Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
25
therefore a quest for authenticity is pointless. Building up a positive image of a place has to
do with a marketing strategy called ‘reputation management’.
Arts, culture and heritage are often the easiest way to go when looking for elements
that will make a certain place stand out from its competitors, for art and culture are normally
local and place-specific.
Such premises raise further concerns about the problem of authenticity. How can one
be sure that what is being branded – and therefore advertised – is ‘real’? How can a definition
of a place made up in order to attract tourists, investors and stakeholder represent the real
essence of the place itself? Ooi and Stöber (Ibidem: 68-69) offer three main reasons why a
coincidence between the branded place and “real” places is hard to achieve. First, a brand
cannot provide an honest representation of a place simply because it was created to sell the
place. That means that positive aspects of a certain place will be highlighted, while the
negative ones will be voluntarily left out or made little of (Ibidem: 69). Second, branding
campaigns may lead to commoditization of a certain place or social feature, destroying the
original spirit of the place itself. Once certain events, activities or places are advertised and
become iconic their pristine nature risks being transformed into something different from
what they once were. Third, a brand is normative, in other words the image that it wants to
convey can be a change factor on the actual place it is portraying, or it can restrain a certain
form of art, cultural product, etc. from evolving naturally, leading to the creation of
‘surrogates’.
It is evident how, dealing with the development of tourism in Lanzarote, place
branding has played an important role in today’s image of the Island. John Urry stated, in
regard to this problem, that ‘tourist gazes come to constitute a closed self-perpetuating system
of illusions’ (Urry 1990: 7). According to him this is a problem that arises from the
interaction between local inhabitants and tourists. On one side the tourists are thought of as
pilgrims who travel on a quest for authenticity in another ‘time’ or ‘space’, on the other side
this intrusion caused by fascination for what is
other
is considered to be unacceptable by the
local inhabitants. This leads to the creation of so-called ‘back stages’ as a resistance strategy
and to the organization of what MacCannell defined as ‘staged authenticity’ (Ibidem: 9).
The ‘Lanzarote-Brand’ and the ‘Manrique Trade-mark’
It can be maintained that Manrique’s works represented an attempt at place branding
ante
litteram
, since when this marketing strategy was first theorized Manrique had already been
working on the Island in such terms for over thirty years.
Fernando Gómez Aguilera, Director of the Fundación César Manrique, in his preface
to Manrique’s
La palabra encendida
(2005),
2
states that the figure of César Marinque may be
considered as controversial. César Manrique took Lanzarote as his greatest artwork. Aguilera
states, ‘His aesthetic programme underwent controversies, which have attracted critics from
sectors that have accused him of trivializing and
thematizing
the Island, as well as
domesticating and aestheticizing the landscape to the point that, following the logics of the
2
This book is a collection of Manrique’s most important writings and speeches.
