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19/5/2003

Trash culture

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB, Barcelona

Curator: Jordi Costa

A trash culture product is basically something dreadful which holds a fascination for us. That is, a work in which error has become an essential expressive resource. Trash culture elevates to an aesthetic category everything that official culture regards as aberrant, it makes discourse out of what correctness has relegated to the fringe.

The pure trash product is not the result of a particular strategy: to put it another way, it is what is produced when a given creator sets out to achieve an end according to accepted aesthetic canons and unintentionally takes a wrong turning. Marked by its condition as a failed aspirant to the status of art, the trash product is often related to kitsch: it looks at itself in the mirror of Art with a capital A and sees a distorted image. Trash culture may even on occasion fortuitously achieve formal solutions which, due to their radical distance from established art, border on a territory near the avant-garde.

Trash culture is in the eye of the beholder. It is not usually the creators who isolate and define the trash aesthetic, but its consumers. This context sees the emergence and development of habits of perception and enjoyment of the work that have very little to do with the traditional relation between academic art and its receiver. The trash product allows the spectator to feel superior to the creator and, therefore, to develop a relationship with the work on the basis of irony. The attitude of the trash product consumer is diametrically opposed to the reverential passiveness that defines the consumption of official culture and tends to evolve towards habits of appreciation that are participatory and dialectic.

CCCB
C/ Montalegre, 5
08001 Barcelona
tel. 93 306 41 48

stampa

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