelia Gimenez took on the restoration of a 1910 portrait of Jesus by local painter Elias Garcia Martinez, little did she know that her well-meaning ineptitude would become the talk of the Internet and that her infamy would be spread around the world by millions of YouTubers and tweeters.
The image that Christian Fraser of the BBC characterized as “a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic” has piqued the imaginations of the multitudes and now thousands of tourists are flocking to Iglesia del Santuario de Misericordia (Sanctuary of Mercy Church) to see the smeared mess with which the dear old grandma festooned the church wall.
According to the CBC program As It Happens, the town had to hire security to control the crowds.
Thank goodness for the new social media! Without the technological wizardry of the Internet, the lightning fast communication of vast proportions that allows the instant interconnectivity of entire populations around the world, we might’ve never heard of Cecelia’s bonehead attempt to fix what was a rather mediocre work in the first place.
Now, instead of planning our European tours around those tired and over-rated tourist traps, like the Louvre, Sistine Chapel and Coliseum, we can by-pass them and Spanish cultural centre Barcelona, as well and bee-line to nearby Borja to marvel at Monkey Jesus!
Up until now, using the traditional media, people longing to enrich their cultural lives, without visiting stuffy museums or having to look at any old stuff, had been limited to the tourist attractions that appear on the little pamphlets printed by towns hoping to snare a few dollars from unwary travellers.
Who hasn’t wanted to see the world’s largest hockey stick, tallest gopher statue, heaviest pumpkin or better yet, visit Graceland?
Now we have been freed from those limited attractions and can receive daily on our smartphones constant news of the weird and wonderful, the gaffs, mistakes, artistic blunders, horrendous failures, all the things truly worth seeing. It’s like having a Barnum and Bailey sideshow right in your pocket!
– Jim Holtz is a columnist for the WEEKENDER and former reporter for the Grand Forks Gazette