Articoli taggati con ‘emerging culture’
The sound of poetry. The case of “Andata e Ritorno” Festival
We grow up being used to the idea that poetry is something boring. This scenario is luckily changing. There are a lot of poets who want to stay inside the modernity, want to write about it and above all they stare at the eyes of their audience, take their hands, fascinate their ears.
Exploring the world between nostalgia and desire
In such a rapidly changing world certainties are strongly needed, and communities share a painful nostalgia for an idyllic past. While powerful people try to stop time a growing tribe of innovators and non-prejudicial individuals build a sort of network able to generate new views and to face new horizons. When the world fears change it means that its backbone is frail, and it cannot rely upon any consolidated principles or beliefs, therefore it can only protect the traditional ones. In the meantime new people accept the challenge and craft a new mankind. They only travel and explore, exchange intuitions and inspirations, ride donkeys, bring light luggage and read the stars to get oriented. Among the many outcomes of such an intensive and complex period we find the evolution of describing the world with maps where many various sites, routes and atmospheres were analysed and painted; and the evolution of books, in some decades transformed from manually written sheets to printed volumes. When they were developed not everybody felt at ease with these mysterious and unexpected objects.
Why should we care about the arts?
Many things are disappearing from the political agenda: the emerging economic paradigm is totally ignored, as if nothing had happened in the most recent years showing the final breath of manufacturing capitalism; the new social complexities are feared, as if we could set the world’s clock back to the colonial age; the environment is considered only when it smells of business; the redistribution of roles and power in a society whose leading value is knowledge is viewed as a threat for the consolidated boxes in which individuals and groups are comfortable although mummified. In such a reluctancy against changes the arts and culture have been totally eliminated from any discussion, and almost no program takes them seriously. Many professionals still enjoy complaining about our permanent emergency: according to their oleographic view we are under siege by a horde of barbarians and nobody provides culture with adequate funds. The arts and culture still appear in the news and in the debate only when some masterpiece is overpaid in auctions, or some disaster occur. The discussion is still drawn with ethical colours, painting culture as a religion rather than a pleasure.
Emerging Culture: Weak Labels vs. Strong Views
For many years culture has been too slow: static, self-celebrating, devoted to a club of presumed cultivated individuals; the convention used to consider culture as the source of spiritual value, therefore objective and eternal. Slow culture cannot evolve. Recently what we define culture has become too fast: spectacular, superficial, devoted to mass-tourists prepared to buy nights in hotels and meals in restaurants. Fast culture cares about income. In both cases labels count quite a lot; it is a matter of communication, either selective as before or ecumenical as after. Culture has been no more than a list of objects and facts, whose inclusion in the magic set strongly depended upon the ritual presence of such i-tems into museums, theatres and sites: the container gave power to the contents. This ended up to freeze culture as a homogeneous system, and to drain the audience into a cloned mass. Mummified culture was useful for its disneysation too, aiming its comfortable homogeneity at the attraction of a wider audience and at making some money.
