La Voz de Galicia – March 29, 2024 →
I suppose it’s because the novella I’m writing is leading me down that path, but for a few months now, I’ve been watching documentaries and reading articles about artists who at some point in their lives decide to distance themselves from their own careers, sometimes to attempt to retreat from public life, other times to step away from the profession.
This week, in an attempt to connect with my niece Quela’s world, I sat down with her to watch one of the documentaries about her current hero, Taylor Swift. And as I listened to the artist reflect on what it means for her to always be at the center of all conversations and controversies, I thought about the fact that there are professions in which the only way to achieve sustainability is through public life, and that public life, although always incredibly complex, seems even more challenging in the times we live in today, in the digital age. And as always, I began to wonder what it means to have a passion for something and to discover along the way that to survive in that profession, one has to go through the great showcase of social media and the media; that to have a name of one’s own, one has to be on everyone’s lips, with its consequences.
According to the RAG (Real Academia Galega), fame is the «fact of being a very well-known person or thing and there being a certain general opinion about them», but in that general opinion that we all fit into, the worst of us also fits: prejudices, anger, insults… Fame is quite complex, and today, on social media, it seems like an obsession. And although fame is an important part of survival in certain professions, it is also one of the reasons why some artists decide to distance themselves from their profession… with all that entails.
