{"id":24718,"date":"2014-03-18T07:41:15","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T12:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24718"},"modified":"2014-03-18T07:41:15","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T12:41:15","slug":"updating-davids-sling-outraging-italian-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/18\/updating-davids-sling-outraging-italian-politicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Updating David’s sling, outraging Italian politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virginia Postrel<\/a> diagnoses the real reason politicians are upset about Armalite’s updated image of David’s armament:<\/p>\n

\"David<\/p>\n

Italian authorities were indignant when they discovered that the Illinois weapons maker ArmaLite had an advertising campaign showing Michelangelo\u2019s David holding one of its rifles. \u201cThe advertisement image of an armed David offends and violates the law,\u201d tweeted tourism minister Dario Franceschini. Angel Tartuferi, director of the Accademia Gallery, which houses the sculpture, agreed: \u201cThe law says that the aesthetic value of the work cannot be altered.”<\/p>\n

This moral posturing is clearly about something other than respect for the sculpture\u2019s \u201caesthetic value\u201d or \u201ccultural dignity.\u201d Otherwise, officials would crack down on the David boxer shorts sold by countless Florentine vendors. And where was the outrage in 1981, when the David was flogging Rush brand poppers, amyl nitrite drugs used to enhance sexual pleasure, in magazines aimed at gay men?<\/p>\n

It seems that it\u2019s fine to use the David to sell things as long as you emphasize his nudity rather than his meaning.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

ArmaLite\u2019s ads broke the unwritten rules. Instead of highlighting the hero\u2019s body, they emphatically made him a warrior. Hence Franceschini\u2019s objection to an \u201carmed David,\u201d even though every David is armed. \u201cDavid famously used a slingshot to defeat the giant Goliath, making the gun imagery, thought up by the Illinois-based ArmaLite, even more inappropriate,\u201d writes Emma Hall in Ad Age<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To the contrary, the gun imagery, while incongruously machine-age, was utterly appropriate. David did not use a \u201cslingshot.\u201d He used a sling. As historians of ancient warfare — and readers of Malcolm Gladwell\u2019s latest book, David and Goliath<\/em> — know, a sling was no child\u2019s toy. It was a powerful projectile weapon, a biblical equivalent of ArmaLite\u2019s wares.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Virginia Postrel diagnoses the real reason politicians are upset about Armalite’s updated image of David’s armament: Italian authorities were indignant when they discovered that the Illinois weapons maker ArmaLite had an advertising campaign showing Michelangelo\u2019s David holding one of its rifles. \u201cThe advertisement image of an armed David offends and violates the law,\u201d tweeted tourism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,62,339,28,663],"tags":[97,102,49,238],"class_list":["post-24718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-europe","category-italy","category-media","category-weapons","tag-advertising","tag-art","tag-guns","tag-offensensitivity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6qG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24720,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24718\/revisions\/24720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}