115 by Alejandro González Iñárritu), that we must pay close attention to the confusion between emulation and catharsis of our emotional sphere, deeply involved in art and ethics: leveraging brisk emotions – as the so-called distress-exploiting programs and some embarrassing editorial lines, certain crier reportages, social-networking indignation shamefully accompanied by hate speech, the politically correct sclerotisation flowing into the frankly unsustainable disguised totalitarianism of the cancel culture, defined by Nick Cave as mercy’s antithesis – leads to anything but populist rhetoric, which is not good for morality, or ethics, or art. The gap that passes between the emulation and the catharsis of emotions is the same that runs, through the gaze, in raising the image to imaginary: emotion, like the gaze, must know how to make a journey, be metabolized and then transformed, and only then will it be fertile. Only then will it be art, and will it be ethics. track #07 what time is the revolution, ma’am? Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann He-chmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann, obsessively repeated the sound device installed by Mirosław Bałka, in 2018, at the Dvir Gallery in Brussels. Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann He-chmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann, because the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt identified embodied in the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann could still be found in me you he she it we you they, whenever the crime of the absence of Pietas is perpetrated. Eichmann I-chmann You-chmann Hechmann She-chmann It-chmann We-chmann You-chmann They-chmann: through the language of art, Mirosław Bałka reminds us that in front of life – of every life, none excluded – we are always and in any case responsible, even when we delude ourselves no to be so. And remembering can be painful, and feeling responsible can be tiring, but the higher the vision, the more challenging the journey, and the fuller the meaning upon arrival. Do you know what the problem is? That we stopped thinking big, dreaming big, aiming for big things, bowing to the mediocrity of conformism, immediate relief. The lil’ contract, the lil’ chore, the lil’ house, lil’ work to be done, handbrake on, comforting micro-ambitions, to be offered on the altar of complacency. We traded beauty for consent, the sense of responsibility for that likeability that Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho (1991) and The Rules of Attraction (1987), describes in White (2019): that kind of attitude prone to the mass approval, to the hail of thumbs up and hearts to double-tap, that makes you do write or say something only after having filtered it through the supposed other people’s approval. We are talking about voluntary self-censorship winking at hypocrisy, zero responsibility, zero identity, ethics and aesthetics decided by a show of hands – or rather, by a show of thumbs – and the non-compliant, the other from itself, the different, the disturbing discarded without appeal. But, Ellis writes, claiming his right to uniqueness and the right of art to freedom, «I wanted to get upset and even be damaged by art». To pleasure and to please, to decorate, to confirm the average taste = to anesthetize, flat electroencephalogram To perturb and to disturb, to hurt and to shake, to destabilize = to touch the depths, to call to responsibility Whose side are you on? The price to pay, in order to facilitate the likeability dictatorship, is not only that of the spreading of a homologated and insipid mass beauty, of an aesthetic repression guided by what Ellis calls the TripAdvisor syndrome, but also the highly serious one of sliding into the lack of respect, into the widespread contempt and hatred towards everything not ratified by the stamp of confirmation to conform: «This is what happens to culture when it no longer give a damn about art». «We also have an eye for our artists, that amuse and impassion us so much» - Giuseppe Conte, May 14, 2020, first pandemic wave vs. «Cultural events are of the utmost importance in our life, because completely new perspectives on reality are created in the interaction between artists and their audience. We are confronted with emotions, we can develop new thoughts, we can better understand the past and we can also look to the future in a completely new way» - Angela Merkel, May 05, 2020, first pandemic wave Whose side are you on? The caustic rhetoric of the wolf of Wall Street, 100% performing 100% winning 100% façade, fomented by social networks turning life into a showcase to display the most likeable merchandise, has something totalitarian, and totalitarian is the regime of the unique thought. The imperative to have fun, mistaken for happiness, fossilizes the individual on consuming life rather than on living it, while we completely lack the cure to investigate the powerful poetry and the teaching coming from the sense of loss, of failure – vs.
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