An investor-communicator decided to give a present to the city of São Paulo: a sculpture of a golden bull. It is the “Golden Bull” by Pablo Spyer, famous for commenting on the movements of the financial market as if narrating a rodeo and for using the slogan “vaaaaaaai, bull, vaaaaaaai, bull”. Installed in front of the B3, which I stubbornly still call Bovespa, the statue was vandalized by social movements and became the target of “semiotic” criticism in the pages of our glorious press.
Criticism is the epitome of intellectual dishonesty – and the sentimental tackiness that still guides the left. Just now I have just seen an image that has the statue in the background, illuminated by the sun that filters through the buildings in the center of São Paulo. In the foreground, in the shade and leaning against a wall, a street child looks wistfully at the golden animal. With this image, the photographer intends to criticize the opulence of the financial market, which supposedly ignores misery. Some even say that this market is the cause of misery.
Others critics speak of a “complex of mutts”, resuscitating the expression consecrated by the semi-cancelled Nelson Rodrigues. After all, the Brazilian statue is inspired by the bull that decorates the financial center of New York. The curious thing is that the same critics who talk about the importation of a North American symbol are the ones who promote the ridiculous identity causes imported from the American academy.
Coherence was never the strongest point of these people.
Assumption of evil
Assumption of evil
Embedded in these criticisms is the abject, but omnipresent, presupposition of evil – the same one that contaminates all our relationships, from family to political ones. According to this assumption, man does nothing without second, third, and fourth malevolent intentions. In the case of the Golden Bull, for example, evil ranges from pure aesthetic bad taste to ostentation of wealth in a country of the poor.
The aesthetic evaluation I leave to each one. I would just like to remind the inspectors of the good or bad taste of others that, not so long ago, a so-called Cow Parade spread cows with different prints in various cities around the world. And everyone went there and took a picture with the cows and posted it on social media and, if that was the case, even included a little political message that matched the modern print on the cowskin. Not to mention that, in terms of jequice, nothing beats the sickle and the hammer.
About ostentation (and it is worth clarifying for those who are unaware that, despite the color, the bull is not made of gold), there are two ways of thinking about the statue. The first is based on the assumption of evil to say that investors don’t give a damn about the poor, that the financial market is evil, that capitalism is bad, that only Boulos and his bar socialism can save. Etcetera. But why not think that it is a thanksgiving for the abundance provided by the much-fighted market?
Pablo Spyer, creator of the controversial Golden Bull, has already said that he thought of the statue as a gift to São Paulo. People could walk around the center, dodge the crooks and take pictures beside the monument. Just like the Caviar Socialists do on their trips to New York. Of course, there is also a lot of investor-communicator self-promotion. But what’s the problem with that? That’s the thing: while Boulos promotes himself by enticing the poor to invade someone else’s private property (with broad positive coverage from the left), Spyer promotes himself with a harmless statue.
