No worries! Sorry for my late reply — I've just finished a film shoot, which took a whole week.
One thing I forgot to add in my last comment: you said that a certain section of the Brazilian elite lionise French culture and romanticise May 1968. I've got a feeling this is partly a hangover from the 18th and 19th centuries, when France was an economic/cultural/military powerhouse. People always seem to look up to countries that are 'above' them in some way. I've heard that the British and Russian upper-classes also speak French. I'm not from the upper class or anything but I did go to a school that switched from Spanish to French for, I believe, purely reasons of snobbery. It's pretty much the only reason I know French.
Then I guess you also have people on the left who always romanticise popular revolutions. I mean, there are people everywhere who look fondly upon May 1968, and then there were some French intellectuals who supported the Cultural Revolution in China. Incidentally, I briefly studied at l'Université Paris-Sorbonne (now Sorbonne Université), which was created after the University of Paris was divided into dozens of different universities following the protests. You could actually see political graffiti from May 1968 in the bathrooms there (which also kind of points to the fact that the Sorbonne is in dire need of renovations).
I personally feel that there's something somewhat ironic about romanticising a revolution. Revolutions are about overthrowing the established order, but if large sections of the upper echelons of society look up to the revolution, then the revolution becomes part of the establishment, thus becoming a parody of itself.
In a similar way, I also find it ironic how some conservative types may worship the literary and art history canons, while seemingly failing to realise that the artists and writers who make up these canons were almost always outsiders during their time and largely rejected due to their innovations. James Joyce had to beg Sylvia Beach to publish Ulysses as no other publisher would touch his work. Marcel Proust self-published 'In Search of Lost Time' as his novel was also too experimental for its time. Claude Monet's Impressionist paintings were seen as technically deficient by the French art establishment of the time, and van Gogh got nowhere with his work. All the innovative artists and writers were largely rejected because they were creating new forms that no one could recognise. And so while some types may worship the established literary and art history canons, the irony is that they may turn their noses up at brilliant contemporary artists and writers for very much the same reasons that the writers and artists of the canons were initially rejected. Canonisation always seems to take place in retrospect after society has finally caught up with what the artist was doing.
As I work in advertising in Paris, much of my job revolves around selling French culture to the world. But while France makes some really great products, I'm not convinced they're necessarily any better than products from other countries. Perhaps France excels at high-end luxury products, but then again, so do other countries, especially Italy. I think that France still benefits enormously from its soft power, which I'm partly tasked with projecting, but I think that other countries also do really cool things, and are perhaps more innovative in certain categories.
In response to what you said about the dearth of creativity in government and business, I think the problem is universal and has to do with the fact that most political and business leaders aren't creative. People in business and politics tend to climb the ladder by having good analytical and social skills. A disproportionate number of French politicians graduated from the same university, which offers a very rigorous curriculum but it's a very 'left-brained' form of education. And so while they may be great at critique and deconstruction, they may lack the ability to come up with novel ideas. I think that part of the problem is that creativity isn't really something you can force; you can only lay the foundations for ideas to come to you, as it were. In other words, creativity is in some ways kind of stupid, and you have to switch off your critical faculties to enable it. But people who are always thinking critically may not know how to do this. Couple this with a weak propensity for risk-taking and you've got yourself a recipe for rejecting new ideas that simply appear strange and somehow threatening.
The way that society seems to work, though, is that organisations are almost always dominated by non-creative types as they tend to be better at running things. Creatives usually aren't that great at politics or management, but they are good at coming with ideas. And so while creative types have so much to offer in the C-suite, you very rarely see them there as they don't tend to climb that high up the ladder.
A large of advertising is about trying to persuade clients to go with interesting ideas that have never been done before, but because they haven't been done before, there's no telling how they'll perform until they're out in public and so clients would have to take a leap of faith and go with them. Cool new ideas have the potential to cut through far more effectively than ideas that have been done to death, but clients tend to prefer ideas that feel safe and have been done before.
Sorry, this comment is a bit of a mess!
