{"id":6727,"date":"2021-04-23T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/mierda-enlatada\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T08:03:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T08:03:38","slug":"canned-crap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/thinking\/observatorio\/mierda-enlatada\/","title":{"rendered":"Canned shit"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are drowning in numbers, in data, in that rate that goes up and down every day and makes our mood swing. Our dependence on numbers has reached unimagined limits.  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have now been 141 million people infected with Covid-19 worldwide, 80 million have already recovered and 3 million have died.\u00a0Spain\u2019s GDP has recorded a historic decline of 11%; aid from the European recovery funds amounts to 750,000 million euros; vaccine production has increased by 30% in recent weeks, and vaccination programmes have ambitious targets to have 80% of the Spanish population immunised by the end of this summer.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We encourage our children to study careers in numbers, science, and mathematics, sheltered under a utilitarianism with the firm belief that only that which surrounds figures will be useful for their future, and ours. We live in times when it sounds almost ridiculous, or worse still, bohemian, to talk about the need for Latin, Greek, art, poetry, philosophy\u2026 We have become mechanised and subjugated to the powerful dominion of numbers and are increasingly sensitive to their power.  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, said that \u201cEverything that brings us happiness is useful.\u201d<\/strong>.Watching a film that moves us, reading a novel that makes us travel while sitting down, transporting us to another space and time, going to the theatre to laugh at others' stories without quite knowing why, or simply feeling our skin prickle to the melody of a song; these are pleasures that are becoming increasingly scarce but, at the same time, increasingly necessary. And we saw this when We've felt like lions locked in their cages. <\/strong>during weeks when it felt like everything was falling apart on the outside. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paradoxically, for a Mediterranean and calm people, our language has several references to condemn someone who occasionally dedicates themselves to contemplation, to necessary rest, or to those things considered useless: \u201cto twiddle one's thumbs\nto not lift a finger\nto ogle someone\u201d<\/strong>\u2026 We love to look at ourselves in large mirrors and decide how far our society is from the civilised Scandinavian cultures, where the grass is greener. But we are incapable of internalising the famous Danish practice as necessary. hygge <\/em>which basically consists of creating environments that foster situations of comfort, relaxation, rest and well-being. Because going for the Italian idea of \u201cDolce far niente\u201d (literally: the pleasure of doing nothing) seems to us, quite simply, utter madness. We already know: \u201ctempus fugit\u201d. Wake up, run, hurry up, retrain, be your best self\u2026 or shut up and die forever. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is no accident that in recent decades the humanities and artistic disciplines have been considered useless and are marginalised in both school curricula and state funding. Why spend money or time on knowledge that only offers a meagre economic return?<\/strong> We have not yet been willing to accept that it is precisely from the knowledge considered \u201cuseless\u201d that our soul is fed. What would have become of us during all these months without a book, a film, or a song with which to escape from painful reality? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his manifesto \u201cThe Usefulness of the Useless\u201d <\/strong>the philosopher Nuccio Ordine already said that \u201cknowledge itself constitutes an obstacle against the delirium of money and utilitarianism\u201d and stated \u201cthe vital importance of those values that cannot be weighed and measured with instruments adjusted to evaluate the quantity <\/em>and not the Quality<\/em>\u201d<\/strong> claiming the fundamental nature of investments that generate non-immediate and, above all, non-monetisable returns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art, literature, music, cinema, theatre, and all These disciplines, considered \u201cuseless\u201d, are the sustenance of human nature.<\/strong>, the breath that empowers us, the strength that magically drives us forward, with no other desire than to feel our wings, onwards; even more so, in dire times like the ones we are experiencing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Einstein hadn't played the violin every time he got stuck in his brilliant thoughts, perhaps we wouldn't have the Theory of Relativity today. If Gillian Lynne hadn't swapped her school desk for the \u201csilliness\u201d of a dance school, we would probably have missed out on memorable musicals like \u201cCats\u201d or \u201cThe Phantom of the Opera\u201d. If the scruffy Steve Jobs hadn't attended \u201cuseless\u201d calligraphy classes out of his own volition, millions of computers worldwide would have been without Apple's beautiful typefaces.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let's stop viewing humanity's thirst for art as incompatible with (economic) profit, because everything that is good for us ultimately becomes good for society too. Even a \u201cuseless\u201d brick dreams of one day being an unforgettable building. <\/strong>Even the most delicate, small, and rare flowers are capable of breaking through \u2013 with no other purpose than to humbly serve the extraordinary fact of beauty \u2013 amidst useless rubble. That rubble also called Monday, end of the month, overtime, tax return, or lockdown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let us not forget that once Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold his celebrated work \u201cArtist's Shit\u201d in a can for the \u201cuseless\u201d sum of \u20ac275,000.<\/strong>.Here is our contribution, albeit more modest, to champion the importance of Book Day, Art Day, and Creativity Day. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivimos ahogados por las cifras, los datos, por esa tasa que sube y baja cada d\u00eda y que hace balancear nuestro estado de \u00e1nimo. Nuestra dependencia de los n\u00fameros ha llegado a l\u00edmites insospechados.   Llevamos 141 millones de personas infectadas por la Covid-19 en el mundo, 80 millones ya se han recuperado y 3 millones […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-observatorio"],"acf":{"alt_intro_image_active":false,"alt_intro_image_hidden":true,"alt_intro_image":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9338,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6727\/revisions\/9338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mig-prisma.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6727"}],"curies":[{"name":"WP","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}