KITSCH 3: DEL ARTE MALO AL MALVADO Y AL PROFANADOR

Perverso

Sin la distinción naturalizada entre lo verdadero y lo falso, lo logrado y lo malogrado, lo noble y lo plebeyo… el Kitsch aparecía como una estética expresivista frente a otras, sin ningún vicio de nacimiento, sin su destino malvado escrito en la frente. Se limitaba a ser tan solo un intento de hacer arte y belleza frente a otro, sólo un simulacro frente a otros. Y entonces perversamente cabía preguntarse si, así como el pasado era patrimonio indiscutible del Gran arte, el futuro lo podría ser del plebeyo, sentimental y chabacano Kitsch.

KITSCH 2: ARTE TRIVIAL, TRIVIALIZADOR, SIMULACRO

 

¿Trivial, trivializador o evidenciador de la trivialidad artística?

Molestaba del naciente Kitsch, pues, ¿qué trivializase ese final heroico o que lo convirtiera en trivial? Indignaba el Kitsch ¿por qué no era digno de acompañar la pompa del sepelio del arte o por qué mostraba pomposamente alguna oculta indignidad en ese séquito? Obscenamente mostraba el Kitsch -con su existencia y en sus propias prácticas- que el arte noble, heroico y sagrado no lo era tanto, que tenía también los pies en el barro y además que con mala conciencia sartriana se negaba a aceptarlo.

La alta cultura i el gran arte moribundos tenían que sentenciar vengativamente al Kitsch ¡Porqué la simple existencia de éste evidenciaba irónica, sarcástica, sardónica, provocadora y profanadoramente la pulcra momia embalsamada, sacralizada y museizada en que se había convertido el arte tradicional!

KITSCH 1: EL SÍNDROME DE LA MUERTE DEL ARTE

 

Arte malogrado

Es muy significativo que la aparición del Kitsch dejase boquiabierta la pazguata y escandalizada alta cultura de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Con sospechosa unanimidad, denunció el Kitsch como no arte; incluso son muchos los que lo vieron como el antiarte por antonomasia y los más integristas lo acusaron de ser literalmente el mal social y estético.

VÍDEO: 15M y los 'indignados', 10 años después

 

• https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=325193799125004
• https://www.facebook.com/CPUNMSM/videos/630324817942150/
• https://web.facebook.com/TATEP.UNMSM/videos/817296392541086/

WATER FOR EVERYBODY BUT NOT FOR SIMPLY ANYTHING

 

Recovery

 

Of course, the tendency to overlook water’s vital force and its mysterious creative power has not been entirely replaced by our fascination with the human capacity to take advantage of its kinetic energy.  For many, it is apparent that water yet retains its great power, as the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea have recently reminded us.  Human effort is again seeking to plumb its mysteries, grasp it in all its richness and pay tribute to its necessary ubiquity.  In short, this is exemplified by three important trends in contemporary philosophy.

AN UNFULFILLED HOPE

 

Athena defeats Poseidon

 

As human beings became city dwellers, urbanisation turned water into just another resource.  Offering potable water to the citizenry became a political task and a public service.  And who, after all, would still be able to worship something supplied as a public resource? The myth of Athens’ choice of city patron gives us an example of the complex process by which worship of one god is replaced by another.  While undoubtedly not the most central feature of this change, one outcome was the progressive waning of water’s importance and its symbolic presence, among other things. 

FROM POWERFUL WATER TO WATER POWER (AND HYDRAULICS)

 

In the popular mind, water was symbolised by a powerful, magical woman creating all wealth and life and, at the same time, by a capricious, deadly woman.  (It could be both if refused or enjoyed in excess.)  Humanity lived in a world where water mysteriously fell from the sky, either beneficently or cruelly, where it mysteriously sprang from the earth or ceased to do so, where it mysteriously, powerfully coursed rivers or spread out in the perilous immensity of the mysteriously boundless ocean. 

TAKING ON SIGNIFICANT ROLES, NONETHELESS

 

Obviously, this piece packs a certain expressive punch insofar as its narrative or literary genre is panegyric.  However, the analysis of the myths, metaphors and symbols of water (in contrast to what was said before about the thousand waters that make one thin) leads instead to the conclusion that water’s centrality to life is not very well reflected in our philosophical, literary or cultural traditions^[1], not even if we take culture in its widest and most popular sense.

SURPRISING DISAPPEARING MATTER: WATER AS ANTI-SYMBOL

 

As merely negative form

 

Daily life shows that water is qualitatively defined through human senses and perceptions in a basically negative way: it is colourless, tasteless, odourless, transparent and shapeless (this last one being true of all liquids and gases). On the macroscopic level, water only assumes the form of the receptacle that receives and contains it.  As the psychologist Jean Piaget showed, an understanding of the conservation of matter is only acquired at a specific stage of infantile development.  Only at that point do children stop making the mistakes commonly made in the previous stage.  The following experiment can be easily reproduced. 

DECISIVE ROLE BEFORE AND AT THE TIME PHILOSOPHY BEGAN

 

Water, as can be seen from these few examples, played a brilliant role before and at the beginning of the history of the philosophy.  It seems to have been perfectly suited to becoming a natural, physical symbol of 'being' par excellence.  It was simply going to have to act as a key concept and metaphor in metaphysics.  Precisely because water and 'being' can be reduced to a lack of attributes, qualities and shapes, they exemplify what existed at the beginning, the necessary substrate (hypokeimenon, according to the Greeks) from which attributes, qualities and properties were able to appear.  In this way, water was seen as the primary matter of being, the very substance of life or, at least, its original, maternal womb.

METAPHOROLOGISM OF WATER

 

'The clearest thing is water.' (A Catalan saying).

Metaphorologism^[1] of Water^[2]. The difficulty and ‘triviality’ of the subject

Giving serious thought to water is surprisingly problematic.  Case in point:  an amateur play to which I was recently invited served up a university lecturer as an object of ridicule.  Neurotic, bumbling and unable to make himself  understood, he was, tellingly, an expert on water.  The play thus set out to comment on the paradox of gaining wisdom about 'nothing', the paradox of specialising in what is—to all appearances—not a matter for specialisation.  After all, we all consider ourselves experts on the subject of water or, at the very least, know what needs to be known.

La jaula del tiempo