2023-06-11 09:12:00
When television was consumption par excellence, there was the vice of zapping. Then it was common to see people mesmerized with the remote control in hand, changing the channel over and over again, leaving nothing in particular, catching a moment of a witty soap commercial, a frantic car chase from an action movie. , a cake demold in a cooking show, two people touching each other in soft porn.
“Leave something,” they used to be told. The effect of seeing everything and seeing nothing was disturbing: little could be understood and appreciated. I wonder how different is the effect of zapping contemporary on our phones, because while clips are now created to get you high in less than a minute, and people and brands go to great lengths to create a fleeting narrative line, the finger has usually swiped up before for that time to expire.
At some point comes the need to stop. To observe something without rush. To recover the exercise of contemplation. To feel something more than the high and the subsequent low because what we see – sometimes taken out of the oven half-baked, tied to the current production logic – hardly remains. That is why music, literature, painting, art in general, continue to be a different source of stimuli.
In optic nervethe art critic and writer María Gainza describes her encounter with Alfred de Dreux’s deer: “(…) This time my encounter with Dreux was sudden, what AS Byatt would call the kick galvanic. He reminded me that in the distance that goes from something that seems beautiful to something that captivates you, everything is at stake in art, and that the variables that modify that perception can and are usually the most insignificant ones”.
Gainza says that when he’s seriously attracted to a painting, he feels a flurry: his brain releases dopamine and his blood pressure rises. “Stendhal described it like this: ‘Leaving Santa Croce, my heart was pounding; I felt that life had exhausted me, I was afraid of falling’. Two centuries later, a nurse in the emergency department of Santa Maria Nuova, alarmed by the number of tourists who fell into a kind of voluptuous coma in front of Michelangelo’s sculptures, dubbed it Stendhal syndrome.
Do you need to travel to have a beauty overdose? Recently, in Córdoba, the 2023 Contemporary Art Market was held, the art fair that brings together galleries that show works by artists from different parts of the country. When I was touring the fair, I once experienced the sensation of Gainza. Stop, I told myself, there is so much beauty. You have to chase her, in the exercise of the search she is found. Possibly away from the zapping.
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#stop #beauty