I can't find it but I seem to remember a post years ago about the woman in Spain who tried to restore a local painting in her church and botched the job. The linked article is a recent story about how it has resulted in the painting becoming a tourism must-see.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240926-what-makes-a-tourist-attraction
It's a feel-good story because it's brought tourism and income to the region. A quote from the article;
In his book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class,
sociologist Dean MacCannell writes: "anything is potentially a
[tourist] attraction. It simply awaits one person to take the trouble
to point out to another something noteworthy or worth seeing …
Sometimes we have official guides and travelogues to assist us in this
pointing." But more and more often, social media feeds now serve as
our travel guides, pointing tourists towards things like unassuming
rural villages, quirky roadside attractions and far-flung art
installations.
I created a post last week asking how to look at art, and one of my comments is that I'm more interested in the story of the art than I am in the art. https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/how-to-look-at-art
This is a perfect example of something that may be more worthwhile to me.
Do we blame social media for creating a sensation or praise it for creating the sensation, resulting in revenue for an out-of-the-way destination?