Opinion
The boring times of ethics
I was born in 1979 and I am lucky to have enjoyed the end of an era —which I don't know when it must have begun but which ended in the first decade of the 21st century, maybe even in 2008— in which art elegantly ran through an aesthetic, daring, playful and even hooligan and carefree dimension, and I liked that. Of course, those were still prosperous times, we didn't have social networks and the world was neither so globalized nor so afflicted (and I was also younger, but that's not the point). Now I have to live in an era in which art needs a moral and social justification, that it can be legitimized, that art is good for a greater number of people, or at least that it pretends to be so or that it seems so, that it already does the deed. And that, compared to that, bores me. It bores me to the core. I am bored by the lack of ambition, the lack of humor, the contempt for talent and charisma, the ideological filth that oozes everywhere and is no longer subtle but clumsy and blatant, and as the icing on the cake, I am bored with endless yawning pseudo-intellectual conceptual discourse that only makes the general confusion that reigns bigger. And this not only in art, but in general, because this is the spirit of the current times, our zeitgeist.
We are all part of it and we all contribute to it, but a special mention must be made for the public administration (both here and elsewhere), which aims for fashion by enacting laws that are more ideological than pragmatic and bases for calls and competitions that know how to discern between good and evil. Because it seems that current ethics have been reduced to this, to good and evil, without nuances. In the face of this dichotomous way of living, I will make a claim for aesthetics. And by aesthetics, more than sublime, precious and ordered beauty, I mean what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, that is, that which opens the doors to deep emotions, that which disrupts, that which impresses and that which moves, like the wine of Dionysus, and that which amplifies vitalism, the will to live fully, and to experiment. I miss it.
Mine, however, is just a problem of boredom. It's okay, I have the right to be bored. We already know that history is cyclical and that after one stage comes another. We also know that we shouldn't generalize, that each stage is characterized by certain tendencies but that there are honorable and brave exceptions. And we also know that every yin carries its yang and that now, in this moral phase, so Apollonian and correct, the subversive wave is already brewing that will take us back to the Dionysian turmoil.
