The What versus the How: Contemporary Art and Critical Writing

Juan Cárdenas

A novelist and essayist, Cárdenas’s books are all journeys back and forth between seemingly irreconcilable worlds: Europe and Latin America, art and science, substrata and surface. In his most recent essay, La ligereza, he addresses an abyss that intellectuals find difficult to face: the abyss into which, despite the many revolutions in the realm of museums, “the people and art have been cast”, where everything is arranged in order to “seduce the boss or supplant them”. The abyss in which we are capable of fetishising everything from good causes to their true or supposed subjects of redemption.

Three decades after the boring liberal future prophesied by Francis Fukuyama, posthistory has passed into the annals of history. This truth forces us to acknowledge that the euphemisms we have used during this time in a bid to bail out the boat have been of little use. Among other reasons because following the successive collapses of communism and social democracy, the department of demolitions is now seriously turning its attention to that liberalism, as happy as it is fallacious, sold to us thirty years ago as the ineffable bridge to eternity.

This train has stopped at a station where “everlasting” liberalism has been replaced by capitalism, nothing but capitalism or “capitalism, alone”, as foretold by Branko Milanović. An authoritarianism of the market—increasingly detached from democracy—that holds sway as the model of our times.

Nor is it any consolation to continue stretching that tyranny of the catharsis that provides us with a basis—on the customary digital media and platforms—not for changing the world, but for resigning ourselves to denouncing it; instead of defining it, we have settled for renaming it.

It should be remembered, moreover, that posthistory turned twilight into the most profitable of its cultural products, dispensing to all and sundry obituaries for art and the novel, ideology and revolution, utopias and the elites.

It is in this state of affairs that, bored of a boredom that never arrived, we situate Landscapes after the Catharsis, a public programme by instalments that will function as an ongoing series. 

A project that touches down in the twenty-first century, the first quarter of which has already been and gone; a project through which we hope to find the keys that go beyond the exposition of crises and stagnations from which we need to escape.