Coloring about the news
"So much culture will eventually become true," Gabriel Cañellas is said to have said during his time as president of the Balearic Islands, a day when he must have discovered there was an excess of culture. He couldn't have known that his words would be prophetic and that, indeed, we would become sick of culture, especially because, for some time now, it has been agreed that everything is culture. Especially what some people like: going to restaurants is culture, trashy television is culture, looking for trouble is culture, tent parties are culture, drugs are culture, and football, of course, is culture. Bullfighting was already culture before, and when culture was invented, that wouldn't be open to discussion. Or don't you know that Picasso liked going to bullfights? We're gone, we won't talk about it.
So culture is everything, except culture. Culture is no longer culture because it's lazy, it usually requires a certain amount of effort and attention, and that's not valued. Culture has bones, it has biases, it has spikes, and sometimes it can cause a certain discomfort. So we'll declare that this culture, culture, is elitist and only of interest to those who are into culture.
Perhaps for all this, some artists (no need to say "creators"; not everyone is creating all day long) end up going out into the streets to create culture. So they won't be called elitist and so people can see that culture, well, doesn't bite either. Yes, it can induce some reflection, but it can also give pleasure. And starting with little and changing little, too.
Here, for example, is a painter painting on the street using press clippings. He doesn't illustrate what these clippings say: he uses them as a support. Both clippings are from two renowned newspapers and don't seem chosen at random: one is from an art critic commenting on a painting by Gustave Courbet; the other is from a political and economic analyst discussing the most notorious hostile takeover in the history of Spanish banking, which, as we all know (whether we like it or not), is BBVA's takeover of Banc Sabadell. Culture—high culture—and money—high money.
Courbet, whom today we would call an anti-establishment, committed, in the painting titled The painter's workshop, from 1855, a less than courageous act: erasing the figure of Jeanne Duval, a Black woman who for a time was the lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who does appear in the painting in the company of the anarchist Proudhon or the patron Alfred Bruyas. The illustrious men, in the painting. The Black, or mixed-race, poor and prostituted woman, erased. As a joke it could have happened, but as an artistic presence, no. The irony of time (and of art itself) is that the layer of paint with which Courbet intended the Jeanne Duval of the painting, and of art history, has thinned over the years, and now the figure of the Black woman is visible again. This is poetic justice.
Above the story of Courbet, Duval and the painting The painter's workshopOur artist has drawn a young man with his back turned, seemingly searching with his hand raised for a door or a place where he can pass from where he is to somewhere else. He has also successfully covered up most of the words in the article's title, leaving only three highlighted: 'Art. The Phantom.' However, the text of the article, with its rather unseemly story of Gustave Courbet's erasure of Jeanne Duval, has been left intact, enriched with some timely underlining.
Making Culture
On the other side of the easel, the article about banks devouring each other has been superimposed with a marker drawing of a mixed vital organ, half heart and half brain. Courbet was a rebel, or he was famous, but posterity and capitalism have also launched a hostile takeover bid against him, and now his paintings, which in his lifetime represented the most fervent bohemian spirit, are worth millions, or it is said that the price is incalculable. They can indeed be purchased, for modest prices, in prints or reproductions of these, which are sold to flea market dealers and home decor stores, or directly to the home sections of some department stores. Surrounded by the banal culture of our time, and possibly disenchanted with the culture that history has bequeathed us, our anonymous artist has taken to the streets to create culture. And he, at least, does have something to say.
