Sobre el Artista

I am not a professional artist. Although from an early age I stood out for my imagination, creative skills, and sense of aesthetics —or so my teachers said, who I remember recommended me to study fine arts at university. However, my professional career followed very different paths. First I was in the military, then I was a lawyer (I am still practising today), an entrepreneur, and finally I got a university degree in Philosophy in search of answers that I did not find, and perhaps the absence of answers was the answer —as Wittgenstein taught. Whatever I did, there was, is and will always be an alternative point of search and poiesis. I don't like to go from one point to another this way or that just because many have said before that this way or that was the best way. I check, explore and experiment with new paths. The world, as I see it, is an ontosemiotic world, a world in which meanings make sense of each other creating all there is. So that "all there is" is in some not inconsiderable sense a fiction, even that which is called "reality". In that reality humans are kept sane by fiction, as are larks and cicadas —thank you, Shirley Jackson— and that is exactly why the world is made up of stories such that atoms are but one of those stories —thank you, Muriel Rukeyser. In this way, the best life choice is that of Don Quixote: live mad and die sane —thank you, Cervantes. We only have a spark of madness and, if we lose it, we are nothing —thank you, Robin Williams. And the best way and manner to take advantage of that spark of madness is to create freely. The fact that the autonomy of art is a utopia doesn't imply that we should stop searching for that utopia. Because that's exactly what utopias, non-places, are for, to try to reach them, knowing that they are unattainable... After all, the impossible is nothing but the possible to come —or so Žižek explains. For a long time there was an artistic canon that a few self-privileged humans defined, however much it mutated over time. But one day Danto, a genius (not) like any other, came along and turned everything upside down. One must not ask oneself whether this or that thing is art or not; one must ask oneself why (the hell) this or that thing is art or not. The former implies checking against a canon; the latter implies checking against freedom... So, Danto made the previously impossible possible, he made it possible that anything could be art. And if an artist is one who creates at least one work of art, then anyone can be an artist. Something, by the way, not very different from what Chef Gusteau taught that made Ratatouille dream and thrilled the fearsome critic Anton Ego: "Anyone cannot become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere".