Home
Sections
LN Club
My Account
In 1978 the official propaganda of the World Cup He established as a martial mantra that "25 million Argentinians will play the World Cup" when only 22 played and won the first World Cup for the Argentine National Team. At the time of writing this article, 73,878,778 users converted a post from the official account of Lionel Messi in the most image liked from Instagram story, the platform that claims to be the last link in photography and the one that has contributed the most to defining it contemporary visual culture.
A post shared by Leo Messi (@leomessi)
From the first attempts at color television (ATC) to the era of the Internet and social networks there is a common thread with football as an epic tale which now enshrines this image which, in addition, breaks with a certain logic of what instagrammableThe photo, taken by Englishman Shaun Botterill for the Getty agency (although the post does not mention any author), shows Messi lifting the trophy in Lusail Stadium in Qatar and surpassed the image that held the previous record in less than a day. The photo of a brown egg on a white background that the account @world_record_egg (a single post, 5 million followers, no accounts followed) uploaded on January 4, 2019 with the sole objective of dethroning from the podium a post by influencer Kylie Jenner (of the Kardashian clan) that had reached 18 million likesTen days later, the egg (taken from the Shutterstock image bank) reached 42 million likes, prompting American critic Ben Davis to speak out in the magazine Artnet of a new era of popular conceptual art. But it was the competition of the species in the environment of social networks: a viral campaign mounted by an advertiser dethroning a Instagrammer like Jenner, born to post and be liked.
Now Messi arrived with an unplanned photo for the post (Botterill doesn't even have an account with his name) and that refers to the physical, analog world if you will. Beyond the global phenomenon that the footballer represents and that was strengthened with each step of the Argentine National Team in Qatar, this is already one of the images of the 21st century which in turn is made up of others inscribed in the history of art.
For the Spanish cultural critic Jorge Carrión, author of The Viral, he like Massive advertising operates under the logic of networks, although this case has its peculiarities. “I would say it's pure collective synchronicity. It's the phenomenon that drives and explains virality. Suddenly, thousands or millions of people agree on the centrality of a vaguely identified cultural object and decide not only to read or enjoy it, but also to support and spread it. That force has been felt with Argentina's triumph in a very strange way. Because there is almost always a divorce between the digital and analog planes. Instead, the celebration has been, with equal power, virtual and physical, in the dimension of bodies and in that of pixels. That seems more historic and important to me than a number linked to a photo on a social network. Perhaps it's due to the pandemic,” Carrión analyzes for LA NACION.
Bodies and pixels define the historical time of this image. A half torso of the hero on Kun Agüero's shoulders (not visible due to the cropping made by the network when publishing, but present in the full frame) could date back to Greco-Roman representations and, later, to the art of the photography of the sports body in Aleksander Rodchenko (Soviet Union) and Leni Riefenstahl (Nazi Germany), but also on the bottom edge of the image two smartphones raised by arms stretched to the impossible to try to capture something of this scene. A digital photograph of the hero, yes, but also a kind of selfie of the machines themselves, which shoot at each other like in a maze of mirrors. The same thing happened with attempts to bring this scene to the skin via tattoos: bizarre copies that wander around bodies and that returned to the pixel viralized as ironic consumption such that the restorer of Borja (the one from Ecce Homo failed) would have installed a Tattoo shop at the Bond Street Gallery.
If Jenner's post with her newborn daughter can be attributed to traits of a Renaissance Madonna and the Egg (Acuña?) follows a certain logic of Dada and conceptualism, Messi's image is based on the monumental. Such is the conclusion that the photographer and historian Facundo de Zuviría When reviewing it: “The angle from which it was taken is the same one that we photographers choose for register a monument"They're shot from below to give them that sense of grandeur, and here you can see that on Messi's face, and it's an image that very concretely expresses the moment of triumph. It's also a snapshot of our collective happiness."
But there is also a anchoring in the images of classical painting. After consulting LA NACION, Jose Emilio Burucúa He leaves a disturbing response in the email: “The matter is very thorny from an iconographic point of view. Call me.” On the phone, the art historian points out that the way the cup is held is very unusual and that the gesture “is not the one recorded as triumph in the painting but rather resembles that of the Massacre of the Innocents.” He is not referring to the teams that fell by the wayside but to a biblical topic in painting dating back to the 15th century. “Scenes of triumph in painting are rather vertical, and here we see something else.” The cup is raised like the baby who is saved in Rubens' painting (Art Gallery of Ontario) or those of Matteo Di Giovanni (Museo Di Capodimonte) and the frescoes of Lattanzio Gambara in Parma,” he concludes.
Returning to our digital times, Carlos Scolari, a Rosario-based researcher specializing in media at Pompeu Fabra Universitybelieves that the Messi post phenomenon is part of a crossroads of mediatization. “Since ancient times, battles and wars have been broadcast through bronze, with monuments. That's solid mediatization. Then, with the development of print media, radio, and television, comes a liquid mediatization of events. The moment captured in this photo is part of the gaseous stage of mediatization: we can follow the war in Ukraine on TikTok. The change is such that during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, they didn't allow cell phone filming, and now they almost beg the public to do so.”
However, there is something in Messi's record-breaking image that transcends these stages. "The solid stage is so deeply rooted in the culture that if a monument to Messi were to be built in the future, it couldn't come from any other image than this one," says Scolari. Beyond media analysis, the author of Snack Culture and The Platform Wars, from papyrus to the metaverse (to be published in February) finds a line that escapes the pure visual to understand the almost 74 million likes. “This image is like the ending of a perfect fairy tale. The story of the boy who couldn't grow up and had to leave for Barcelona; who triumphed in Europe, but never with the Argentine national team; who went through the stage of renunciation, echoing Evita's story; and who ended with this happy ending captured in this post.
Copyright 2022 SA LA NACION | All rights reserved
Download the LA NACION app. It's fast and lightweight.
Do you want to receive alert notifications?
A connection error has occurred
English 
Spanish