The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) wants to reach a wider audience\u2014so, they chose celebrity-ambassadors.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Yahoo! Philippines OMG, the Commission\u2019s public affairs head Rene Nape\u00f1as said, \u201cWe have our artistic teams in the commission which decide the ambassadors basically to profile or highlight our various celebrations.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cWe didn’t use artsy people to represent or be our ambassadors. We wanted some media magnet for this because they normally get attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the chosen celebrity-ambassadors include TV host Boy Abunda (Philippine Arts Festival), Leyte Rep. Lucy Torres-Gomez (Dance), singers Sarah Geronimo (Music) and Ogie Alcasid (Heritage),\u00a0 TV heartthrobs Piolo Pascual (Culture), Dingdong Dantes (Youth Ambassador for Philippine Arts Festival) and Jericho Rosales (Taoid), as well as beauty queens Shamcey Supsup (Architecture & Allied Arts) and Venus Raj (Dayaw).<\/p>\n
In a Facebook post, the Commission said, \u201cThey are expected to advocate and stir everyone’s interest in our culture and the arts scene with many fun-filled, exciting, and educational activities particularly in the coming month-long Philippine Arts Festival in February 2014.\u201d<\/p>\n
But not all netizens favoured the decision of NCCA to choose celebrity-ambassadors.<\/p>\n
Some were saying that these celebrities don\u2019t have anything to do with the field of art assigned to them.<\/p>\n
Nape\u00f1as, in response, defended the Commission\u2019s decision, \u201cLike for example for Philippine Arts Festival, we got Mr. Boy Abunda because of his ability to communicate to Filipinos from all over the globe. \u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got Dingdong Dantes as our youth ambassador because of his wholesome image as an actor, producer, [and] director as well,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cFor this year, 2013, Sarah Geronimo was given the Ani ng Awards during the Arts Month. Hopefully by next year, we will be able to really tap Sarah as our celebrity spokesperson to help us promote the National Arts Month as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also cleared that there was no money involved in tapping the celebrity-ambassadors.\u00a0\u201cThese are all gratis. We never paid any of our ambassadors. Not even a single centavo,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) wants to reach a wider audience\u2014so, they chose celebrity-ambassadors. In an …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-entertainment-ph","mauthors-katherine-marfal-teves","mauthors-philippine-canadian-inquirer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}