Toscani thoughts

 LP 15

Blood, Sweat, and Sear by Oliviero Toscani

I wanted to jot down some of the ideas about Toscani's work because I found the documentary we watched in class to be very interesting. Toscani is an interesting figure because he takes advertising, which is usually very filtered, muted, and profit-driven in its message, and uses it as a tool to draw attention to controversial, yet important, issues. The main issue in this is that behind all of the really great activism, there is the underlying understanding that Benetton and Toscani are getting filthy rich off of it, Benetton would, and consequently did, fire Toscani the first moment his activism started hurting the company's bottom line. I would, however, say this is a critique of Benetton and not Toscani, even journalists and authors profit off of publishing controversial stories, Toscani, perhaps uniquely as a very different kind of advertiser, is not much different. Benetton, on the other hand, could have had at least a little bit more loyalty to their image as a socially conscious and activistic company. Toscani didn't choose the economic system he was born into, nor did he have a lot of choice in participating in it, if he wanted food on the table that is, Benetton had a choice between their bottom line and their activism and unsurprisingly they chose the former. In the end, Toscani is interesting because of the conversations he gets us to have, be it through his activism directly or through its relation to Benetton that funded that activism.