Gustav Mahler said that “tradition is not ash worship but preservation of fire.” To pay remembrance to tradition is not to “bow one's head to the past,” it is not to allow the “ashes of remembrance” to bring down to us the images of a time long gone. To honor tradition is more than that: it is to keep alive that “fire” that burns in the furrows left by the lives of those who inhabited this land, to fuel it with evocative stories and overwhelming emotions.
The Olympic torch is the symbol of a passing of the baton between past and future generations, through which the country hosting the games uses a unique opportunity to be seen by the world, opening the windows on self-telling, creating a myth to spread it to spectators.
Gone is the era of grand narratives, the inauguration of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games delivered us a lysergic spectacle in which the “Last Supper of the West” was consumed, a farewell to a tradition of classicism and harmony giving way to provocation for its own sake, amid parodies of Leonardesque works in queer sauce (with attempted posthumous denial gone awry), violent spectacles and simulated decapitations of the French Revolution.
The Dirty Three
A photo from a month ago, picked up by all the Italian newspapers, depicted the debut of three MEPs from the left-wing group The Left: the “first day of school” of the Lucano/Rackete/Salis attack trident, united by a controversial - we might say eventful and movementist - past full of charges of a certain level. The photo portrayed the protagonists of the (in)civil rebellion dressed in sloppy clothes, happy in their dim look and, as for Rackete, unaware of the existence of the noble and popular profession of beautician.
These two events have in common the rejection of beauty in all its forms, from the classical to the modern, from a sense of disfigured decorum to the strident hypocrisy of those who want to be at all costs in institutional fora while pretending that they are not.
The word “decorum” comes from the Latin word “decus” and meant a mixture of honor, grace, ornament, and beauty. The Latins already knew that aesthetics is in what way a principle of ethics, form gives structure to substance and creates immortal languages. But it is not only clothing in public situations that is invested with a charge of ugliness: decorum has disappeared from language (think of the impoverishment of linguistic registers and vocabulary), good taste has fled from relationships, in which all kinds of private nuances are put on the square.
Does the dress make the man?
While it is true that one cannot entirely judge people by their clothing, since much of personal style is carried forward by sterile imitation, there is no doubt that clothing is a communication code, it speaks for us, it expresses messages; like all codes it must be interpreted, and so it is always best that it is not easily misunderstood.
How important is speaker attractiveness in opinion formation? According to some studies, “aesthetic” (otherwise called peripheral) cues matter a great deal, especially in cases where the listener is not a highly motivated person to understand.
The change of an opinion or attitude, which depends on a persuasive message, is the outcome of two types of processes: a central and a peripheral one. The central process investigates arguments and the quality of arguments; it is typical of motivated and experienced people, who will thoroughly investigate the message without getting distracted. Most of us, however, where not particularly motivated, use heuristics, shortcuts in thinking in which we focus on peripheral aspects of the message, such as the authority of the source, the context, or indeed the look and appeal of the source.
La pretesa delle persone di non essere giudicate dall’aspetto – istanza perorata soprattutto dalle donne, in questo momento storico, bisogna ammetterlo – è fallace non solo per una presa di posizione politica, quanto poiché inapplicabile, in quanto la forma non è sempre districabile dal contenuto.
Bad taste
Our time is successfully fighting against beauty and truth, whether attacking with the weapons of technology or with the expressions made available by postmodern theorists. Bad taste lies in the imitation of supposedly eternal values by seeking art that “gives a message,” always in line with the mainstream media, turning artists into mere executors of an agenda, without the inspiration to create the beautiful, to express a 'work that is the result of an inner, prerational inspiration.
The word Kitsch, German for “junk,” is a fairly common term for something that is in bad taste, in art as in behavior. In recent years we have witnessed an anthropological mutation, the left, which nevertheless retained a kind of ideal of beauty and sacredness, has abandoned it, preferring the destruction of the form, through the dissolution not only of values, but even of works of art, of which the vandalism of works of art is a tragic emblem, iconoclasm of symbols and meanings that delivers us a present in which radical chic has turned into radical kitsch.
A graduate in Psychology, a political activist, she cultivates in parallel a passion for the topics of political communication, the relationship between the sexes and military history.
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