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How the Streisand Effect came to haunt Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart
Mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s attempt to have portrait by Vincent Namatjira removed from National Gallery exhibition backfires
www.independent.co.uk
A failed attempt by Australia’s richest person to remove an unflattering portrait from exhibition has had the opposite effect of inviting more attention to the artwork and scrutiny of her own beliefs and background.
Gina Rinehart, 70, is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting, a mineral exploration and extraction company worth an estimated $30.6bn (£15.9bn). She demanded the country’s National Gallery remove what she saw as an unflattering portrait of her from display. The gallery refused.
The portrait was made by award-winning Aboriginal painter Vincent Namatjira and features Rinehart in his signature caricature style. It is part of his “Australia in Colour” series, a satirical look at 21 influential people who played a part in shaping Australia...
By demanding that the gallery take down her painting, Rinehart fell prey to the Streisand Effect, named after American actor Barbra Streisand whose 2003 attempt to remove aerial photos of her California beach house by suing the photographer ended up costing her $177,000 in legal fees and garnering far more interest in the images.
In Rinehart’s case, the gallery’s refusal to remove the portrait and Namatjira’s response to the demand have sparked debate about art and censorship in Australia...
Namatjira said: “People don’t have to like my paintings, but I hope they take the time to look and think, ‘Why has this Aboriginal bloke painted these powerful people? What is he trying to say?’”...
Rinehart’s attempt at censorship led to a scrutiny of her own beliefs and why she made it to Namatjira’s series in the first place.
It turned out her father Lang Hancock, who founded Hancock Prospecting, had faced criticism for his remarks about mining on Aboriginal land, which many Indigenous Australians consider to have been stolen from them.
“Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the black fellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist,” Hancock once said, reported News.com.au.
Rinehart herself, in an article written in 2012, argued that if people “jealous of those with more money” wanted to be richer, they needed to “do something to make more money yourself − spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working”.
Her views make it clear why she made it to Namatjira’s list.
