La civilización del espectáculo Quotes

“The essential difference between the culture of the past and the entertainment of today is that the products of the former sought to transcend mere present time, to endure, to stay alive for future generations, while the products of the latter are made to be consumed instantly and disappear, like cake or popcorn.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“Because in the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“The naive idea that, through education, one can transmit culture to all of society is destroying ‘higher culture’, because the only way of achieving this universal democratization of culture is by impoverishing culture, making it ever more superficial.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“O conhecimento tem a ver com a evolução da técnica e das ciências, e a cultura é algo anterior ao conhecimento, uma propensão do espírito, uma sensibilidade e um cultivo da forma que dá sentido e orientação aos conhecimentos.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“It is not bad that the main beneficiaries of freedom criticize open societies, where there is much that can be criticized. It is bad if they do so by taking the side of those who seek to destroy these open societies, replacing them with authoritarian regimes, as in Venezuela or Cuba. When many artists and intellectuals betray democratic ideals, they are not betraying abstract principles, but rather the thousands and millions of flesh-and-blood people who, under dictatorships, resist and fight to gain freedom. But the saddest thing is that this betrayal of the victims does not come from principles and convictions but rather from professional opportunism and posturing, gestures and actions adapted to circumstance. Many artists and intellectuals in our times have become very cheap.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“The disappearance of any minimal consensus about aesthetic value means that in this field confusion reigns and will continue to reign for a long time, since it is now not possible to discern with any degree of objectivity what it is to have talent or to lack talent, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what work represents something new and durable and what is just a will-o’-the-wisp.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“In individuals, as in society, high culture, sensibility and intelligence can, at times, coexist with the fanaticism of the torturer and the assassin.

In the civilization of the spectacle, intellectuals are of interest only if they play the fashion game and become clowns.

When religion and the state become confused, freedom irremediably disappears.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture

“Probably there are no longer any societies in which the best people are attracted to civic duties.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“This definition was not just limited to establishing a method for exploring the specificity of one human group in relation to another. It also desired, from the outset, to renounce the prejudiced and racist ethnography about which the West has never tired of berating itself. The intention could not have been loftier, but the well-known saying tells us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“La frivolidad consiste en tener una tabla de valores invertida o desequilibrada en la que la forma importa más que el contenido, la apariencia más que la esencia y en la que el gesto y el desplante —la representación— hacen las veces de sentimientos e ideas.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“La desaparición de mínimos consensos sobre los valores estéticos hace que en este ámbito la confusión reine y reinará por mucho tiempo, pues ya no es posible discernir con cierta objetividad qué es tener talento o carecer de él, qué es bello y qué es feo, qué obra representa algo nuevo y durable y cuál no es más que un fuego fatuo. Esa confusión ha convertido el mundo de las artes plásticas en un carnaval donde genuinos creadores y vivillos y embusteros andan revueltos y a menudo resulta difícil diferenciarlos. Inquietante anticipo de los abismos a que puede llegar una cultura enferma”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“It is not in the power of journalism by itself to change the civilization of the spectacle that it has helped to create. This reality is deeply rooted in our time. It is the birth certificate of the new generations, a way of being and living and perhaps of dying in this world of ours; we who are the fortunate citizens of countries in which the democracy, liberty, ideas, values, books, art and literature of the West have afforded us both the privilege of turning fleeting entertainment into the supreme aspiration of human existence as well as the right to view with cynicism and disdain everything that is boring or worrying, and remind us that life is not just entertainment but also drama, pain, mystery and frustration.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture

“Um Estado laico não é inimigo da religião; é um Estado que, para resguardar a liberdade dos cidadãos, desviou a prática religiosa da esfera pública para o âmbito que lhe corresponde, que é o da esfera privada. Porque quando a religião e o Estado se confundem, desaparece irremediavelmente a [L]iberdade.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“Les hommes s’efforcent de croire en Dieu parce qu’ils n’ont pas confiance en eux-mêmes. Et l’histoire nous démontre qu’ils n’ont pas tort car jusqu’à présent nous n’avons pas été bien fiables.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“En la civilización del espectáculo, el intelectual sólo interesa si sigue el juego de moda y se vuelve un bufón.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“como la idea de que reemplazar el vivir por el representar, hacer de la vida una espectadora de sí misma, implica un empobrecimiento de lo humano (proposición n.º 30).”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“democratic and liberal society, despite having created the highest living standards in history and reduced social violence, exploitation and discrimination more than at any other time, does not receive the enthusiastic support of its beneficiaries, but is greeted with boredom and scorn, if not systematic hostility. For”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society

“probar que hay sitio para la esperanza en las circunstancias más difíciles, es algo que la literatura ha sabido hacer, aunque,”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“embaucador italiano Tommaso Debenedetti, que durante años estuvo publicando en diarios de su país «entrevistas» con escritores, políticos, religiosos (incluido el Papa), que,”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“La cultura puede ser experimento y reflexión, pensamiento y sueño, pasión y poesía y una revisión crítica constante y profunda de todas las certidumbres, convicciones, teorías y creencias. Pero ella no puede apartarse de la vida real, de la vida verdadera, de la vida vivida, que no es nunca la de los lugares comunes, la del artificio, el sofisma y el juego, sin riesgo”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“que la crítica y la alta cultura. ¿Por qué? Porque el erotismo, que convierte el acto sexual en obra de arte, en un ritual al que la literatura, las artes plásticas, la música y una refinada sensibilidad impregnan de imágenes de elevado virtuosismo estético, es la negación misma de ese sexo fácil, expeditivo y promiscuo”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo

“Al igual que la elite, la clase social es una realidad que debe ser mantenida pues en ella se recluta y forma esa casta o promoción que garantiza la alta cultura, una elite que en ningún caso debe identificarse totalmente con la clase privilegiada o aristocrática de la que proceden principalmente sus miembros. Cada clase tiene la cultura que produce y le conviene, y aunque, naturalmente, hay coexistencia entre ellas, también hay marcadas diferencias que tienen que ver con la condición económica de cada cual. No se puede concebir una cultura idéntica de la aristocracia y del campesinado, por ejemplo, aunque ambas clases compartan muchas cosas, como la religión y la lengua.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo