National Prize for Literature 1999. Quetzal de Oro. Deputy Director of the Guatemalan Academy of Language.Corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy.Retired professor of the USAC Faculty of Humanities and former director of its Department of Letters.Former director of the House of Culture of the USAC.Decorated with the Order of Isabel La Católica.Former columnist for La Nación, El Gráfico, Siglo XXI and Crónica, of which he was a member of its editorial board, early days.Former director of the cultural supplement of La Hora and La Nación.Former Guatemalan ambassador to Italy, Greece and Colombia.He has published more than 25 books in Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Costa Rica.

Various philosophers, thinkers and aesthetes -and even the poets themselves like Horace- have tried to give an explanation of what is art?, without until today the different definitions and arguments offered to satisfy everyone diachronically and synchronously.In other words, a definition of art valid for everyone and at all times... an almost impossible task! Copy Paper

However, I will try, reader, which makes me of boundless audacity.

One of many definitions affirms that art is a sublimating process through which the artist alleviates and discharges what he accumulates and represses in the unconscious due to malaise in culture, that is, cultural and civilizing repression.Because of the adaptation that man strives to achieve in the development of the culture that he has created.

The theme of sublimation and symbolization carried out by art -and which for the surrealists was a source of great curiosity and commitment- has been, for a long time, of my deep interest: since my immersion in the thick and dense waters of psychoanalysis.

It seems that, although man sublimates individually -whether he is an artist or not- he always finds himself in a deficient situation regarding the repression of the instincts that culture requires him to repress.I am referring more to destructive or thanatos instincts and less to those of life, although in the context of the latter, erotic repression is essential.And due to this decompensation or deficit, man needs to dream, make art or contemplate it as a spectator.Since art frees from repression both the one who makes it and the one who contemplates, hears or caresses it.

Art would therefore be a way of living –in another key- our instinctive and dreamlike life without running the risk of entering into a clear and open fight and denial of cultural reality and of the “civilized” world.But this way is perhaps doubly sublimated because the instinctive is lived without actually falling into vice or perversion or crime.It is as if we dreamed ourselves -during the aesthetic process- vicious, perverse and criminal and, when we woke up, nothing really happened.

Art not only helps to sublimate destructive passions but also those that emerge not so much from Eros as from his brothers lasciviousness and concupiscence.Through art we can sublimely live these states and drives to which all the unconscious tends and all Western culture punishes, punishes, and monitors.But these two aspects are inexcusable: the Oedipal and the incestuous that has been the same.Incest (through the artistic vehicle) is no longer forgiven, but is sublimated.The same happens with rape, but it is dreamed of and elevated through Aesthetics.

Current art is already aware of this role of its own and hence the multiplication of Norman Mailers and Pasolinis who drink consciously! from the "perverse" fountain of the Marquis de Sade in whom sublimation really occurs halfway, since it borders on the borders of the pornographic both with his life and with his work.The result of this "desublimation" would come to be Saló from the author of Ragazzi di Vita, while aesthetic sublimation occurs in others in a masterful way such as Luis Cernuda.

Art is and has been many things!: political instrument, creed and religious narrative (especially Catholic with the nativity scenes of our days) moral or educational lesson in the 18th century, sensual or sensory caress, in Romanticism, with the nocturnes of Chopin, but also, as I say, sublimation of instincts (and therefore capable of semiotic symbolization) as long as the spectator remains in the stage and moment of living the "perversion" of a Rimbaud or the frenetic sensuality of Rubén - from the poem- ​​or in almost the sexual enjoyment of a painting by Modigliani.But -if, on the other hand, the same work of art pushes him to carry out what at first he only wanted to be an aesthetic sublimation of the instinctive- then he has passed to a very different field (not suitable except for initiates) such as the shady land that he cultivates the Divine Marquis.

Lots of things, yes.But I prefer the theory of sublimation in which what appears to be black can be white and what is white can be black.In the reassessment of the good and the bad.Because the instincts are also plausible, and the red god enlighten us.

President - Oscar Clemente Morocco Director General - Pedro Pablo Morocco P. Editors - Hedy Quino - Star Sapalu - Grecia Ortiz Audience Editor - Douglas Gamez

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