School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    Radical inauthenticity and cultural anxiety: the Benetton advertising phenomenon
    Amad, Paula ( 1994)
    Just months before the beginning of the intifadah uprising in the occupied territories of Israel in 1987, The Benetton Group released their latest corporate advertisement (fig. 1) featuring an Arab and a Jew embracing each other with a globe between them.1 the image was one of a series from a campaign featuring historically opposed nationalities in a mutual embrace. The ‘Arab/Jew’ ad immediately sparked worldwide media controversy.2 However, the image had already been the object of a clandestine controversy resulting in the censorship of its original unreleased version, in which the two opposing ‘nationals’ were united not by a globe but by a handful of money.3 Six years later on September 13, 1993 another version of this image of desire and fear (fig. 2) made front-page news worldwide. The moment Arafat and Rabin shook hands, standing either side of the global symbolism of President Clinton of the United States, was widely acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s most significant political reconciliations. The narrative offered here by the contiguity of these three images is not structured by the operations of cause and effect. Rather, it is constructed as a challenge to that logic which would interpret advertising as having clearly negative or positive effects on reality. The impossibility of isolating the impact of the ‘original’ advertisement in this proliferation of images immediately highlights the complex relation Benetton ads maintain with reality. This complexity is fuelled by a mixture of determinism and non-determinism, figured in the ad and its various other incarnations as the contradictory embodiment of both commercially motivated product-relatedness and aesthetically ambiguous product-non-relatedness. This contradiction centralizes ambivalence in the analysis of such Benetton-related circuits of communication. Thus, just as the ‘Arab/Jew’ ad juxtaposes the logo with the dream of national transcendence, so too does the photojournalist image juxtapose the politically monumental with the memory of an ad. Neither image exists in an isolated, mono-functional realm. (From Introduction)