Where Are We Heading

Kabir Vega Castellanos

HAVANA TIMES — It’s becoming harder and harder to find an artistic product that moves you.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a movie, a series, even a song or a book, nearly everything we consume is just like a meal. We enjoy it, but after the last bite we get stuck in our routines and we forget its taste.

Before, I used to look through the Weekly Package [digital audio visuals] with my parents. We would regularly look through each of its sections trying to find something a little bit “interesting”. However, we had been let down so many times that we stopped copying it: more than a thousand gigabytes of garbage, literally.

According to Wikipedia:

Entertainment is understood to be a series of activities that allow human beings to use their free time to have fun, forgetting their everyday worries for a minute.

While:

Art is generally understood to be any activity or product that is made by humans for an aesthetic and also communicative purpose, which they can express their ideas, emotions or a vision of the world with using different resources (visual, linguistic, auditory, corporal, mixed…) Art is a part of culture, reflecting financial and social classes in its creation, and passing down ideas and values, inherent to any human culture over space and time.

According to Plato, you can predict when a revolution is going to break out due to a change in people’s popular tastes: “If a trivial or excitable kind of music is disseminated, we can deduce that this threatens us with turbulence, extremism and general unrest” (The New Humanity of Intuition, C. Jinarajadasa).

Aside from poetry or good literature (maybe the art forms that encourage us to reflect the most), I think that any type of creation should give the viewer something transcendental. What is the value of a product that only has the purpose of making us forget that time is passing by?

In my circle of friends who like Japanese animation series, we sometimes think about the quality of new manga series (a mistaken term in Cuba which is used to refer to anime, but in reality refers to comics). Even some of the less intellectual complain about not finding anything different. The same repeated formulas, with stereotypical characters and trivial stories, without an intricate plot, not to mention concepts.

However, no matter how sad our analysis is, garbage continues to be sold because not one, but millions of people continue to buy it. Businesspeople aren’t interested in the fact that the state of the world is getting worse while they are able to fill their pockets.

Sometimes, I ask myself whether Einstein was right when he said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

So, let’s continue to admire ancient art, or the cultural inheritance passed down by Greek philosophers, as the last brilliant minds of our species.