Israel Centeno

Prologue

This essay brings together two converging perspectives: one on the collapse of the ideals born in the Age of Enlightenment, and another on the aesthetic exhaustion of postmodernity. It is not an outraged denunciation, but rather a reflection that seeks to name what many already perceive: that what once appeared as emancipation turned into dispersion, and what seemed like openness ended in fragmentation.

Part I – The Failure of the Enlightenment

What the French Revolution foreshadowed, Goya painted in shadows. The guillotine quickly made the ideals bleed. What was meant to illuminate the world ended up darkening its sky. The so-called Age of Enlightenment did not bring clarity, but a blinding glare.

The Enlightenment ideas, born from rationalist impulse, surrendered to the accumulation of wealth and the frenzy of industrialization. They became ideological systems that, under the promise of emancipation, emerged as brutal equalizers. In the name of reason, the human being was mechanized. In the name of equality, the individual was reduced. In the name of liberty, control was institutionalized.

All the paths that stemmed from these utopias ended in the same horror: concentration camps, gulags, the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Enlightenment project culminated in the administration of suffering, in technologies of extermination, in rationalizations of evil. The sublime became calculation. Morality, statistics. The other, a variable.

Then came modern democracies. Fragile, unstable, led by men lacking greatness. Administrators of promises. And when no room remained—when the rope of progress could no longer be stretched—came the replacement idea: to affirm that truth does not exist. That everything is relative. That all narratives have equal value. That each subject constructs their own morality. That there is no good or evil, only contexts. That everything is negotiable: identity, justice, beauty.

Really?

After what Leopold II did in the Congo?

After the Opium War imposed on China?

After the totalitarian regimes that devastated Europe and Asia?

After witnessing what happens when technique is absolutized and conscience is relativized?

And now we are told: “there are no values”?

Make them to your measure. Shrink them.

Dismantle the shared soul. Celebrate difference as an end in itself.

And in the meantime, give us your data.

The new order needs no martyrs or heroes—only users.

It is not imposed through speeches, but through interfaces.

The new invisible hand is no longer the market’s, but that of nanotechnology.

A hand without body, without face, that administers desires and shapes perception.

A god without an altar, but with sensors.

Thus the circle is completed: from the Enlightenment that promised emancipation… to algorithms that program the will.

Part II – The Fall and Fragmentation: Postmodernity and Aesthetic Ruin

Every end of a civilization reveals the wounds of the process that sustained it. Decay is not an accident, but the natural consequence of exhaustion. Yet something different happens when the end arrives unnoticed. When collapse is not lived as tragedy, but as normalcy.

Ours is a silent fall. A free fall disguised as freedom. We strapped on Icarus’ wings and ascended beyond what our form could bear. The sun wasted no time: its heat burned the wax of our fictions. We are falling, and still, we insist we are flying.

Along the way, our languages became confused. Instead of building a song, we left behind trails of printed noise. Disconnected fragments that no longer refer to a center or a meaning. Only traces remain—ugly, broken, erratic—across the surfaces of paper, canvas, and screen. What was meant to be art becomes a record of confusion.

Postmodernity was celebrated as an explosion of possibilities. But seen as a whole, it resembles nothing more than a fragmentation grenade. The blast produced thousands of voices, styles, gestures, affirmations… but no shared language. Shards scattered in disorder. Each one demands attention, meaning, belonging. But nothing builds a form. Nothing creates beauty.

Looking at its legacy, it’s difficult to find in postmodernity a work of true aesthetic weight, anecdotal depth, or formal risk. In any discipline—painting, music, literature, architecture—what predominates is the grimace, the mockery, irony without transcendence. Art no longer touches the soul; it mocks it.

What used to be a formal wager has been replaced by the ephemeral gesture. Intention has taken the place of language. Slogan has replaced silence. The mirror no longer returns a face, but fragments—reflections that fail to compose a figure. Postmodernity is that shattered mirror.

In its name, forms were dissolved, beauty was relativized, rigor was discredited. What was once craft became performance. What was contemplation turned to spectacle. What was aspiration turned into self-affirmation.

Today, we live in that aftermath. And although works are still being created, and artists still named, something essential has been lost: the ambition of totality, the will to brush the absolute. People write, paint, perform—but rarely transform. Art has ceased to elevate. It entertains, exhibits, sells. But seldom touches.

Yet beauty still exists. Not as an imposed category, but as an experience that occurs. That which moves without shouting. That which unites without explanation. That which creates a direct connection with another’s soul. A subjective exchange that pierces language and exceeds it. A form that needs no label to be recognized as true.

Amid the noise, that possibility still lives. But to find it, we must stop seeing each fragment as an end in itself. We must return to form, to silence, to contemplation. To the patient craft that seeks not attention, but the chance—once again—to brush the absolute.