The curtain opens and an overturned chair appears in a museum room. Is it art? Spoiler: it’s an overturned chair about to be picked up by maintenance. In the confusion, between the absurdity and reality, the ‘Fine arts’ series moves, whose second season premieres this Wednesday Movistar Plus+ with the same bad drool as the first and the same desire to dissect the crazy world of modern art. “Many things reach the absurd,” Óscar Martínez, possessed, or at least infected, by the character of Antonio Dumas, the director of the museum of fiction, whom he plays with a lot of irony and cynicism, acknowledges in an interview with ABC.
Like his alter ego, he pulls no punches. Give your opinion, even though giving your opinion is now a risky sport. And he distributes, because he knows that it is an almost impossible task “to be exposed and not be used or manipulated for political purposes.” «My character, being someone who is not at all empathetic, is loved because he is able to say things that many people would like to say but cannot. “People feel liberated through it,” says the Argentine actor living in Madrid. Participant in the creative germ of the series created by his “friends” Mariano Cohn, Gastón and Andrés Duprat, with whom he had already worked previously, Martínez confesses that he has contributed to outlining details of his Antonio Dumas profile: «Even links. I have incorporated several things, but it doesn’t matter which ones. And be silent. In the end, the joke chair was art before the mystery was revealed.
The character of Óscar Martínez, a “man, white and heterosexual” and the only one capable of resisting the attacks of political correctness, he witnesses perplexedly the ravings of a cultural world bent on frivolization and so many minorities that in the end end up being the majority. «Inclusive language seems ridiculous and unnecessary to me. I don’t think it has the effect they think it has or that it has anything to do with gender equality. Another absurdity is the cancellation of artists who died 50 years ago, as with Picasso, in addition to the fact that it is impossible to judge in a contemporary way behaviors from 50, 100, 200 or 300 years ago because the conventions were different, the values were different, it was different. the moral criterion. What they do ends up being carnage, a mess,” lists, in detail, the Argentine interpreter, for whom “all this is applicable to the formation of a political cabinet, to the panel of an academy… It’s ridiculous. We have a Nobel Prize winner to be Minister of Health but no, it has to be a woman. What is this, praising mediocrity? It is a criterion with which I decidedly do not agree and neither does the series and I love it.
‘Fine arts’, which returns as it left, Because both seasons were filmed at the same time, it puts the emphasis on all these topics that, almost always, have more to do with politics than with art or talent. The quotas, the diversity… «It is a kind of neo-fascism, of militant fundamentalism that we have been suffering from and that is global. These ‘progressive’ topics taken to a paroxysmal extreme make free thought, individual reflection very difficult, if it is not aligned with that kind of tsunami of political correctness,” Martínez criticizes, seriously.
Humor against politics
The Movistar Plus+ series points in the same direction, but from satire, caricature. It desacralizes current conventions but it does so not from gravity and solemnity but from biting and intelligent humor, letting the nonsense reveal itself. «Politics where it sticks its tail is like the devil, it does it with a utilitarian desire to profit. I believe that culture is not made by governments, it is made by the people,” insists the actor. Perhaps for this reason, the cleanest look in the series is neither that of Dumas nor that of the Minister of Culture played by Ana Wagener. Nor that of the artist who pretends to be a woman so that his work can be exhibited in the museum. Nor that of the jury of an LGTBIQ+ award, which needs to know the artist’s orientation rather than his paintings before handing out the award. No, in the end only one child, the grandson of the museum director, is capable of saying what he really thinks. “I’m bored.” And that child is a little bit of all of us in the face of the calamities of the times.
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