The endearing phrase that speaks of having a child, planting a tree and writing a book has been guaranteeing the supremacy of writing over the rest of human abilities with creative development for decades. “Write a book”, not paint a picture or make a performance. That is one of the big differences between the Contemporary Art Fair and the Madrid Book Fair, which opens this Friday. While in Ifema there are not many canvases or facilities site specific signed by politicians, youtubers or celebrities, the biggest queues in the Retiro are taken by them. It’s weird, but it’s consistent.
It’s weird because human beings learn to draw before they learn to write. Also because the dominant trend in Arco is conceptual art, that is, art that values the idea above the physical execution of a work, whose owner may well not have gotten his hands dirty to carry it out. Why then do we have a book and not a video installation of Colate or of prince harry If their memoirs have been written, although they do not appear on the cover, Patricia Navarro and JR Moehringer, respectively?
It is coherent because we live in a democratic and overflowing time of concerts without live music, artificial intelligence, autotune and playback. Arthur Cravan, boxer and poet, announced that the day would come when artists would have to be pushed aside to walk down the street. He has come that day. As the romantics wanted, we already live poetically. Last March, the rapper Rayden announced that he was leaving music to dedicate himself to novels. We will miss his songs.
In 2021 the Madrid fair, held in autumn, controlled the capacity due to the pandemic. The measure had two effects: the bookstores only wanted authors who guaranteed a minimum of signatures, that is, sales, and the public of mass idols collapsed the venue. Luckily, editorial Darwinism passed like the covid and what they call bibliodiversity returns. With some nuance: those who do not need to write a book to publish it have all the rights, unlike those who have not only written it but also paid for it themselves. By regulation, self-publishing does not fit in the Paseo de Coches. Like the audiobook or the e-book.
There is no shortage of those who every year complain about the intrusiveness of celebrities. Purists! What matters is the experience, as in avant-garde restaurants. experience and its effect. Someday a poem written by ChatGPT will change our lives. AND? The unprejudiced and nostalgic for Save me can, for example, approach the first book by Jorge Javier Vázquez, life was serious. Published a decade ago, it narrates the childhood and youth of the presenter in San Roque, the Badalona neighborhood from which he left to sign on the Soon with pseudonyms like George Scott or Héctor Banderas. He slips when he forces the intrigue to be a “novel”, but they are decent memoirs with a background of homosexual liberation, class struggle and family relations. Pure literary news.
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