Picasso, emeritus

In addition to the title of the monumental work published by Pierre Cabanne in 1979, Picasso's century was an expression that faithfully described a historical reality.

While he lived, Picasso exercised an indisputable dominance over the rest of the artists, the styles and theories that followed one another in his time and whom he fought with hoods as they brushed past his satchel.

For museographic purposes, the New York MoMA, what today would be called “the great global prescriber”, rotated his collections on it as on an axis.

As far as art is concerned, the 20th century was his, like a kingdom, like a competition in which all the others remain in the shadows.

However, at the very date of that book, even at the date of his death six years before, that order of things had already begun to be undermined,

Everything is now prepared —the entire institutional framework of art— for a battery of exhibitions and gatherings to make this year 2023 the Year of Picasso, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

But what has actually happened in these 50 years?

For now, there is a lot of difference between having owned an entire century and now seeing yourself as the owner of only one year.

The joke, however, falls short compared to the change that his current very limited influence means in the aspect that can matter the most.

If we do not let ourselves be carried away by the forced exaltation that is coming, we will see that Picasso was repealed long ago in that aspect in which his work represents a paradigm.

Picasso's painting invites us to the type of art experience that we can consider specifically modern, that is, one that,

Stripping the works of their literary, moral, or political meanings—messages, as they used to say—he simultaneously frees them for full sensible, physical perception, for joy and thrill.

In other words, the aesthetic experience.

Well then, the last 50 years seem to have served, above all, for a new empire of discourses and meanings to have reduced works to the condition of texts to be read, thus obstructing that modern regime of the body, pleasure and meat that no other artist like Picasso summoned us, with the hunger and fury, moreover, of the Blue Beard that Françoise Gilot saw in him, as she wrote in her memoirs.

for joy and thrill.

In other words, the aesthetic experience.

Well then, the last 50 years seem to have served, above all, for a new empire of discourses and meanings to have reduced works to the condition of texts to be read, thus obstructing that modern regime of the body, pleasure and meat that no other artist like Picasso summoned us, with the hunger and fury, moreover, of the Blue Beard that Françoise Gilot saw in him, as she wrote in her memoirs.

for joy and thrill.

In other words, the aesthetic experience.

Well then, the last 50 years seem to have served, above all, for a new empire of discourses and meanings to have reduced works to the condition of texts to be read, thus obstructing that modern regime of the body, pleasure and meat that no other artist like Picasso summoned us, with the hunger and fury, moreover, of the Blue Beard that Françoise Gilot saw in him, as she wrote in her memoirs.

His painting invites us to experience modern art, stripping the work of moral or political meaning.

The German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written in one of his latest books that "the problem with current art is that it tends to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction, that is, to transmit information."

And Han or Robert Pfaller himself, people who are critical of this contentist inflation, have observed that "art that is dedicated to meaning is hostile to pleasure."

The fact that art is amoral, as Picasso proposed, does not mean that it must necessarily be immoral, but rather that, for the sake of that pleasure and that freedom, moral and aesthetic judgments should not be confused.

And it is not —only— that Picasso and his work can be as vulnerable today as Courbet and his to the moralizing cancellations of our offended world.

The worst thing is the institutional condition of this new domain of discourses, actually extended to all cultural manifestations.

Although the propaganda of the contemporary artistic regime flaunts its transgressive quality, nothing can hide the systemic nature of its implementation.

You only have to look at the commemoration of another fiftieth anniversary, that of the 1972 Pamplona Meetings, to verify the official and governmental nature of the reply held nothing ago.

And that is, after all and said with an example, what has happened in these fifty years.

In the mid-sixties of the last century, when Picasso and his order still seemed to be in force, painting, in reality, had already been put in the pillory to throw all the reproaches on it.

The pop heirs of Dada proclaimed in Paris and New York a new communicative statute of images, from which painting —the most corporeal and physical art that exists— had to be excluded by virtue of its technological obsolescence and its sensory condition.

The argument, by the way, was very similar to that used in 1934 in his

by Ernesto Giménez Caballero (who made the presentations between Picasso and José Antonio Primo de Rivera in San Sebastián).

With the difference that, now, it is no longer a question of opening a new chapter in the history of art, but another history of a new kind, which will therefore no longer be able to pivot on the same axis.

As many museums and art centers as we walk, we will see that the speeches —the sermons— prevail over that free sensitive experience.

The delicate and furious Bluebeard has been stripped of the realm of time from him.

So we don't know how the commemoration orchestra will manage so that their own instruments don't get out of tune with each other.

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